Revisiting Nearly Forgotten U.S.-Mexico War

A small boy, a young cadet in the Mexican army, is said to have wrapped himself in the Mexican flag as he leaped to his death from the top of Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City during the last stand of the U.S.-Mexican war in 1847.

He, along with five other young “nin~os heroes”--or “child heroes,” as they are now known in Mexico--flung themselves off the castle during the battle, joining the tens of thousands of Mexican soldiers who died fighting U.S. forces during the nearly two-year-long war under U.S. President James K. Polk beginning in 1846.

That dramatic scene springs to the minds of most Mexicans today when they think of the war, the subject of “The U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848),” a dramatic, two-part documentary that airs nationally on PBS Sunday and Monday. Mexican citizens remember that anecdote and that at the end of the struggle, the American government walked away with nearly half of Mexico’s territory--the more than 500,000 square miles that are today known as California, Texas, Nevada, most of New Mexico and Arizona, and parts of Colorado, Oklahoma and Wyoming--which Mexico had at first refused to sell to the United States.

In contrast, many Americans hardly remember that particular war ever happened at all.

“We found that most Americans know very little, if anything, about the U.S.-Mexican war,” said Sylvia Komatsu, vice president of television production for KERA-TV in Dallas and executive producer of “The U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848).” “Many times, people we talked with confused it with the Spanish-American War.”

It’s that kind of collective American amnesia that Komatsu and her partners on the production--director Ginny Martin, senior producer Paul Espinosa and writer Rob Tranchin--set out to combat with the documentary, a binational, collaborative effort to portray the war from both the American and the Mexican nations’ perspectives.

The war, the first the U.S. fought on foreign soil and the first to be brought to the American public by the media, was a defining conflict in the history of both nations. In fact, some say the U.S.-Mexican War helped forge both the Mexican and American national identities. It inadvertently unified a still-young Mexican republic, which had just 20 years earlier gained independence from Spain, and reinforced America’s notion of itself as a morally correct nation expanding westward according to the dictates of Manifest Destiny.

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Getting the production of the four-hour documentary going was a Herculean undertaking. The effort took seven years; fund-raising efforts were often met with the cold shoulder from potential corporate backers because of the sensitive nature of the project, according to Komatsu. And, she said, there was the juggling act of incorporating the input of 10 outspoken advisors from both sides of the border.

“We wanted to make sure our advisory board represented a wide range of perspectives,” said Komatsu, who pointed out that the board was made up of three Mexican historians and seven American historians (with three Mexican Americans and one Native American represented among them). “We also wanted to make sure that the board members represented the foremost experts on this period of history.”

If choosing advisors and raising funds were difficult, satisfying the goal of presenting fairly both sides of the story (as well as the “borderland perspective” of the Mexicans and indigenous people living in the annexed territory) was a nearly Sisyphean labor in comparison. The big question in the minds of academics, historians, activists and others now is: Did the documentary achieve a balance of perspective or is it tainted, despite the best intentions, by a U.S. bias?

Gilberto M. Hinojosa, professor of history and dean of the college of arts and sciences at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas, says the documentary misses the opportunity to challenge the misconception that America has never engaged in any war of conquest. He says the filmmakers could have examined U.S. participation in an imperialistic “world trade network” as the real impetus for declaring war on Mexico.

This view of the war, Hinojosa says, informs some modern-day Mexicans’ attitudes toward America and should therefore have been addressed explicitly. “American businessmen and politicians today have to realize that Mexican people carry the wound of this American conquest invasion still today,” he said.

The sometimes problematic relationship between Mexico and the United States, as well as between Mexican immigrants and anti-immigrant groups seeking to stem the flow of new immigrants to the U.S. and curb their rights through the state proposition system, are present-day examples of the legacy of the U.S.-Mexican war, Hinojosa and other Mexican American historians said.

“The filmmakers chose to ignore the more mundane social and cultural aspects of the war and its aftermath,” said Deena J. Gonzalez, a history professor at Pomona College of the Claremont Colleges and one of the series’ advisors. “There was an interest in ascertaining the impact of the war at the highest levels without attempting to portray the impact for those who lived in the borderland.”

Komatsu acknowledges that the impact on those living in the borderland is an important part of the story but said that though she did address the issue briefly, she could not devote more time to it: “It is, after all, only a four-hour-long documentary.”

Antonia Castan~eda, a historian from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio who is quoted in the documentary, agrees with both Gonzalez and Hinojosa that the documentary could have gone further in drawing connections between the war itself and current social problems.

“Unless those issues are gleaned out of the series, a significant part of the population who views it may not see how some of the issues we focus on today are some of the same issues that were at stake then,” said Castan~eda. “We’re talking about the development of capitalism and the nation-state, questions of race, culture, language, citizenship and the question of once a population is annexed, what do you do with that population?”

And yet Gonzalez said she’s looking to the series to open those issues up for public discussion. “I hope it will open our eyes to some of the issues that are plaguing [the Southwest] now, and I don’t think they have to do with immigration. It’s historical.”

Komatsu is optimistic that the series will be a catalyst for discussion. “I think the series will help remind Americans that this continent was not always theirs,” she said, “that it had to be conquered, and that the process of conquest has consequences.”

* “The U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848)” airs Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28.