Q&A with Elaine A. Peña on Celebrating Washington’s Birthday at the US-Mexico Border

Since 1898, residents of Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, have reached across the US-Mexico border to celebrate this country's first president George Washington's birthday. The celebration can last a whole month, with parade goers reveling in American and Mexican symbols; George Washington saluting; and “Pocahontas” riding on horseback. An international bridge ceremony, the heart and soul of the festivities, features children from both sides of the border marching toward each other to link the cities with an embrace.

Elaine A. Peña's book ¡Viva George! offers an ethnography and a history of this celebration, which emerges as both

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symbol and substance of cross-border community life. Anthropologist and Laredo native Elaine A. Peña shows how generations of border officials, civil society organizers, and everyday people have used the bridge ritual to protect shared economic and security interests as well as negotiate tensions amid natural disasters, drug-war violence, and immigration debates.

Drawing on previously unknown sources and extensive fieldwork, Peña finds that border enactments like Washington's birthday are more than goodwill gestures. From the Rio Grande to the 38th Parallel, they do the meaningful political work that partisan polemics cannot.

This week, we will be attending the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting virtually, during which we will offer a discount on our new and award-winning anthropology books. Apply the discount code EXAA during checkout on www.utexaspress.com to receive 30% off the full list price of any book, plus free domestic shipping.

To celebrate the publication of her book, we asked Dr. Peña some questions about her research.

Please describe the WBC’s International Bridge Ceremony, and what questions you wanted to answer by focusing on this performance?

The ceremony features two children representing the U.S. and two children representing Mexico walking toward each other on the Juárez-Lincoln International Bridge to share a picture-perfect embrace and to exchange national flags. Other actors, mostly political figures and business leaders from both sides of the border, also share embraces and exchange well wishes. The ritual has taken place in some shape or form since the celebration’s inception in 1898.

Focusing on the bridge ceremony allowed me to trace shifts in cross-border cooperation across several decades and, more importantly, to see how Mexican actors have supported this ostensibly U.S.-centric celebration. I was interested to see if the balance of the ritual—two sides coming together with tight choreography annually for over a century—carried over to everyday border interactions or had an impact on how port-of-entry actors dealt with shared problems and/or opportunities linked to trade, immigration, and security. I took a specific interest in the history and uses of the international bridge because it is co-owned by the Mexican government and the city of Laredo. I thought, well, there are insurmountable inequities that affect that border in terms of poverty and documentation vulnerabilities, for example, but the international bridge—an exemplar of border infrastructure—is co-owned. Both sides share it and thus manage responsibilities and power. Having that conceptual ground to stand on allowed me to dive into the archives and into ethnographic fieldwork with greater attention to what border actors do—how they find innovative ways to cooperate during times of crisis. Focusing on how border actors have festively repurposed the International Bridge Ceremony not only challenges but also empirically denies popular narratives of border dysfunction.

What were your early experiences of the festival, and how has your impression/consumption/participation of it changed over several decades?

We moved around a lot and lived in different places downtown during my childhood so I was used to seeing and interacting with people gathering for the parade. I would work the parade sometimes, selling cold sodas and water. My favorite parade participants were the Mexican tumblers. They would do amazing tricks! Other than that, we would go to the carnival or to the jalapeño festival if we could afford it that year. This is all to say that I was aware of the celebration, and definitely of the beauty and glamour of the debutantes, but I didn’t wonder about it too much. I had other things on my mind as a kid.

Things changed once I got to high school because a lot of my classmates participated in the festivities as debutantes or as escorts. They worked so hard to get selected and they had so many commitments. It was intense.

I went to the Princess Pocahontas pageant in 1996 because my best friend was Pocahontas. That was a really weird moment for my sixteen-year-old self. It was the first time I had attended a “high-class” event and I was really confused by what I saw and heard about Native American tribes. I didn’t know what “playing Indian” was at the time and I didn’t have the vocabulary to work things out, so I was left with a lot of questions.

