Thanks everyone this helped me a lot!

https://www.krqe.com/news/new-mexico/linguist-spanish-dialect-spoken-in-new-mexico-is-fading-away/

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Navajo Code Talkers Preston Toledo and Frank Toledo attached to a Marine Artillery Regiment in the South Pacific. Image from National Archives.

The Navajo Code talkers served the Allied Countries with superb skill, transmitting over 800 secret military messages without errors and without ever having their code broken. They were “critical to the victory at Iwo Jima” and other battles, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Now New Mexico lawmakers say it’s the state’s responsibility to preserve its history.

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New Mexico Navajo Code Talkers Museum faces headwinds

Hi all,

I've started digging into some of the history of New Mexico recently (I feel like it's a heck of a lot more interesting than class in school made it out to be), and I've run into a topic that I'm very confused about and am hoping someone might be able to point me towards where I need to look to untangle my confusion. Disclaimer: I am terribly white, and honestly just very confused about some of the racial/ethnic aspects of this - I'm sorry, I am trying to understand.
Short version: I do not understand how citizenship was granted to those of Mexican/Spanish descent when New Mexico became a territory of the US, or how it was treated from that point on.

Some points of confusion:
- The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) reportedly extended citizenship to Mexicans living in the territory, unless they chose to remain Mexican. I realize there's more that went on here in regards to how the land grants were handled, and I need to read more about that, but supposedly this treaty should have established a route of citizenship for Mexicans in New Mexico at the time? Given the next few points, there seem to be some contradictions - was this treated as one-time offer for only those already living in the territory?
- The Nationality Act of 1790 (which defined eligibility for citizenship and naturalization, establishing the standards and procedures by which immigrants became citizens), restricted American citizenship to "free white person[s]." Looking into this has some talk about how various exceptions were made (and un-made) over time up until 1952, but no real details about what those exceptions were, when they happened, or whether/how they were enforced?
- In ~1935, there was some kind of kerfuffle over a federal judge that ruled that three Mexican immigrants were ineligible for citizenship because they were not white. Roosevelt apparently circumvented this by making the federal government treat Hispanics as white (via the State Department, Census Bureau, and Labor Department). But there's almost 100 years between 1848 and 1935 - so what was done about citizenship for Mexicans between the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and this change?

I don't have any desire to debate the "whiteness" of anyone, but I do want to understand the history of how this was approached since it seems to have some impact on a number of events from the territorial point onward.
As a more specific example: I've come across instances (circa 1930s) where "Mexicans" were deported, or treated differently (unfairly), reportedly because they were not citizens - I'd like to have some idea whether they were even being allowed to become citizens (as that kind of changes the degree of the oppression, in my mind).
I'm not having a lot of luck finding any concrete timeline of how this matter was treated. I realize it's also probably complicated by migratory practices - not every Mexican in 1930s New Mexico would have been a Mexican that was living in New Mexico territory when it was annexed, and the designation of "Mexican" is very ambiguous in most of these accounts. I've looked around a little bit, but most sources that come up seem to just have a couple sentences and then move right along, which hasn't been helpful to me in piecing together the broader picture of how this changed over time.

If anyone is aware of a source(s) that discusses this issue, or has any insight on what exactly I should be looking for to get a better understanding, I'd really appreciate you pointing me in that direction. Thanks!