Natives? Check. Blacks? Check. Mexicans? Also check!

The European settlers continued to displace people.  That's what alien settlers always do.  That is happening even now in contemporary times, like how the indigenous Miskitos are under assault in Nicaragua.

In the young USA, the leaders decided that they ought to displace Mexicans too.

Mexico was as large as the US in land area, and had a larger population:

"As early as 1825, John Quincy Adams had instructed the American minister to Mexico to try to negotiate a new boundary," writes Jill Lepore.  Yep, the new country was not even 50 years old.  trump's attacks on Mexico are merely the latest in this long history.

Why were the European settlers so interested?  The Mexican territories of "Coahuila and Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico, and west of the state of Louisiana, proved particularly attractive to American settlers in search of new lands for planting cotton."

Perhaps you have an immediate question: Working on the cotton fields meant slave labor; so, if somehow acquired by the US, would Texas allow slavery?

The anti-slavery north protested.  Mexico considered Texas its province, though a rebellious one.  The US wanted to annex it, and more.  The US laid a trap for Mexico in order to begin a war.  It was only a matter of time before Mexico fell into that trap.  Almost exactly to this date--on January 25th--back in 1845, "the House passed a resolution in favor of annexation."  And about slavery in Texas?  The resolution included a compromise: "The eastern portion of Texas would enter the Union as a slave state, but not the western portion."

From the 3/5ths compromise, the US has been at such dealmaking in favor of slavery; yet, we have a president in office who loudly wondered why they had never struck a deal in the past in order to avoid the Civil War!  What an ignoramus that 63 million elected only because he appealed to their racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and more!

President James Polk had grand dreams to extend the American empire; "Texas was only the beginning," Lepore writes.  He hoped to get Mexico into an armed confrontation, and it happened.  He asked Congress to declare war.

What would happen if the US won the war and gained territory?  Would Mexicans there now become Americans?  Quite a few leaders were against it.  "Ours is the government of the white man."  Would the new territory then be slave states as well?

As the war with Mexico came to and end in the second half of 1847, Polk "considered trying to acquire all of Mexico" from 26 degrees N all the way to the Pacific.  But, it was finally settled at 36 degrees north.  With a formal end to the war in February 1848, "the top half of Mexico became the bottom third of the United States."

Jill Lepore writes: "As the United States swelled, Mexico shrank."