Gringo Justice

The Development of Gringo Justice

To fully comprehend the negative manifestations of gringo justice, it is necessary to recognize and understand the legacy of social, economic, and political conflict between the United States and Mexico, which developed during the early 19th-century settlement of the northern Mexico borderlands now identified as the American Southwest. Ironically, Mexican authorities formally invited American immigration into their northern borderlands as early as 1822 to help stabilize the region, which basically was populated by a number of nomadic and warring indigenous tribes, despite over 200 years of Spanish and Mexican colonizing efforts. A trickle of legal immigrants recruited through empresarios, or land agents, soon turned into a tide of mostly southern, undocumented American immigrants who brought with them preconceived notions of [Page 327]Anglo superiority and dominance. Not surprising, these Anglo American immigrants in the northern borderlands came to view Mexicans as a subhuman and inferior mongrel race due to their centuries-old African, Indian, and European mestizaje, or racial/ethnic mixing.

This negative view of Mexicans coincided with national desires of American expansionism that congealed into the concept of Manifest Destiny. This belief became the rallying inspiration and justification for God's chosen people to settle the North American continent in order to spread freedom through democratic institutions among those who could be self-governed. Unfortunately, non-Whites, and to a lesser degree, non-Anglo Saxon Protestant Europeans were excluded from the category of those who could be self-governed. Mexicans, with their mixed racial and cultural background and adherence to feudal and Catholic traditions, were the antithesis to emergent American core values.

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