I began to attend a wide range of celebration events once I decided to work on the celebration as an academic, about ten years after that moment. I attended as many events as I could between 2006 and 2017, including the International Bridge Ceremony, the Pocahontas and Society of Martha Washington pageants, LULAC’s Noche Mexicana gala, the Caballeros de la República del Río Grande cocktail party, and the Mr. South Texas luncheon. I also attended WBCA events in Nuevo Laredo and celebration events hosted by the municipality of Nuevo Laredo. These upper-echelon gatherings gave me insight into why rituals persist, how they are practiced across generations, and how they benefit border business.

The era of paso libre is, as you say, a puzzle. Would you describe paso libre and the incongruous context in which it existed for twenty years?

Paso libre coincided with the International Bridge Ceremony in February 1957. That year, the ritual doubled as the public inauguration of the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge. Dangerous water levels created by Hurricane Alice had destroyed the existing bridge at the end of July 1954. Paso libre was part of an agreement to make the newly constructed bridge operational, and it extended free bridge crossing privileges during the celebration in either direction. In practice, this meant that Mexican citizens could cross the border into the U.S. without having to show documentation every February between 1957 and 1976. Thousands of people crossed the border peacefully and safely during that time.

It took me quite a long time comparing uncatalogued documents in the archives, but I finally figured out that paso libre was a peace-building/port business–securing gesture initiated by U.S. actors, including the INS and the State Department, to persuade Mexican officials to formally open their side of the international bridge. I spoke with as many people as I could who remembered that time and I was lucky enough to locate photos of paso libre at different moments during the phenomenon. I remember coming across photos from the early 1960s showing families walking hand-in-hand across the bridge as well as Mexican military cadets. Photos of the early 1970s are absolutely spectacular because they feature thousands of people walking across the border as part of the bridge ceremony. By that time, anti-immigrant narratives were not only becoming more widespread in the U.S. but were also being politicized as part of the War on Drugs campaign launched by President Nixon in 1969.

It is just mind-blowing to think that paso libre persisted, with lots of fanfare and without incident, for almost twenty years. It is also incredible that paso libre was covered (negatively) by major newspapers like the Los Angeles Times during that period (early 1970s) but was never questioned by academics or mentioned in the history books. ¡Viva George! is the first study to do so.

What aspect of the ceremony does the cover of your book depict, and what is its historical and also logistical significance?

The cover depicts a transformative moment in the bridge ceremony ritual. The children’s embrace in the middle of the bridge is the culmination of months and months of cross-border collaboration between Mexican and U.S. actors. This coordination is sometimes conducted under extreme duress—political pressure to secure the border, etc.—but still, in that moment, the ritual makes visible and palpable the fact that both sides can work together.

You embedded yourself in both archival and ethnographic research. What kinds of activities and participation did your ethnographic research entail?

In addition to conducting archival research in Waco; San Antonio; Austin; Washington, DC; Mexico City; Laredo; and Nuevo Laredo, I spent a lot of time in the field—during the celebration, of course, but also during summers, academic breaks, and sabbatical years. The celebration unfolds in February, but planning happens year-round. I met with WBCA actors, past and present, individually and in groups on several occasions. I attended the planning meetings of bi-nationally focused organizations like the International Good Neighbor Council–Laredo, the Consejo Internacional de Buena Vecindad–Nuevo Laredo, and LULAC Council #12, but I also attended special committee meetings with city officials focused on border security and celebration logistics. I went to dress fittings and rehearsals with the abrazo children and their families. I traveled to Washington, DC, with WBCA actors headed to the annual Laredo Day event on the Hill in early March.

It was also important for me to participate in the International Bridge Ceremony as often as possible and from several different vantage points. One year I headed out to the bridge at 5:00 a.m. to help set things up and to get an up-close and personal take on how international bridge personnel do not close but “redirect” traffic while the ritual unfolds. Another year, I traveled from Nuevo Laredo with Mexican representatives to the bridge ceremony.

