Week 9 Discussion — Conquest, Contract, and the Courts — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Hook

A treaty, a labor agreement, and two court cases each decided where Mexicans and Mexican Americans stood under U.S. law. This week you read the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the 1930s removals, the Bracero Program, the archive's E1 excerpt, and two cases, Mendez v. Westminster (1946) and Hernandez v. Texas (1954).

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: Under Article VIII of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Mexicans who stayed in the ceded lands could keep Mexican citizenship or acquire U.S. citizenship without moving; the border moved. Under the Bracero Program (1942 to 1964), Mexican men came north on short-term contracts that two governments agreed to and went home when each season ended. The archive's E1 excerpt (illustrative) comes from one such worker, who says he had papers from two governments. Week 3 gave you two categories, immigrant peoples and colonized or incorporated peoples. Do those two categories describe a bracero well, or does his story need a third way of naming how people came under U.S. law? Use the distinction, the Bracero Program, and Article VIII, and give the other view its strongest case.

Option B: In Mendez v. Westminster (1946), a federal district court ruled that segregating Mexican American students by ancestry, appearance, and language violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment; the Ninth Circuit affirmed it in 1947, and the Library of Congress describes it as strengthening the ground for Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In Hernandez v. Texas (1954), decided two weeks before Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court held unanimously that excluding people from jury service because of their ancestry or national origin violated the 14th Amendment, rejecting the two-class theory. Suppose a small museum has room for one panel on Mexican Americans and the courts. Which case would you choose, and what would visitors miss without the other? Say what you count as the more important change, and make the strongest argument for the other case.

There is no single right answer. A category can fit some lives well and others poorly, and two court cases can matter in different ways; pick the option you care about, and show us your reasoning.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Working on your own: this version of the discussion is written entirely from your own reasoning, in your own words.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• For Option A, say whether the two categories, immigrant peoples and colonized or incorporated peoples, describe a bracero well, and why; for Option B, say which case you would put on the museum panel and what visitors would miss without the other.
• Use at least two of this week's terms (Article VIII, the immigrant and incorporated distinction, the Bracero Program, a federal district court, the two-class theory) correctly, and keep documented history plain.
• Give your judgment, with a reason, and give the other view or the other case its strongest form.
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: point out what a classmate's chosen category or case leaves out, offer the strongest case for the view they did not take, or name a dated event from this week that supports or complicates their reading. "Nice point!" on its own does not count.

What a strong post looks like:

I chose Option B and would put Mendez v. Westminster (1946) on the panel. It was a federal district court case, affirmed by the Ninth Circuit in 1947, and the Library of Congress describes it as strengthening the ground for Brown v. Board of Education (1954), so visitors would see that the road to Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ran through a district court first. The other side has a point: Hernandez v. Texas (1954) was a unanimous Supreme Court decision that rejected the two-class theory, and without it visitors would miss the jury box. I would still look for the district's own enrollment records to see what the ruling changed in practice.

Notice how it names the right court, keeps the history plain, gives the other case its due, and says what it would still check. That is the bar.

This discussion is about the records of 1848 to 1964; keep it off any current immigration question, and describe people by their roles rather than their names.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

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