American society was poised in continual paradoxes -- religious yet money-hungry, disdainful of social hierarchies yet dependant upon oppressing or disenfranchising races to secure advancement of poorer whites. America was also land-hungry in a way that put it into conflict with its neighbor Mexico, despite its insistence upon being against colonialism, having been born of resistance to colonial Britain. This resulted in the Mexican-American War and the eventual incorporation of Texas into the Union. Texas and the West itself is still another paradox of the American experiment. For those unable to become wealthy through capitalism, striking out on one's own in the west seemed a better alternative to the increasingly civilized and also socially entrenched east. Thus the west, even more so than the east, was both anti-elitist yet elitist -- it offered profound social mobility for some, but for others, it provided a justification for further relegating social 'others' to the margins of society. In the case of African-Americans, life became even more difficult, as various...
Every state admitted to the union reignited the debate of slave vs. free and showed the strains upon the Missouri Compromise.
So who is an American and what an America can or cannot do are questions which are critical to the issue of legalizing immigrants. Does being an American mean you cannot show allegiance to any other country? The images of people raising and waving Mexican flag had enraged many but it need not have. It should be accepted that people who come from different countries would forever hold in their
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