Remarks

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Historian Anthony Mora argues that those who fled Mesilla “took the Republican defeat as a bad omen for their future in the valley, perhaps taking to heart Baca’s earlier warnings about the Democratic Party.” Alternatively, José Angel Hernández concludes that, based on available documentation, the migrants’ motives remain unclear. He does suggest, however, that “the opportunity to head south deeper into Chihuahua provided an effective outlet for the disgruntled. And perhaps it provided an avenue for historical silencing, something common to the experience of dissenters forced into a migratory and refugee status.” See Anthony Mora, Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848-1912 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 114; and José Angel Hernández, Mexican American Colonization in the Nineteenth Century: A History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 178.