| Author | : Julia Akinyi Brookins |
| File Size | : 42,6 Mb |
| Publisher | : Unknown |
| Language | : English |
| Release Date | : 01 May 2024 |
| ISBN | : 1303422417 |
| Pages | : 435 pages |
Immigrant Settlers and Frontier Citizens German Texas in the American Empire 1835 1890 by Julia Akinyi Brookins Book PDF Summary
Beginning in the 1840s, large-scale German migration to Texas created a sizable and distinctive ethnic community in a region essential to U.S. territorial expansion at Mexico's expense. The United States was a young republic whose unity was strained by the scale of its land claims and by the cultural divisions that mass foreign migrations brought with them. It was an open question whether European immigrants would integrate into the American nation. What role would a large foreign population play at the edges of an unproven empire? This dissertation uses press, private, and government sources, as well as secondary literature, about Germans in Central Texas from the 1840s to the 1880s to explore ideas and practices of race and nationalism in the U.S. Southwest. It traces how immigrants' concepts of citizenship and nation from the German states of Central Europe interacted with local social structures and political opportunities on the Southwestern frontier to cement immigrants' affinity for the U.S. nation, including its federal institutions. German immigrants were diverse in background, aspirations, and political beliefs, but as a whole, I argue, the migration had certain discernible effects on society in Central Texas. Germans in Texas tended to emphasize the importance of cultural diversity against Anglo-American hegemony. At the same time, however, they advocated for U.S. territorial conquest in spite of its deleterious consequences for other minority groups--particularly native Tejanos, Mexican immigrants, and indigenous Indians. In the case of German-Texans, this combination of assertively maintaining ethnic culture while actively supporting U.S. nation-building allowed them to operate successfully within Anglo-American legal and political structures. I argue that their conceptualization of citizenship, while it was not unique to Germans in Texas, is important to our understanding of what it meant for the United States to become a nation of immigrants.