Throughout the course of history, Mexican Americans have had a burdensome experience in how to identify in the United States. Beginning from the American colonization to the span of our current time period, Mexican Americans had been brutally shun from society and labeled inferior to the white race despite all effort to assimilate into the American ways. Spanning from 1846 to 1848, the Mexican American war resulted in the seizure of Mexican land thus changing the lives of thousands of Mexicans living on those lands. These lands, now American soil, were inhabited by Mexicans and through the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, there inhabitants were granted an option of American citizenship or the movement back to Mexican territory. Through these terms those who stayed to gain the citizenship were to be categorized as legally white yet socially tagged inferior.