Posted on 11/18/2014 12:44:50 PM PST by Regulator
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ended the Mexican War and for a cool $15 million acquired what is now the entire southwestern United States — Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah and parts of Wyoming and Colorado — from Mexico was an uncannily well-timed moment in U.S. history. Could American negotiators have known that within a year gold would be discovered in California and the flood of Anglo and other immigrants into this state would be the beginning of a population boom still going on 165 years later?
(Excerpt) Read more at santacruzsentinel.com ...
Lots of speculation about that. John Sutter supposedly discovered gold with his employee James Marshall. However, he was no saint. Johann Sutter was a con artist, conning the governor into giving him a land grant. He wheeled and dealed, and probably knew of the gold and may have secretly told the Americans it existed. In any event, it got out of his control when the gold rush happened, and he died nearly broke.
Gold was discovered in California on January 24, 1848, a week or so before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed.
BTW, the $15 MIL was in gold.
I just realised he actually wrote Texas was aquired from Mexico in 1848, lumping it in with California.
BZZZZTTTT! Wrong!
That 1836 Mexican surrender to independent Texas must have slipped his mind.
Texans don’t owe Mexico squat.
And by this same logic.. shouldn't the United States reassert its claims to all of the Oregon territory again?.. hey Canada..its 54.40 or fight!. but let's start applying it to Europe. . I'm sure Germany would like East Prussia back from Russia and that big chunk that now Poland
The Gadsden Purchase should negate any claim to the territories north of it in what is now Arizona and New Mexico.
So worst case scenario--some future Democrat President gives California back to Mexico, Arizona and New Mexico stay in the US, and Texas resumes its independence.
The guy should learn to write. That was a nauseating run on sentence.
Know whats funny?
He looks exactly like i pictured him without ever seeing him.
Dont be so logical...!
It’s hilarious here.
People who are allegedly college educated write at the level of high school juniors.
Filled with factual errors, sentimental appeals, verbosity and God knows how many stylistic blunders, you begin to understand why so much social nonsense comes out of California.
Remember Diane Keaton’s poetry group in Sleeper?
This guy woulda fit right in.
They are that addled.
He’s really the last of his kind: Californians who grew up in the golden age after the war when property values weren’t so high, the population was homogeneous, and you could be a fool and still survive.
Not in the near term future though.....
Heh, that's great...:)
Modern development of California began in 1849's Gold Rush and was an American, not a Mexican phenomenon. Like Texas, it broke from Mexico and became a Republic before joining the Union.
Aztlán is a Mexican fairy story. Neither the Mexicans or the Spaniards before them had more than the barest scattering of settlers in the Southwest they sold to the US and barely scratched the surface of its potential.
BTW, you'd be hard-pressed to find any group more opposed to massive immigration from Mexico than the descendants of the few original Spanish settlers in places like New Mexico. The Spaniards ... and then the Mexicans after them neglected the settlers and left them to wither on the vine, crushing any attempt they made to assert their rights. The Mexicans even crushed the missions, a key economic engine of their colonies.
Return? Bullshiite.
As a matter of fact, the northern Mexican states have tried at one time or another to join the US. The most notorious being Baja California, which was punished for a long time by the strongly federal Mexican government and was not even permitted to become a Mexican state until quite recently! To make that wild and wooly territory easier to handle, they broke it up into two states.
Mexican Civil Wars (40 or 50 of'em anyway) were ALL fought over the rights of the Mexican Federal Government vs. The Rights of the sovereign states and their people. Mexico should be a warning to us in the US of the dangers, the inefficiency, and just plain ornery stupidity of an overly centralized government. ¡Ay Chihuahua!
Chihuahua being a traditional hotbed of states rights and one of the Mexican states that wanted to join us! BTW, after the war with Mexico, many Mexicans wanted to join the US en masse, sort of merging the two countries. Guess they are trying it another way.
The numbers from Spanish Colonial California are fascinating:
Approximate number of aboriginal natives: about 300,000
Approximate number of Spanish colonists: about 7000
The colonist number was stable up to the Bear Flag Republic rebellion. By that time, the native population was down to about 150,000 thanks to smallpox and slaughter.
But they were still by far the majority. If you wanted to find Spaniards, you needed to know where they were, since there were so few of them.
But by that time there were upwards of 30,000 Anglo settlers around Sacramento, and moving into the Bay Area slowly.
What happened next is that the Anglos moved to establish their form of popular government and land ownership in place of the system based on the Spanish Crown, and inherited by the revolutionary Mexican government.
