LACMA

1842 The Republic of Texas After helping the white settlers defeat his fellow Mexicanos at the Battle of San Jacinto, after helping to bury the Alamo dead, and after serving as mayor of San Antonio in the new Republic of Texas, Tejano Juan Seguin is accused of being a traitor by the new white immigrants. His land is taken and he is exiled to Mexico, where author- ities arrest him for sedition, force him to join the Mexican Army, and send him to battle, where he leads a company of soldiers against the gringos he once called friends. Ni de aquí, ni de allá, neither here nor there, Seguin lives the proto-Chicano experience. FEBRUARY 1848 Mexico City, Mexico The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is signed, ending the U.S.-Mexican War. More than half a million square miles of territory are added to the United States. Chicanos are born. During ratification, the U.S. Senate eliminates Article 10, which would "honor and guarantee all land grants awarded in lands ceded to the United States to citizens of Spain and Mexico by those respective govern- ments." That same year, gold is discovered in some of the new land. 1858 New York, New York Firth, Pond, and Company publish the popular Texican folk song "The Yellow Rose of Texas," an account of how the beautiful and winsome mulatto slave Emily Morgan helped win the decisive Battle of San Jacinto by having sex with General Santa Anna, distracting the self-described Napoleon of the West as the army of Sam Houston made their victorious attack. For the record: Emily Morgan never met Santa Anna, never was at San Jacinto, but it is true that Mexico lost Texas, the new republic instituted slavery, and a monument to Emily was once proposed that would feature Santa Anna in his underwear and military jacket as the general picked petals off a rose discreetly covering her genitals. 1846 Brussels, Belgium, and Washington, D.C. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels root for the United States to win the U.S.-Mexican War, hoping that a bloated American colossus would be only that much more suscep- tible to a proletarian revolution. Opposing the war is Abraham Lincoln, who is fearful that the new territories taken in the conquest would legalize slavery. 1890 California/Mexico Since 1890 Mission Revival has been the most character- istic and lasting architectural style of California. Eventu- ally the taste for Mission Revival reached Mexico City, where it became Colonial Californiano, a Mexican reinter- pretation of a North American copy of a colonial Mexican style. In Mexico, the style referred less to the original missions than to Hollywood. The buildings became more ornate, incorporating stained-glass windows, elaborately carved stonework, and baroque elements. Though Mexican architects disparaged the style as kitsch and phony, today some of these buildings have achieved the status of historical monuments, which they had aimed for from the beginning.

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