Mexican Senate President Gerardo Fernández Noroña made a striking comment Wednesday when asked about the ongoing unrest in Los Angeles over illegal immigration. Speaking about American borders and migration into the U.S., he said, according to a translation, “We’ll build the wall and we’ll pay for it, but we’ll do it according to the map of Mexico in 1830.”
Noroña showed the cameras a map of Mexico, reflecting land ownership nearly 200 years ago, depicting vast swaths of the American Southwest as part of Mexican territory. He went on to state, “We were dispossessed of those territories, we were settled there before the nation now known as the United States,” and asked, “With this geography, how can the U.S. talk about liberating Los Angeles and California?”
The Historical Nature of Conquest
In his statement, Noroña appears to overlook the fundamental principle of human civilization: one group occupies land until another group conquers it, claiming the land as their own. At that point, the land no longer belongs to the conquered, but to those who acquired and established control, forcefully or otherwise.
Although the “might makes right” nature of conquest may be unsettling to some, the U.S. conquered and purchased its way through the Southwest, and that land now belongs to us. Calling this “stolen land” misrepresents history by applying contemporary notions of fairness to war, the history of which is far from fair.
In reality, the American acquisition of Mexican territory was far tamer than history often witnesses. After roughly two years of fighting, the United States captured Mexico City, and in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was presented. According to the terms of this treaty, the U.S. government gave Mexico $15 million for roughly 525,000 square miles of land.
This presents the irony: land was not stolen in the Mexican-American War; it was largely paid for. However, even if the government had not paid Mexico anything for such vast swaths of territory, we would still be justified in calling it ours. The nature of human conquest does not make America a malevolent force, but one that participates in the same struggles that have shaped every nation on earth.
Returning ‘Stolen Land’: An Endless Cycle
A historical justification of human conquest is not the only defense against the claims of people like Gerardo Fernández Noroña. He claims that the U.S. government has no right to remove illegal immigrants, and — seriously or not — that an agreed border should return nearly 10 American states under the control of Mexico.
There is one obvious problem: If the U.S. decided to give the Southwest back to its original and rightful inhabitants, it would not be returned to Mexico. Land has changed hands constantly throughout history, and Mexicans were not the first to inhabit the Southwest. Although America conquered Mexico for the land, Mexico overthrew Spain for it. Spain, in turn, defeated native tribes, and before the Spanish arrived, Indigenous groups were already conquering, displacing, enslaving, and assimilating one another for hundreds or even thousands of years.
The correct and often-noted point on the Right is a simple question: to whom should the land be returned? Gerardo Noroña seems to want it for Mexico. But should we return it to Spain, which controlled the land before Mexico? What about the Aztecs, who controlled it before the Spaniards? Ancestral Puebloans? The dinosaurs? While ironic, this exercise underscores the absurdity of claiming that America owes its land to people who owned it hundreds of years ago, and could not defend it from outside forces.
Additionally, Mexico controlled the Southwest portion of modern America from its independence in 1821 until the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848 — roughly 27 years. Why should the U.S. return land it has governed for almost 177 years to a country that held it for less than three decades? If simply existing on land establishes a rightful claim to it, then the land should remain with the nation that has occupied it for nearly 150 years longer.
Acknowledging Ourselves Into Oblivion
Although the U.S. will not surrender its territory back to Mexico, Western leftists have devised other means of apologizing for past sins. This penitence for a guilty heritage is known as land acknowledgment, a statement recognizing that a given location sits on land originally inhabited by indigenous peoples.
NPR gives an example of land acknowledgment by a theater company in California. The company’s performances and meetings all begin by stating “that the land beneath our theater and our studios and throughout East Bay is Huichin, the traditional unceded land of the Lisjan Ohlone people.”
A much higher-profile land acknowledgment took place when King Charles bent a knee to the ancient indigenous inhabitants of Canada on May 28. The address to the Canadian parliament began with the King stating, “I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people,” and that “While continuing to deepen my own understanding, it is my great hope that in each of your communities, and collectively as a country, a path is found toward truth and reconciliation.” (RELATED: O Canada!)
The obvious irony of this statement is that the land acknowledgment was delivered by the king of the most colonizing nation in human history. Beyond this, statements such as those by King Charles represent a cowardly inability to follow through. Instead of simpering statements and half measures, leaders ought to either champion the fact that their country’s land was won through conquest or fully embrace penitence and return the land.
Without actually returning the “stolen” land and leaving it, those who embrace land acknowledgments are hypocrites. They feel authorized to enjoy the land and Western civilization while virtue-signaling that it is wrong for the same Western civilization to have been brought to the continent.
While the argument of Gerardo Fernández Noroña is flat-out ridiculous, he at least maintains consistency. He believes that the Southwest was stolen from Mexico and that it ought to be returned. Liberals in the U.S. and other Western countries also claim their country is stolen land, but are perfectly content to work, raise children, vacation, and live on it until they die.
For many on the left, living comfortably in Western civilization requires only land acknowledgments — an easy gesture that conveniently disavows the hard-won conquest that made their comfort possible.
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