Mexican-Manifest Destiny Research Paper

Words: 1428
Pages: 6

When Mexico gained independence in 1821, it inherited a country riddled with financial issues, native conflict, and a lack of national unity. Simultaneously, the United States was recovering economically from two separate wars fought in the last forty years, and internal divisions were beginning to form within the American nation. Mexico was struggling to subdue conflicts and control the lack of organization in government and public opinion, and the United States was beginning to face major ideological changes, both of which set the stage for the Mexican-American War. This culminated in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. The culmination and results resolved issues of native resistance for Mexico and brought a sense of self-importance due to the vindication of cultural ideology to the US. The …show more content…
Western expansion was a form of allowing Americans to indulge in delusions about what was entitled to them for simply being Americans, and when encountering a country that did not fit into their superiority and entitlement, like Mexico. The decision to go to war and prove that they were entitled to land that did not belong to Americans, and how Americans were better than Mexico in every way, especially when Mexico was not composed of Anglo Americans, was hard to resist, which subsequently served as the ideological precursor to the Mexican American War. Dating back to Spanish rule, the subsequent escalation of Native conflict in Northern Mexico, Southern American colonization and annexation of Northern Mexican territory, and the spread of American superiority enforcing ideologies like Manifest Destiny which encouraged Western expansion and American hegemony culminated in the Mexican-American War from 1846 to