Elaine A. Peña is an associate professor of American Studies at George Washington University and author of Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe. Her work has been recognized by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists.

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Q&A with C.J. Alvarez on His History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide

From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the twenty-first century, Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet.

Tracing the accretion of ports of entry, boundary markers, transportation networks, fences

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and barriers, surveillance infrastructure, and dams and other river engineering projects, C. J. Alvarez advances a broad chronological narrative that captures the full life cycle of border building. He explains how initial groundbreaking in the nineteenth century transitioned to unbridled faith in the capacity to control the movement of people, goods, and water through the use of physical structures. By the 1960s, however, the built environment of the border began to display increasingly obvious systemic flaws. More often than not, Alvarez shows, federal agencies in both countries responded with more construction—“compensatory building” designed to mitigate unsustainable policies relating to immigration, black markets, and the natural world. Border Land, Border Water reframes our understanding of how the border has come to look and function as it does and is essential to current debates about the future of the US-Mexico divide.

Give us the elevator pitch for your research and the resulting book.

The US-Mexico border is at the center of an unprecedented national debate, yet very few people from either the United States or Mexico have ever been to the international divide. This book explains the complex history of construction projects on the border that have been underway for over 100 years.

How did you get interested in the subject of your book?

I thought this was an important subject to write about not because it has become especially controversial but because I grew up in the border region. To us border dwellers, the international divide and the various ecosystems through which it passes have always been relevant.

Why is it important to study the built environment on the US-Mexico border?

Government policies—whether we’re talking about the “drug wars” or immigration law—are often enacted through physical construction projects. Fences and walls are the most obvious examples of this, but it’s important to understand other, less-obvious kinds of building, such as border survey markers, roads and highways, surveillance infrastructure, bridges, and massive storage dams.

In what ways did engineering and police projects affect the geography, environment, and communities on both sides of the international divide?

One of the most surprising conclusions I came to through my archival research was that the Rio Grande border has undergone a far higher degree of environmental transformation than the land border. There is almost nothing “natural” about the Rio Grande watershed, and this has produced fascinatingly complex results in border communities. On one hand, some of these river modifications made it easier for immigration police to surveil the international divide, and on the other hand, an untold number of people have been saved from disastrous floods.

What context might be missing from contemporary debates about the ongoing “drug wars” of the border region and border enforcement policy?

Government and business interests in both the United States and Mexico have spent over a century painstakingly building connective tissue between our two countries. First it was the railroads of the 1880s, then, with the invention of automobiles and trucks in the early twentieth century, more complex road networks were introduced: after the 1950s, that meant the interstate highway system, and after the free trade agreements in the 1980s and 1990s, superhighways and port-of-entry expansions. These were all bilateral projects; you can’t build only half a port of entry. The US-Mexico border is designed to be open to commerce, which means you can’t cherry pick those who cross it, weeding out illicit business and the unauthorized movement of people, no matter how many fences you build.

C. J. Alvarez is an assistant professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Mexicans Made America—in So Many Ways. Why Do We Treat Them as Alien Invaders?

By John Tutino 

John Tutino is a professor of history and international affairs in the School of Foreign Service and director of the Americas Initiative at Georgetown University.

Mexicans have contributed to making the United States in pivotal and enduring ways. In 1776, more of the territory of the current United States was under Spanish sovereignty than in the thirteen colonies that rejected British rule. Florida, the Gulf Coast to New Orleans, the Mississippi to St. Louis, and the lands from Texas through New Mexico and California all lived under Spanish rule, creating Hispanic-Mexican legacies. Millions of pesos minted in Mexico City, the American center of global finance, funded the war for U.S. independence,

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leading the new nation to adopt the peso (renamed the dollar) as its currency.

