Guerra Mexico-Americana by Read, Benjamin M - 1910

Santa Fe, NM: Compañía Impresora del Nuevo Mexicano, 1910. First Edition. 259 pages plus twelve pages of plates reproducing documents.

An early and important work of Latinx history and the most substantial effort to that time to present Mexican American view of the Mexican-American war. The volume of books devoted to the war that defined the American West fill many fat bibliographies, yet virtually all the writing is by Americans or Mexicans and hardly any of it by the Mexican Americans who have connections to both sides of the border created by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.

In the six decades after the treaty was signed, when the former-lawyer-turned-historian Benjamin Read sat down to write this book, very few Mexican Americans, outside of a handful of Texans, had ever attempted to write a history of any sort.Read, having grown up bilingual, chose to write in Spanish for the Mexican American community. A Mexican newspaper noticed that Read wrote in American Spanish: "Es cierto que la redacción [del libro] se reciente un poco de la "sajonización" de nuestro idioma" [It is certain that the writing has a whiff of the Saxonization of our language] (El Correo, Chihuahua, Mexico, August 2, 1910).
In the introduction this book, Read declared it to be, "la primera obra de historia escrita por un hijo de Nuevo Mexico, descendiente de ambos raizes, la sajona y la latina" [the first history book written by a son of New Mexico descended from both races, the Anglo Saxon and the Latino]. The book was big news throughout the nuevomexicano community, with the Revista popular de Nuevo Mexico devoting an entire page to it on August 19, 1910, and many other Spanish language newspapers offering almost exclusively glowing reviews."La historia no está escrito bajo el punto de vista de Washington ni tampoco del de México, sino del aspecto de las colonias que fueron anexadas y suplieron la verdadera causa de la contienda" [This history is not written from the point of view of Washington nor from that of Mexico, instead it presents the view of the people who were annexed and it supplies the true causes of the conflict], offered El Nuevo Mexicano (Santa Fe) on July 30, 1910.
Recent scholarship by Erlinda Gonzalez-Berry has cited this book and Read's later history of New Mexico, written deliberately in response to biased English-language histories, as arguments "ostensibly over the veracity of the facts, [but] they really were about a broader issue; namely, who had the authority to write that history." She concludes, "However, once Anglo-American hegemony laid exclusionary claim to the frontier, the question Read raises was rendered moot, his contestory treatises buried in the archival dustbin, virtually erased from the nuevomexicano collective memory."
Benjamin Maurice Read (Las Cruces, NM, 1852 Santa Fe, NM, 1927) was the leading Latinx historian in New Mexico. His father, Benjamin Franklin Read, arrived in New Mexico as a soldier during the Mexican American war and soon married María Ignacia Cano. The origins of Read's mother is somewhat obscure. In the 1860 and 1870 censuses, her birthplace is given as New Mexico; in Read's Historia ilustrada de Nuevo México (p. 456) he says she immigrated with her parents to New Mexico from Sonora, Mexico. In the 20th century, Read reported her birthplace as Spain to census officials. Benjamin F. and María had four boys in quick succession, the last after Benjamin F. died, in 1857. María soon remarried a nuevomexicano farmer, Meteo Ortiz, who raised the boys. Read became a lawyer and served in the territorial legislature and as speaker of the New Mexico House of Representatives.

In 1910, he began publishing a series of historical works looking at New Mexico history from the viewpoint of its residents of Spanish origin. His view of history, as a story that needed to consider ethnic and cultural viewpoints, was rare at the time.This book is scarce. The last copy at auction was in 2005.

It is a key book in Latinx history. Spine dulled, endpapers renewed, else very good in the original blue cloth binding. This is one of the copies Read sent out for review, with the ownership label and signature of Aurelio M. Espinosa, the leading Mexican American academic of the era. A letter from Espinosa to Read is quoted in the Revista popular article about this book: "Ha dado Ud. á luz una obra histórica de gran mérito, y ha hecho un bien perdurable a nuestra raza" [You have published an historical work of great merit, and have made a lasting contribution to our race]. A nice association.