Our southern brethren: National identity and pan-Americanism in early United States-Mexican relations, 1810--1830.

This study examines the effect of American national identity formation on early United States-Mexican relations from the start of Mexico's war for independence through the decade following the establishment of its first sovereign government. During this period, Anglo-American understandings of United States' exceptionalism and of Americanness became intricately connected with larger notions of republicanism and anti-Europeanism. Americans looked to the Spanish American revolutions as auspicious markers of the rising greatness of the New World, and looked upon Mexicans as republican brothers, even willing to explain away their occasional transgressions as the result of their oppressive Spanish colonial heritage. Most significantly, many Americans called on the United States to take the lead in creating a pan-American commercial and political system. The result, they believed, would be a greatly strengthened liberal, republican, and American sphere that could counter the monarchical, statist, Europe of Great Britain and the Holy Alliance. This pan-American System was, in a very real way, the commercial corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In calling for this inter-American system, Anglo-Americans temporarily overlooked the inherent tensions between this new pan-Americanism and traditional United States expansionism. The success of the Mexican revolution seemed to prove the strength of republican ideology, as it demonstrated the ability of American-style republicanism to transcend the perils of historical degeneracy and decay. At the same time, however, the creation of an independent Mexican republic along the southwest border of the United States threatened to close that frontier to future Anglo-American expansion, considered essential for the very survival of the American republic. This tension was resolved, however, when Mexico proved unwilling to play its part in the pan-American System and instead courted British aid and support. It was then that Anglo-Americans began to racialize Mexicans, not as the American brothers they once had been, but as backwards, ignorant people unable to maintain a viable republic. This new construction was reinforced by the internal political turmoil that began to wrack Mexico in the late-1820s. The result was an Anglo-American idea of Mexican racial otherness that paved the way for the aggressive American expansionism of the 1840s and 50s.Ph.D.American historyLatin American historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124897/2/3163896.pd