University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 "Children of the Great Mexican Family": Anglo-American Immigration to Texas and the Making of the American Empire, 1820-1861 Sarah Katherine Manning Rodriguez University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Rodriguez, Sarah Katherine Manning, ""Children of the Great Mexican Family": Anglo-American Immigration to Texas and the Making of the American Empire, 1820-1861" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1981. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1981 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1981 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. "Children of the Great Mexican Family": Anglo-American Immigration to Texas and the Making of the American Empire, 1820-1861 Abstract This dissertation examines the thousands of Anglo-Americans who immigrated to Mexican Texas during the years following its independence from Spain. Long assumed to be the forbears of Manifest Destiny, it argues instead that these immigrants demonstrated a sincere desire to become Mexican citizens, that they were attracted to that country as much for its political promise as for its natural resources, and that they in fact shared more with their northern Mexican neighbors than with their compatriots in the northeastern United States. Drawing chiefly from the personal papers, diplomatic correspondence, and newspapers of Anglo settlers and their Mexican allies, this dissertation exposes a political irony at the heart of the United States’ imperial rise - that it had to do with that country’s early political weakness, rather than Mexico’s, and that the people most responsible for it were in fact trying to escape US dominion, not perpetuate it.