1. As the @gop tries to demagogue the "Mexican caravan" issue to drive angry white turnout in the election, let's remember an earlier caravan through Mexico that occurred in 1847-8, and is, in part, why Texas, NM, AZ, and Cali are US states. nbcnews.com/news/latino/fi…
2. In March of 1847 General Winfield Scott led an armed, unwelcomed caravan of 10,000 US soldiers into Veracruz, Mexico. The goal was to force Mexico to cede the lands that now comprise several different Southwestern states. pbs.org/kera/usmexican…
3. A few months after the siege of Veracruz, Scott's caravan of invaders marched into Mexico City, thus accomplishing the goal of forcing the Mexican government to agree to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). pbs.org/kera/usmexican…
4. The irony here is that the majority of white voters in states like Texas and Arizona, states acquired by Winfield Scott's armed caravan, are freaked out by "the threat" posed by a caravan of 7000 impoverished asylum seekers, many of whom are women and children.
5. In 1848, if it had been left up to the most eager supporters of the Mexican War, the caravan of armed Americans would have tried to annex all of Mexico. As one Alabama volunteer put it "It is an outrage, for the Mexicans to own such a country."
6. Voicing the racism standard at the time, that same soldier declared that [Mexicans] are too lazy to till the soil." Though he didn't say it, he was probably also thinking "they're rapists, they're criminals, and some, I assume are good people."
7. It speaks volumes about the American worldview that so many of us could simultaneously cheer on Winfield Scott's caravan when we read about it in history books, yet recoil in fear from today's caravan of refugees.
8. Trump's base--middle & upper-middle class white Americans--benefit daily from the labor of migrant farm laborers who pick their food and gardeners who tend to their yards...yet their blood boils at the site of such people desperately seeking refuge & work in the US.
9. Yet those same white people, especially those who live in the Southwest, are literally living on land forcibly taken from Mexico by an invading caravan comprised of their ancestors.
