173 Years of Guadalupe Hidalgo

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​Discussion of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and its implications for Mexican Americans in the 21st Century, audio recording on La Onda Bajita program, KPFA-fm, January 15, 2020, hosted by Tony Gonzales with his guest, Armando Rendón. (Bios below.)
 
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is one of the most significant documents in US history. Signed on February 2, 1848, formally concluding the invasion of Mexico by the United States in 1846, the treaty is like a person’s birth certificate; it gave birth to a new ethnic community when an estimated 70,000 persons originally citizens of Mexico chose one of two options in the Treaty: repatriate to Mexico—cross the new borderline to Mexico—or within a year ostensibly become citizens of the US. An awesome history ensued, a legacy of sacrifice, survival, cultural loss, and resilience evolving over the past 173 years into a complex ethnicity of indigenous-hispanic origin.

​Antonio Gonzales (Cumca’Ac-Chicano) is executive director of American Indian Movement-West (AIM-West), an intertribal human rights organization based in San Francisco. Antonio worked at the International Indian Treaty Council, a UN Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in Consultative Status in the Economic and Social Council, for nearly 30 years. In that capacity Antonio also sought to unite Chicano-Indio solidarity and unity utilizing the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as a catalyst for social justice and to leverage political self-determination in all aspects of human development that pertain to territories designated by the Treaty.
 
Armando Rendón (Chicano-Indio) is a writer on Chicano and indigenous-hispanic affairs, author of several young adult novels, and of Chicano Manifesto, published in 1971, reprinted in 1996. He is owner/founder of Somos en escrito Magazine, an online Latino literary magazine, launched in 2009 and an offspring, Somos en escrito Press, a Chicano-owned publishing house founded in 2020. He is also author of a thesis paper, “The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and Its Modern Implications for the Protection of the Human Rights of Mexican Americans (Washington, D.C., 1982).