The Reconquista ("reconquest") is a term to describe an irredentist vision by different individuals, groups, and/or nations that the Southwestern United States should be politically or culturally returned to Mexico. Known as advocating a Greater Mexico, such opinions are often formed on the basis that those territories were claimed by Spain for centuries and then by Mexico from 1821 until they were ceded to the United States during the Texas Annexation (1845) and the Mexican Cession (1848) because of the Mexican–American War, however the Southwest region under Mexican ownership was sparsely populated relative to the rapid migration that occurred when the influx of Americans settled the state.
Background
The term Reconquista means "reconquest" and is an analogy to the Christian Reconquista of Moorish Iberia. The areas of greatest Mexican immigration and cultural diffusion are the same as with the territories that were taken by the United States from Mexico during the 19th century.
Cultural views
Mexican writers
In a 2001 article on the Latin American web portal Terra, "Advancement of the Spanish language and Hispanics is like a Reconquista (Reconquest)," Elena Poniatowska stated:
In his keynote address at the Second International Congress of the Spanish Language in Valladolid, Spain, in 2003, "Unity and Diversity of Spanish, Language of Encounters," Carlos Fuentes said:
In another part of his speech, Fuentes briefly returned to his idea of "reconquista:"
Nationalist Front of Mexico
The fringe group Nationalist Front of Mexico opposes what it sees as Anglo-American cultural influences and rejects the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, as well as what its members consider the "American occupation" of territory formerly belonging to Mexico and now form the southwestern United States.
On its website, the front states:
We reject the occupation of our nation in its northern territories, an important cause of poverty and emigration. We demand that our claim to all the territories occupied by force by the United States be recognized in our Constitution, and we will bravely defend, according to the principle of self-determination to all peoples, the right of the Mexican people to live in the whole of our territory within its historical borders, as they existed and were recognized at the moment of our independence.
Charles Truxillo
A prominent advocate of Reconquista was the Chicano activist and adjunct professor Charles Truxillo (1953–2015) of the University of New Mexico (UNM). He envisioned a sovereign Hispanic nation, the República del Norte (Republic of the North), which would encompass Northern Mexico, Baja California, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. He supported the secession of US Southwest to form an independent Chicano nation and argued that the Articles of Confederation gave individual states full sovereignty, including the legal right to secede.
Truxillo, who taught at UNM's Chicano Studies Program on a yearly contract, suggested in an interview, "Native-born American Hispanics feel like strangers in their own land." He said, "We remain subordinated. We have a negative image of our own culture, created by the media. Self-loathing is a terrible form of oppression. The long history of oppression and subordination has to end" and that on both sides of the US–Mexico border "there is a growing fusion, a reviving of connections.... Southwest Chicanos and Norteno Mexicanos are becoming one people again." Truxillo stated that Hispanics who achieved positions of power or otherwise were "enjoying the benefits of assimilation" are most likely to oppose a new nation and explained:
Truxillo believed that the República del Norte would be brought into existence by "any means necessary" but that it would be formed by probably not civil war but the electoral pressure of the region's future majority Hispanic population. Truxillo added that he believed it was his duty to help develop a "cadre of intellectuals" to think about how the new state could become a reality.
In 2007, the UNM reportedly decided to stop renewing Truxillo's yearly contract. Truxillo claimed that his "firing" was because of his radical beliefs and argued, "Tenure is based on a vote from my colleagues. Few are in favor of a Chicano professor advocating a Chicano nation state."
José Ángel Gutiérrez
In an interview with In Search of Aztlán on 8 August 1999, José Ángel Gutiérrez, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, stated: