By Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. (Anthropology, UCLA)

The U.S. theft of Northern Mexico was not “westward movement”; it was an engineered expansion.

The United States provoked a border clash, framed it as self-defense, and converted war into continental acquisition. The result was a republic stretched from Atlantic to Pacific—secured with artillery, diplomacy, debt, and spectacle. As results, slaveholders gained leverage, speculators gained acreage and politicians gained stature. Ordinary people gained graves.

Indigenous communities were overrun. Mexican civilians were shelled in their neighborhoods. Irish immigrants were hanged for refusing to fight. Farm boys died in heat and dysentery for land they would never own.

The deeper structure reveals itself as part of the DOMINATION SYNDROME, involving the Mexican elite’s monopolies on mineral mining, land ownership and plantations.

The U.S. under President Polk, who masked his theft of Mexico’s northwestern territory as destiny and legitimized his conquest as a seizure for which the U.S. paid a piddling sum as a “sale”.

Against the U.S. DOMINATION OBSESSION with war and conquest, the very embodiment of Anunnaki-imprinted domination obsession, the Anunnaki counterforce PARTNERSHIP PREFERENCE also persisted in the forms of cross-border survival, desertion as refusal, neighbors feeding neighbors, and cultural endurance after sovereignty. The War between the U.S. and Mexico did not simply redraw territory; it normalized conquest as policy that plagues us to this day.

1821–1834: MEXICO INDEPENDENT, BUT FRAGILE

Mexico emerged from Spain enormous on the map yet fragile in finance and fractured in governance. Centralists and federalists clashed. Treasury coffers emptied. Generals treated power as a rotating prize. Though Mexico City’s dominant elite factions maneuvered, Mexican frontier families endured.

Peasants said, We won our independence from Spain, but the landlord is still the landlord.  Mexican Army recruits said, General, feast, we soldiers eat dust.

In Mexico’s North, an elder noted, the big shots in the Capitol only remember us when they want to tax us.

Below elite rivalry, partnership remained the survival mechanism.

1820s–1836 — TEXAS: INVITATION, SLAVERY, AND BREAKAWAY

Mexico invited Anglo settlers into the Mexican state of Texas to stabilize the frontier. But many arrivals brought slaves with them to Mexico, defying Mexican law, which forbade slavery.  Although the Anglo Texans were immigrants to Mexico, they maintained loyalty to the United States. Conflict followed. Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna (below) brought Mexican soldiers to Texas to control the immigrants, who revolted.  The revolt culminated in San Jacinto. Texas declared independence. Mexico refused recognition.

Sam Houston calculated carefully: Texas alone is fragile; it must join the United States.

 Texans of Mexican descent living in Texas (Tejanos)  worried.  Tehano ranchers, among themselves, said, We’re families with graves here—not slogans.

Anglo planters who settled in Texas said, We came for land. Don’t tell us what labor we can use; our economy is based on slaves.

JACKSON’S PROTÉGÉ POLK AND THE SLAVE POWER QUESTION

James K. Polk was a protégé of Andrew Jackson. He owned enslaved people. He aligned with Southern Democratic expansionism.

By 1845, the balance between free and slave states was delicate. Southern leaders feared containment. Texas entered as a slave state. Expansion meant leverage. The Wilmot Proviso (1846), proposing to ban slavery in newly acquired lands, ignited an immediate sectional crisis. But Polk’s objectives were not only providing more territory for Southerners with slaves; more important to Polk, was:

• Securing Texas for the United States, acquiring California, securing access to the Pacific Ocean, and pre-empting British influence on North America. 

• Acquiring California

• Securing Pacific access

• Preempting British influence

The war Polk wanted with Mexico reopened the specter of a civil war within the United States.

1846 — CREATING THE CAUSUS BELLI INCIDENT AS EXCUSE TO STEAL IT NORTH (Domination framed provocation as defense)

Polk sent General Zachary Taylor into the disputed land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande and ran patrols against Mexican forces, which killed intruding Anglo soldiers.  Polk got what he wanted, an excuse to launch a full-on attack on Mexico. He got the Mexicans to kill Americans on what he said was American soil (in an area [describe the agreement Santa Ana was forced into, with a change in which river was the boundary as an excuse that he used to send his troops to Mexico and steal Mexico’s Northern territory.

Irish laborers concluded: This is a rich man’s land deal dressed as patriotism.

Mexican border mothers wailed: We move our children because cannons don’t ask names.