The U.S. repaid the debt by claiming Spanish/Mexican lands: buying vast Louisiana territories (via France) in 1803; gaining Florida by treaty in 1819; sending settlers (many undocumented) into Texas to expand cotton and slavery in the 1820s; enabling Texas secession in 1836; and provoking war in 1846 to incorporate Texas’s cotton and slave economy—and acquiring California’s gold fields, too. The U.S. took in land and peoples long Spanish and recently Mexican, often mixing European, indigenous, and African ancestries. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo recognized those who remained in the U.S. as citizens. And the U.S. incorporated the dynamic mining/grazing/irrigation economy that had marked Spanish North America for centuries and would long define the U.S. west.

Debates over slavery and freedom in lands taken from Mexico led to the U.S. Civil War, while Mexicans locked in shrunken territories fought over liberal reforms and then faced a French occupation—all in the 1860s. With Union victory, the U.S. continued its drive for continental hegemony. Simultaneously, Mexican liberals led by Benito Juárez consolidated power and welcomed U.S. capital. U.S. investors built Mexican railroads, developed mines, and promoted export industries, including petroleum. The U.S. and Mexican economies merged; U.S. capital and technology shaped Mexico while Mexican workers built the U.S. west. The economies were so integrated that a U.S. downturn, the panic of 1907, was pivotal in setting off Mexico’s 1910 revolution, a sociopolitical conflagration that focused Mexicans while the U.S. joined World War I.

Afterwards, the U.S. roared in the 1920s while Mexicans faced reconstruction. Though the U.S. blocked immigration from Europe, the nation still welcomed Mexicans across a little-patrolled border to build dams and irrigation systems, cities and farms across the west. When the Great Depression hit in 1929 (begun in New York, spread across the U.S., and exported to Mexico), Mexicans became expendable. Denied relief, they got one-way tickets to the border, forcing thousands south—including children born as U.S. citizens.

Mexico absorbed the refugees thanks to new industries and land distributions—reforms culminating in a 1938 oil nationalization. U.S. corporations screamed foul, and FDR enabled a settlement; access to Mexican oil mattered as World War II loomed. When war came, the U.S. needed more than oil. It needed cloth and copper, livestock and leather—and workers, too. Remembering the expulsions of the early 1930s, many resisted going north. So the governments negotiated a labor program, recruiting braceros in Mexico: paying for their travel, and promising decent wages and treatment. Five hundred thousand Mexican citizens fought in the U.S. military; sent to deadly fronts, they suffered high casualty rates.

To support the war, Mexican exporters accepted promises of postwar payment. With peace, accumulated credits allowed Mexico to import machinery for national development. But when credits ran out, the U.S. was subsidizing the reconstruction of Europe and Japan, and Mexico was left to compete for scarce and expensive bank credit. Life came in cycles of boom and bust, debt crises and devaluations. Meanwhile, U.S. pharmaceutical sellers delivered the antibiotics that had saved soldiers in World War II to families across Mexico. Children lived—and Mexico’s population soared: from 20 million in 1940, to 50 million by 1970, to 100 million in 2000. To feed these growing numbers, Mexico turned to U.S. funding and scientists to pioneer a “green revolution.” Harvests of wheat and maize rose to feed growing cities. Reliance on machinery and chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, however, cut rural employment. National industries also adopted labor-saving ways, making employment scarce everywhere. So people trekked north, some to labor seasonally in the bracero program, which lasted until 1964, and others to settle families in once-Mexican regions like Texas and California and in places north and east.

Documentation and legality were uncertain; U.S. employers’ readiness to hire Mexicans for low wages was not. People kept coming. U.S. financing, corporations, and models of production shaped lives across the border; Mexican workers labored everywhere. With integrated economies, the nations faced linked challenges. In the 1980s, the U.S. lived through “stagflation,” while Mexico faced a collapse called the “lost decade.” In 1986, Republican president Ronald Reagan authorized a path to legality for thousands of Mexicans in the U.S., tied to sanctions on employers that aimed to end new arrivals. Legal status kept workers here; failed sanctions enabled employers to keep hiring Mexicans—who kept coming. They were cheap and insecure workers for U.S. producers, subsidizing profits in challenging times.

