For several weeks now, our nation has been embroiled in a national debate over illigal immigration. Crowds of people, mostly immigrants from Mexico and children of Mexican immigrants, have come together to protest proposed immigration law reforms. Many of these protest have been high school students abandoning class en masse to denounce any attempt the United States to enact more stringent immigration laws or even to more strongly enforce the current laws. How strange it is, that the protesters are the ones who don't want change, and the people who want change are the quiet ones!

Students at Montebello High School, in California, skip class to hoist the Mexican flag over the upside-down American flag.





Montebello High School students celebrating their nationalism-- for a country in which they do not live.




I do not write this blog to speak directly about immigration law reform, but I want, rather, to comment on one of the more militant ideas brought to national attention by these protest: reconqusta.

Reconquista, a Spanish word meaning to reconquer, is one that has before been used. In it's historical context, it refers to the Christian attempts to drive the Moors, Muslims, out of Spain and Portugal and back into northern Africa. That reconquista was successful. In 2006, the term is being used to mean the reconquering of the southwestern US by Mexicans, culturally if not literally.




Protesters suggesting that they aren't illegal because California is their homeland.

This argument, however, is completely without merit. California is not their homeland and never has been. They are not returning to it after having been expelled. They nor their ancestors were born there.

They make this claim based on the fact that Mexico laid claim on these lands before they became territories, and then states, in the USA. Indeed, Mexico did claim what is today the southwestern United States (California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas) until the mid 1800's. However, laying claim to unconquered lands was nothing unusual for the European colonial powers. The Pope divided everything arbitrarily between Spain and Portugal, sight unseen. (When all was said and done, Spain claimed all of South America and Mexico except Brazil.) The British, when colonizing North America, would charter claims from sea to shining sea. These claims, of course, were impossible to realize. Imagine the state of Virginia stretching all the way to the Pacific! In any case, Texas left Mexico to become it's own nation in 1836, and then a state of the USA in 1845. Americans outnumbered Mexicans there 10-to-1. Most of the rest of the southwest was ceded to the US by Mexico in 1848 as a result of the Mexican American War which saw Mexico City captured by American troops. American outnumbered Mexicans in these lands at least five-to-one. President Polk had succeeded in fulfilling the Manifest Destiny-- a USA from Atlantic to Pacific. The remaining bits of Arizona and New Mexico were purchased from Mexico in 1853, in the Gadsden Purchase. Mexican claims on these lands was legally surrendered. The United States of America has ever since had sovereign control of these areas.

Even with these 'claims' on the land, however, the Mexican government, like the Spanish colonial government before it, never had any real control of the southwestern US. There was no central power like the Aztecs to topple. The armies of Spain, and then Mexico, were able to subdue the Aztecs and surrounding tribes which made up most of what is today the nation of Mexico. The lands they claimed, now the southwestern US, were never conquered by Spain or Mexico. They were explored by small parties of armed men. They were settled by Catholic missionaries. The natives of the area-- for whom the southwest is a true homeland-- were never conquered. The government, hundreds and hundreds of miles away in Mexico City, never effectively ruled here.

The Mexicans didn't conquer the southwest. The Spanish didn't conquer the southwest. Maybe these protesters and students are referring to the Aztecs? Maybe, but they would be wrong there as well. The Aztecs never subdued the tribes that populated the American southwest. Their area of influence was mostly the valley around modern Mexico City and the southern part of Mexico.

One must ask, then, how is this a reconquering?

The only people that might rightly claim to desire to 'reconquer' their homeland in the American southwest are those various tribes present before Europeans arrived. The Acoma, Apache, Cochiti, Havasupai, Hopi, Hualapai, Mohave, Navajo, Pauite, Shoshone, Washo, Miwok, Wailaki, Yuki, etc., etc.

For some reason, I don't think any of those protestors-- or anyone taking a nighttime stroll northward over the Mexican border-- are true natives of the southwest US. It has never been their homeland and their suggestion that it was, and the idea of reconquista, is awash in historical ignorance.

Let them claim the right to live here if they want, but don't twist history.