At no time were the Californios a majority of human population here, and their claim to political control was certainly no more meritorious then the Anglo-Protestants, based as it was on the Papal decrees of 1495 and 1529.
The American government understood that the remnant Mexican population represented a failed attempt at solidifying the original Papal claim that was ridiculous in its scope. Polk had the same issue going in Texas, and the solution to who would control the land was decided at the end of the war in 1848.
Mexico is trying to reverse that verdict to this day. This time they think they have the people, if not the arms, to do it.
But it was never their land. Just like us, it was someplace they had to win, and hold, which they didn’t.
So we have to decide if we plan to keep it.
BUMP
” Mexico is trying to reverse that verdict to this day. This time they think they have the people, if not the arms, to do it.
But it was never their land. Just like us, it was someplace they had to win, and hold, which they didn’t.
So we have to decide if we plan to keep it.”
Good points.
A certain sort of "Mexican Intellectual Patriot" class long ago decided that THEY had been trick-flutzed by those Anglo and Euro Bastards and THEY should be the dominant, the largest, the richest nation in this hemisphere, and maybe the planet. So if they had Aztlán back by means of some sort of "Reconquista" they would be. That's what was behind the 1916 "Zimmerman Note" of WWI fame. The Kaiser didn't just dream it up! He knew his Mexicans!
*Blame a great deal of the truly stupid "Irredentism" troubles of the 20th and 21st C on 19th C Italy. They wanted back pieces of the Roman Empire, the Venetian Empire along the Adriatic, the Genoese trading posts, etc. etc. Their PR People dreamed up the concept of "Italia Irredenta," i.e., the Unredeemed Italy. They actually got Eritrea, ginned up a war with Turkey and took Libya, The Dodecanese Islands, etc. etc.
Since then, the shaky idea has gone viral. E.G., "The King of Spain gave this grant to Gonzales, my name is Gonzalez, therefore it is mine, I "REDEEM" it. Putin says Crimea was Russian under Czar. I redeem it! It can get pretty farfetched. There was a book in the national library of Albania (11 volumes and counting) that mentioned Detroit. It is mine. I redeem it.
Well lets think about that.
Free Republic is located in California.
The single state that support Free Republic the most financially each FReepathon is California.
I live on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
So you want to silence Free Republic.
You wish to surrender the folks who support Free Republic the most each FReepathon.
You wish to nuke me.
Sounds like a surrender monkey to me.
Thanks for the mention. I wasn’t aware of just about all of that. Talk about your obscure historical facts. They are interesting though. It is amazing the information you get on this site, background just jumps out at you if you read a lot.
What I do know is that today 60% of Mexicans have Spanish blood in them. 10% are considered White vs Hispanic. 1% are listed as other. Only 30% are native inhabitants.
Seems like the first order of business would be to reclaim Mexico for the native inhabitants. 70% should be forced out.
Then you consider the language. Over 92% speak Spanish.
This is a nation that needs to reclaim land from other nations? Why? It doesn’t even have it’s own populace sorted out. Revert to Amerindian language, and boot the Spanish blood people out. They’re European.
Once you’ve done that, come back and talk to me.
When you do I’ll explain how your tribes never occupied the Southwest United States.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3228404/posts?page=46#46
Doughty, as we are raised in the English-speaking, formerly Protestant Culture, these things are indeed obscure to us. However, el mundo latino, "Hispanic" Branch, is a whole 'nother mindset, an alternative universe. Might as well be Mars.
For example, we have had 1 Civil War. The Canadians have had none, (well, a minor insurrection or two). Mexico has had at least 20 major civil wars ... and I mean major major, and so has EVERY other Latin American Republic. For example, Mexico had a pretty fair infrastructure in the late 19th C and up to about 1910. Then they threw out the somewhat benevolent dictator Diaz and the resulting round of civil wars practically wiped it out, railroads, ports, powerplants, mines, schools, agriculture, everything. It all had to be rebuilt over the following decades.
Another major difference: The Spaniards married their Indians, or at least had families with them. We mostly killed ours off. They have rigid caste systems, ours are hopefully more flexible. They have racial discrimination, but it is completely different than ours (and until very lately, unspoken).
We tend to think of these countries as quaint, colorful little banana republics. But, Latin America is huge. Mexico is 3/4 the size of the lower 48. So is Argentina. Brazil is larger. The Central American "Banana" Republics are the size of our smaller states, but Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Bolivia, Chile, are Texas/California/Alaska size. Right now, today, Latinos are 1/3 of our population. Inevitably, this country will become the northernmost Latin American Country. If we were to stop all Latino immigration today, that would still be true.
And that is our problem ... or the grandkids'.
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