Omar Valerio-Jiménez is Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies for the College of Liberal and Fine Arts. He was born in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, and grew up in Taft, Corpus Christi, and Edinburg, Texas. After graduating from MIT, he worked as an engineer for five years before attending UCLA, where he obtained his master’s and doctorate degrees. At UTSA, he teaches courses on Latinxs, borderlands, the United States, race/ethnicity, public history, and immigration. His publications include The Latina/o Midwest Reader, Major Problems in Latina/o History, and River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Spencer Foundation, he is working a comparative study of educational reform efforts in New Mexico and Texas. His new book is Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship.
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Omar Valerio-Jiménez
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Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship
This book analyzes the ways collective memories of the US-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans' civil rights struggles over several generations. As the first Latinx people incorporated into the nation, Mexican Americans were offered US citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war. Because the 1790 Naturalization Act declared whites solely eligible for citizenship, the treaty pronounced Mexican Americans to be legally white. While their incorporation as citizens appeared as progress towards racial justice and the electorate's diversification, their second-class citizenship demonstrated a retrenchment in racial progress. Over several generations, civil rights activists summoned conquest memories to link Mexican Americans' poverty, electoral disenfranchisement, low educational attainment, and health disparities to structural and institutional inequalities resulting from racial retrenchments. Activists also recalled the treaty's citizenship guarantees to push for property rights, protection from vigilante attacks, and educational reform.
Omar Valerio-Jiménez addresses the politics of memory by exploring how succeeding generations reinforced or modified earlier memories of conquest according to their contemporary social and political contexts. The book also examines collective memories in the US and Mexico to illustrate transnational influences on Mexican Americans and to demonstrate how community and national memories can be used strategically to advance political agendas.
