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During the second half of the twentieth century, several changes have occurred in the study of Mexican Americans in the present-day Southwest. Both historians and sociologists developed an interest in studying Mexican American's social, political, and economic contributions. Consequently, many historians developed their own thesis of the Mexican American experience in the United States. Some researchers have found that Mexican Americans were a marginal people who survived an Anglo dominated world and managed to keep their culture despite discrimination and displacement by their Anglo counterparts. Others have taken a less aggressive approach but still argue that Mexican Americans have played an important role in society despite many obstacles.
One recent scholar, Armando C. Alonzo, for example, has developed his own thesis on the Tejano experience. Focusing on Tejanos in South Texas, Alonzo's research deals with the survival of Tejano ranchers and argues that the history of the Tejano experience after 1848 is flawed, "one aspect of this problem is the tendency to see conflict as the central theme of Tejano history" (Alonzo 5). Alonzo claims that even though there were conflicts among Anglo and Tejano families, Tejanos lost their land through other means. He refutes the traditional claims by historians that states conflicts and fraud were the dominant cause for land loss. A closer look at these different arguments deserves attention to have a more balanced and accurate account of how Tejanos' land was affected after 1848.
In 1846, the Americans waged war on Mexico under the ideology of Manifest Destiny. This "stemmed from the need to accumulate more land, to celebrate heroes, and to prove the nation's power by military superiority" (Acuna 5). The Mexican American War turned out to be very costly to Mexico. In just two years, the United States acquired the entire Southwest, almost one million square miles, including the presentday states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and part of Colorado. In Texas, Mexicans, as well as many Anglos who had setfled there since the 1820s, had rebelled from Mexico in 1836. Texas became an independent republic that survived for ten years after the revolt until the United States annexed it in 1845. At that time, the boundary was in dispute, and it was finally settled when the war...