Mexican American Expansionism

The southern borderlands at the heart of the current debate serve as a testament to the region’s troubled past.While the U.S. and Mexico have similar origins as constitutional republics that broke free from colonial forbearers, it was only the former that doggedly pursued expansionism under the guise of Manifest Destiny. As early as the 1820s, the enduring racial stereotype of Mexicans as an “idle, thriftless people” was used to justify the rapid influx of White Americans into the Mexican territory of California, with the eminent statesman Richard Henry Dana reported to have exclaimed that “in the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!” After the Mexican-American War claimed around 40,000 lives in less than two years