Previous letter on immigration revised history

Published 12:16 pm Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Lawrence Dean’s letter (“Mexican immigrants are returning to country taken from them,” Sept. 23) is just another example of using revisionist history to make a point.

The story of Mexico is extremely complicated, but prior to the 1800s, there was no such thing as a Mexican. Spain conquered the Aztecs in the 1500s, took over their land and called it “New Spain.” Not until 1824 was the Republic of Mexico formed.

In an effort to settle the area we now call Texas, the Mexican government offered land grants to American families under conditions that were largely ignored. However, Mexico continued to allow the immigration of U.S. citizens in order to collect taxes.

Mr. Dean’s assertion that “the ill will” engendered by the Mexican/American War was a “major catalyst for the Civil War” is pure fantasy. The sparks that ignited the Civil War were the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Kansas/Missouri border wars, the social effect of a famous novel called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the election of an abolitionist president named Lincoln.

Just as Spain conquered the Aztecs, the Europeans conquered the North American natives, the Jews took back their land of Israel, Russia recently conquered Crimea and Syria is now conquering Baghdad and southern Iraq; the United States conquered Mexico … and so it goes. Right or wrong, this type of land taking has been going on among civilizations since man first walked the earth, and it still does.

The worst part of Mr. Dean’s revisionist history is that after defeating the Mexican Army, according to the usual “spoils of war” philosophy, we should have kept all the land, including Mexico City.

Instead, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was drawn up, and we absorbed Mexico’s $3.25 million debt. We also paid them $15 million to make the Rio Grande the southern border of Texas and bought the land that now makes up the southwestern states. We could have just taken it.

Even though we were more than justified in “taking the country” as Mr. Dean says we did, we didn’t. We bought it.

— Brian Dougher