MEXICO, Part 5 ANGLOS MASSACRED MEXICANS, STOLE CALIFORNIA, NEW MEXICO, UTAH, ARIZONA, NEVADA, TEXAS & parts of Colorado and Wyoming

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

The U.S. theft of Northern Mexico was not a “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 a result, 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 is part of the DOMINATION SYNDROME, involving the Mexican elite’s monopolies in 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, Generals feast, but 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, leader of the Anglo Texans, 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 therefore gave overall command of California to Kearny.

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

U.S. privates in California gossiped; generals argued 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.

The 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 the authority laws they passed gave them.

WHAT THE WAR SET IN MOTION

The war expanded slaveholding leverage, intensified the sectional crisis, accelerated Indigenous dispossession, established precedent for “incident-driven” expansion, and trransformed the United States into a continental power.  The war also, within thirteen years, would lead to the Civil War. The Mexican War was a 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 the law to sanitize seizure.

The border did not begin as a culture war; it began as an artillery range.

Yet even then, partnership persisted. Mexican citizens living in the territories the U.S. stole, despite attempts by our current fascist regime to exclude them from voting, continue to maintain strong, supportive partnership patterns. Civilians learned to aid each other in times of oppression, Irish brotherhood organizations persevered, and those of us who love compassion, community, and care for the handicapped, homeless, and migrant communities still strive for minority and female rights and an end to the ever-more exploitive, temperature-harming policies of the dictatorship that currently eclipses our abilities to help each other.

History is never unanimous. Domination is ascendant, but partnership is stubborn, and the struggle between them continues.

3113 BCE – 2026 CE: Four Moments. Four Stances. One Long Struggle Between Extraction and Sovereignty.

AZTEC IMPERIAL CENTER (c. 1502–1521)

Voice of the Sacred Ruler — Moctezuma II

Moctezuma II sat elevated, isolated by ritual distance. He said, “The Sun requires order. Tribute maintains balance. The altepetl must send what is due.”

Tenochtitlan dominated central Mexico through tribute networks.
Chinampas fed the capital; subject cities bear the burden.
Sacred cosmology and imperial administration merged.
Power flowed upward. Grain, cacao, cloth, captives — upward.

 SPANISH CONQUEST & COLONIAL EXTRACTION (1519–1821)

Voice of the Conquero– Cortez:

Hernán Cortés stood amid alliances and cannon smoke and said, “Gold, souls, land — all now for Crown and Church.”

Epidemic diseases weakened Tenochtitlan before the siege.
Indigenous allies helped topple Mexica dominance.
Silver from Zacatecas and Guanajuato flooded Europe.
Temples fell. Churches rose.
Tribute was redirected — not abolished.
Extraction intensified
Hierarchy hardened.

MEXICAN REVOLUTION (1910–1920)

Voice of the Land — Emiliano Zapata

Emiliano Zapata spoke from the south, “Land and Liberty. The land belongs to those who work it.”
Porfirian land concentration collapsed under rebellion.
Peasants demanded restitution.
The 1917 Constitution promised communal lands, labor rights, and limits on foreign control.
Armed struggle fractured the old oligarchy.
The rural majority demands structural correction.
Power began to redistribute downward, briefly.

NATIONAL ASSERTION IN A GLOBAL ERA (2024–Present)

Voice of Sovereign Presidency — Claudia Sheinbaum says, “Mexico is not subordinate. We cooperate — we do not submit.”

Claudia Sheinbaum took office in 2024. In diplomatic tension with U.S. rhetoric — particularly from the American President
Donald Trump, she publicly defended Mexican sovereignty, the dignity of migration, and national economic autonomy.
Nearshoring strengthened Mexico’s industrial leverage.  She relieved Cuba from Trump’s overthrow attempt when he banned Venezuela’s oil from Mexico
Her energy policy emphasized national control.
Migration negotiations resisted Trump’s pressure.

STRUCTURAL ARC

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