As they have sought to justify sending 700 active-duty U.S. Marines to Los Angeles, President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have described the demonstrators in the city as carrying foreign flags with the intention of continuing an “invasion” of the United States. To some Angelenos, the notion that their city was being invaded by Mexico might sound like a fantastical twist on the history of U.S.-Mexico military relations.
After all, U.S. Marines were among the invaders in the 19th-century war between Mexico and the United States that forced Mexico to give up more than half of its territory — including what is now the state of California.
“Mexican Americans have a saying here, ‘They didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them,’” said Gaspar Rivera Salgado, director of the Center for Mexican Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. In the historical memory of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, he added, the American invasion is remembered.
The year was 1847, and the United States and Mexico were in the middle of a heated conflict that had begun the previous year under President James K. Polk, during an American push for westward expansion and white dominance. American troops landed near the port city of Veracruz on Mexico’s eastern coast, alongside the ocean basin that Mr. Trump has sought to rename the Gulf of America.
About 12,000 soldiers, including about 400 Marines, unloaded supplies, weapons and horses and laid siege to the city for 20 days, until it fell. The operation gave the American troops a base from which to advance westward to Mexico City. And there, on a cold and foggy morning that September, hundreds of U.S. Marines were among the 7,000 military men who descended on a rundown castle known as Chapultepec. They pushed past the Mexican defenses there with bayonets and cannons, and used ladders to scale the castle’s stone walls.
Inside, they expected to encounter more Mexican soldiers, but all they found were 132 military cadets. Few Americans today remember the Battle of Chapultepec, but in Mexican children’s history books, the bravery of the young men is the stuff of lore. A garrison commander is said to have given the cadets orders to fall back, but six of them did not retreat — they fought bravely to the death.
The Battle of Chapultepec let to the capture of Mexico City that essentially ended the war. Five months later, on Feb. 2, 1848, Mexico and the United States signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which carved a jagged new border, nearly 2,000 miles long. That border, modified further by the Gadsden Purchase six years later, became the backdrop for immigration battles past and present.
The Marine Corps memorializes the Marines who fell in the Veracruz campaign. On their navy-blue trousers, Marines wear a scarlet stripe in their honor, a symbol of their bravery, and their blood.
Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter covering immigration for The Times.
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