I don’t recall any mentioning of February 2nd, an anniversary type memo in the American press, neither this year nor before. On the same line, I don’t recall any historical treatise on the subject "who built America" or "Americans of merit" mentioning Mexicans. For example, American social history project Who built America under the direction of Herbert G, Gutman, in the first volume (1989) which covers "working people and the nation’s economy, politics, culture, and society" from colonization to 1877, the book which is abscessed with explaining and bewildering of slavery in America, justifies even the Mexican war of 1848, a jewel of American imperialism, as a consequence of the conflict of pro- and contra-slavery states. And what is Mr Gutman’s view of Mexican working people? Only half of a paragraph was enough. Here:

"Victory over Mexico transferred almost 1.2 million square miles of land - half Mexico’s national territory - and nearly eighty thousand Spanish-speaking people, mostly of mixed Spanish-Indian descent, to the United States. These people would perform the low-paid labor needed to make agriculture, ranching, mining, and industry in the region profitable."

On February 2nd 1848, following a short and one-sided war, Mexico agreed to cede more than half its territory to the United States. An area covering most of present-day Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah, plus parts of several other states, was handed over to gringolandia. The rebellious state of Tejas, which had declared its independence from Mexico in 1836, was recognized as American soil too. But a century and half later, communities have proved more durable than borders. The countries with the highest concentration of Mexicans (as defined by ethnicity, rather than citizenship) overlap closely with the area that belonged to Mexico before the great gringo land-grab of 1848. Some are recent arrivals; other trace their roots to long before the map was redrawn. They didn’t jump the border - it jumped them.