Final answer:
Attitudes toward race profoundly influenced the society in the territories acquired from the Mexican War, leading to widespread land dispossession of Mexican heritage populations, legal discrimination, and labor exploitation, which solidified racial and ethnic divisions.
Step-by-step explanation:
Attitudes Towards Race After the Mexican War
Following the Mexican-American War, attitudes toward race played a significant role in the territories acquired through the war. The racial antagonism began with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, where Mexicans and Mexican-Americans experienced a large-scale dispossession of their land. This was reinforced as the U.S. government and incoming settlers declared Mexican and Spanish land deeds 'imperfect'. The Californios and Tejanos were systematically stripped of their ownership, leading to a loss of land, wealth, and status. Legislative actions, such as California's 'Greaser Act', further institutionalized discrimination against people of Mexican heritage, explicitly targeting them and undermining their societal standing.
In Texas, the rising power of 'Texans' compared to 'Tejanos' led to cultural, political, and economic tensions, with the former increasingly dominating local governance and threatening land confiscations. Furthermore, slavery emerged as a contentious issue. American settlers, largely from the South, sought to bring and maintain slavery in Texas, clashing with Mexican laws that were moving towards abolition.
The overall result was a segregated society where Mexican-Americans were largely marginalized and entered a cycle of labor exploitation and political disenfranchisement. This sowed the seeds for the entrenched racial and ethnic divisions that would persist in these regions up to the present.