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Sep 14, 2020 · 1609-1610. Conquistador Don Pedro de Peralta settles Santa, Fe New Mexico, making it the oldest capital city in North America, the oldest European community west of the Mississippi River and the...
Mexican American history, or the history of American residents of Mexican descent, largely begins after the annexation of Northern Mexico in 1848, when the nearly 80,000 Mexican citizens of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico became U.S. citizens.
The Mexican–American War, followed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, extended U.S. control over a wide range of territory once held by Spain and later Mexico, including the present day states of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California.
4 days ago · This highly diverse group includes people with roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Colombia, Honduras, and other parts of Central and South America and the Caribbean, as well as Spain. Hispanics may be recent immigrants or people whose families have been settled in the United States for generations.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Some Mexicans were already living in the Southern and Western regions of the North American continent centuries before the United States existed. Many more Mexicans came to the country during the 20th century, and Mexican immigrants continued to arrive in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
The ancestors of Mexican Americans are many—railroad workers from Jalisco, Afro-Mexican founders of Los Angeles, Hispanos from Northern New Mexico, part-German Tejanos, indigenous Californians, and Spanish settlers from the Canary Islands, to name just a few.
The history of Mexican immigration to the United States is best characterized as the movement of unskilled, manual laborers pushed northward mostly by poverty and unemployment and pulled into American labor markets with higher wages. Historically, most Mexicans have been economic immigrants seeking to improve their lives.