1846–1847 — CONQUEST IN NORTH AND WEST

While Taylor fought major battles, U.S. columns seized New Mexico and moved into California.

Command rivalries flared. Glory competed with governance. Polk’s agents in California, Stephen W. Kearny and John C. Frémont, who captured Los Angeles, quarrelled over overall command in California. Polk concluded that  Frémont was too noisy and controversial and gave overall California command to Kearny.

California’s Mexicans concluded, Gringos call it liberation. I call it strangers writing our law.

U.S. privates in California, gossiped, The Generals argue over credit. We sleep in mud.

1847 — VERACRUZ AND THE MARCH TO THE CAPITAL

                    General Scott

Under Winfield Scott, the U.S. executed a large-scale amphibious landing at Veracruz. Artillery reduced the city. The army marched inland. Civilians became terrain.

Mexican mothers wailed, Our children are not “collateral.

A U.S. soldier murmured, Orders say maintain discipline, but my buddies in camp say, Drink.

But elders in Veracruz say, We shall remember.  We bury people before we bury arguments.

SEPTEMBER 1847 — CHAPULTEPEC

In September 1847, U.S. forces under Scott launched a direct assault on Chapultepec Castle, the hilltop military academy guarding the western approaches to Mexico City. After heavy bombardment on September 12, American infantry stormed the heights on September 13, overwhelming Mexican defenders that included regular troops, militia, and teenage cadets later remembered as the Niños Héroes.

The fall of Chapultepec broke the city’s outer defenses; within days, U.S. troops entered and occupied the capital.

For Mexico, the loss marked the collapse of organized resistance at the republic’s center. For the United States, it signaled the decisive moment of the war’s final campaign—victory achieved not at a distant frontier but in the heart of the nation it had invaded. The fortress fell. Mexico City was occupied. Volunteers, drunk on stolen liquor, committed rape and murdered unarmed civilians in Mexico City during the occupation after its surrender.

Mexican Cadet: I am afraid—and I remain.

U.S. officer: History will call this inevitable.

City resident: I will remember your inevitability by its smoke.  The Gringos say it’s destiny but I remember, they invaded us.

1847 — REFUSAL: THE SAN PATRICIO BATTALION

Riley

Thousands deserted the U.S. Army. Among them, Irish Catholics formed the San Patricio Battalion under John Riley. They fought beside Mexico. During the U.S.–Mexico War, thousands of soldiers deserted the American ranks, many driven by harsh discipline, nativist abuse, and anti-Catholic prejudice. Irish Catholics among the turncoats organized as the Saint Patrick’s Battalion, led by Irish-born artilleryman John Riley. Fighting under a green banner emblazoned Erin go Bragh, they served Mexico as skilled gunners and saw heavy action at battles such as the Battle of Churubusco, where they resisted fiercely before being overwhelmed. Captured survivors were court-martialed by the U.S. Army; dozens were executed in one of the largest mass hangings in American military history. To U.S. commanders, they were traitors; in Mexico, they became symbols of refusal—men who crossed lines of nationality in protest against what they judged an unjust invasion. Captured after Churubusco, many were whipped, branded, or hanged—some forced to watch the U.S. flag rise before execution.

Deserters said, We refuse to die for Polk’s ambition.

1848: TREATY OF GUADALUPE HIDALGO

Mexico ceded vast territory: California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, parts of Colorado and Wyoming.

The U.S. paid $15 million. Ink reframed conquest as purchase.

Mexican residents quipped, The border crossed me.

Gold discovered in 1848 accelerated the dispossession of Mexican people from their land in California, citing authority laws they passed gave them.

WHAT THE WAR SET IN MOTION

The war:

• Expanded slaveholding leverage

• Intensified sectional crisis

• Accelerated Indigenous dispossession

• Established precedent for “incident-driven” expansion

• Transformed the United States into a continental power

Within thirteen years, the United States would descend into Civil War.

The Mexican War was rehearsal.

WHY THIS MATTERS NOW

Three precedents were cemented:

1. Manufacturing provocation to justify expansion.

2. Framing resource acquisition as destiny or defense.

3. Using law to sanitize seizure.

The border did not begin as culture war.

It began as artillery range.

Yet even then, partnership persisted:

Tejano endurance.
Civilian mutual aid.
Irish refusal.
Abolitionist protest.

History is never unanimous.

Domination is loud.
Partnership is stubborn.

And the struggle between them continues.