If I didn't already prefer Ketel One vodka in my martinis, I might very well call for my own boycott against Absolut.
Not because I agree with the knuckleheads who fear that the Swedish company's advertisement featuring a map of the American Southwest as Mexican territory is fueling ethnic secessionism, but because, in its attempt to lure upper-middle-class consumers in Mexico, the company played on an age-old canard that has historically been used to justify discrimination against Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans here in the United States.
Last week I was in Las Vegas, and I found myself having a depressing chat with a Croatian maid at the Mandalay Bay hotel. "Your name is Rodriguez, are you Spanish?" she asked. "No," I told her, "I'm Mexican American." To which she responded glumly, "then pretty soon, this land will be yours. You are taking over."
I tried to explain to her that I was an American, and that we all have modifiers. But she wasn't having any of it. Where she's from, ethnicity and nationality are one and the same. Croatia is for Croats, Serbia for Serbs. Having suffered the dismantling of her native Yugoslavia, which once stood as a functioning multiethnic state, she thought she knew better than to think nationality could be organized around anything other than a single, shared ethnicity and heritage.
Here in the U.S., our nationality is not supposed to be defined by ethnicity or race. But for much of our history, it was. Despite our diversity, the U.S. was long in the grip of white racial nationalism, which held that only whites were true citizens of this land. By the early 19th century, many white Americans believed that they were members of a superior Anglo-Saxon "race" destined to shape the world. The nonwhites they encountered on their way were deemed inferior and doomed to subordination or extinction.
It so happens that it was during early conflicts with Mexico that Americans began to understand territorial expansion in racial terms. Rather than view the Texas Revolution of 1836 as a struggle by aggrieved American colonists against tyrannical rule in Mexican territory, white Americans largely saw it as a racial clash. As historian Reginald Horsman has written, even Sam Houston saw the struggle, which resulted in the creation of a short-lived Texas Republic, "as one between a glorious Anglo-Saxon race and an inferior Mexican rabble." Likewise when considering the U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845, James Buchanan, President Polk's secretary of State, argued that "our race of men can never be subjected to the imbecile and indolent Mexican race."