The 1980s also saw the demise of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the presumed triumph of capitalism. What would that mean for people in Mexico and the U.S.? Reagan corroded union rights, leading to declining incomes, disappearing pensions, and enduring insecurities among U.S. workers. President Carlos Salinas, a member of Mexico’s dominant PRI Party, attacked union power—and in 1992 ended rural Mexicans’ right to land. A transnational political consensus saw the erosion of popular rights as key to post–Cold War times.

Salinas proposed NAFTA to Reagan’s Republican successor, George H. W. Bush. The goal was to liberate capital and allow goods to move freely across borders, while holding people within nations. U.S. businesses would profit; Mexicans would continue to provide a reservoir of low-wage workers—at home. The treaty was ratified in Mexico by Salinas and the PRI, and in the U.S. by Democratic president Bill Clinton and an allied Congress.

As NAFTA took effect in 1994, Mexico faced the Zapatista uprising in the south and then a financial collapse before NAFTA could bring investment and jobs. On top of this, the Clinton-era high-tech boom caused production to flow to China. Mexico gained where transport costs mattered—as with auto assembly. But old textiles and new electronics went to Asia. Mexico returned to growth in the late 1990s, though jobs were still scarce for a population nearing 100 million. Meanwhile, Mexican production of corn for home markets collapsed. NAFTA ended tariffs on goods crossing borders while the U.S. continued to subsidize corporate farmers, enabling agribusiness to export below cost. Mexican growers could not compete, and migration to the U.S. accelerated.

NAFTA created new concentrations of wealth and power across North America. In Mexico, cities grew as a powerful few and the favored middle sectors prospered; millions more struggled with marginality. The vacuum created by agricultural collapse and urban marginality made space for a dynamic, violent drug economy. Historically, cocaine was an Andean specialty, heroin an Asian product. But as the U.S. leaned on drug economies elsewhere, Mexicans—some enticed by big profits, but many just searching for sustenance—turned to supplying U.S. consumers.

U.S. politicians and ideologues blame Mexico for the “drug problem”—a noisy “supply side” argument that is historically untenable. U.S. demand drives the drug economy. The U.S. has done nothing effective to curtail consumption or to limit the flow of weapons to drug cartels in Mexico. Laying blame helps block any national discussion of the underlying social insecurities brought by globalization—deindustrialization, scarce employment, low wages, lowered benefits, vanishing pensions—that close observers know fuel drug dependency. Drug consumption in the U.S. has expanded as migration from Mexico has slowed (mostly due to slowing population growth)—a conversation steadfastly avoided.

People across North America struggle with shared challenges: common insecurities spread by globalizing capitalism. Too many U.S. politicians see benefit in polarization, blaming Mexicans for all that ails life north of the border. Better that we work to understand our inseparable histories. Then we might move toward a prosperity shared by diverse peoples in an integrated North America.

John Tutino
Georgetown University

John Tutino is the author of Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Duke University Press, 2011) and The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500–2000 (Princeton University Press, 2018). He is the editor of and a contributor to Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States (University of Texas Press, 2012).

Further Reading - Border Essentials

REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era

By Amy Sara Carroll

Featuring dozens of compelling images, this transformative reading of borderland and Mexican cultural production—from body art to theater, photography, and architecture—draws on extensive primary research to trace more than two decades of social and political response in the aftermath of NAFTA.

Border Odyssey: Travels along the U.S./Mexico Divide

By Charles D. Thompson, Jr.

This compelling chronicle of a journey along the entire U.S.-Mexico border shifts the conversation away from danger and fear to the shared histories and aspirations that bind Mexicans and Americans despite the border walls.

Visit the companion website www.borderodyssey.com to access maps, photographs, a film, audio, and more.

Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados: Class and Culture on the South Texas Border, Revised Edition

By Chad Richardson and Michael J. Pisani

Now thoroughly revised and updated, this classic account of life on the Texas-Mexico border reveals how the borderlands have been transformed by NAFTA, population growth and immigration crises, and increased drug violence.

Mexican Migration to the United States: Perspectives from Both Sides of the Border

Edited by Harriett D. Romo and Olivia Mogollon-Lopez

Bringing together leading scholars from Mexico and the United States in fields ranging from economics to anthropology, this timely anthology presents empirical research on key immigration policy issues and analyzes the many push-pull facets of Mexico-US migration.

Captivity Beyond Prisons: Criminalization Experiences of Latina (Im)migrants

By Martha D. Escobar

Escobar examines the criminalization of Latina (im)migrants, delving into questions of reproduction, technologies of power, and social justice in a prison system that consistently devalues the lives of Latinas

The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town

By Jennifer R. Nájera

Using oral histories and local archives, this historical ethnography analyzes how and why Mexican American individuals unevenly experienced racial dominance and segregation in South Texas.

Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border

By Edward S. Casey and Mary Watkins

Using the U.S. wall at the border with Mexico as a focal point, two experts examine the global surge of economic and environmental refugees, presenting a new vision of the relationships between citizen and migrant in an era of “Juan Crow,” which systematically creates a perpetual undercaste.

Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants: A Texas History

By Martha Menchaca

A timely exploration of the political and cultural impact of U.S. naturalization laws on Mexicans in Texas, from early statehood years to contemporary controversies.

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The Enduring Appeal of Gang Suppression in El Salvador

In 1992, at the end of a twelve-year civil war, El Salvador was poised for a transition to democracy. Yet, after longstanding dominance by a small oligarchy that continually used violence to repress popular resistance, El Salvador’s democracy has proven to be a fragile one, as social ills (poverty chief among them) have given rise to neighborhoods where gang activity now thrives. Dr. Sonja Wolf's new book Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador examines the ways

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in which the ruling ARENA party used gang violence to solidify political power in the hands of the elite—culminating in draconian “iron fist” antigang policies that undermine human rights while ultimately doing little to address the roots of gang membership.

Dr. Sonja Wolf is a CONACYT research fellow with the Drug Policy Program at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas. We asked her to comment on the 25th anniversary of the Chapultepec Peace Accords.

The Enduring Appeal of Gang Suppression in El Salvador
by Sonja Wolf

On January 16, 2017, El Salvador will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the peace settlement that ended the country’s twelve-year civil war. This conflict pitched the guerrilla forces of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) against the government army, propped up by billions of dollars in US military aid. While for the average citizen it is bound to be a day like any other, the administration of President Salvador Sánchez Cerén will mark the occasion with concerts and other festive events.

It has also announced, however, that it has asked the United Nations, mediator of the earlier peace negotiations, to help produce a new “National Accord”. This agreement is meant to unite all sectors of society, often at odds with each other, in order to tackle major challenges. The invitation comes at a critical time and, compared to the usual official rhetoric that the country is forging ahead, is a recognition that local actors have proved unable to create much-needed political consensus and public policies.

The somber climate stands in stark contrast to the optimism of the early nineties, when Salvadorans were hopeful that greater freedom and prosperity were laying ahead. The war, which had originated because peaceful social and political change was impossible, had left some 75,000 people dead and the economy shattered. The peace agreements mandated a series of constitutional, institutional, political, and socioeconomic reforms. While most transformations advanced only half-heartedly, the last of these never took off to begin with.

The FMLN and the ruling government of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), a conservative party that defended the interests and privileges of the economic elite, embraced fundamentally different views and expectations of their country. Whereas the left felt that a democracy had never existed in El Salvador, and the peace accords were a means to build it, the right considered that the guerrilla had attacked an actually existing democracy and the task ahead was to restore the status quo.

With a powerful part of the population committed to ending the war, but not to pursuing the vision enshrined in the treaty, the country’s future was always going to be uncertain. The peace accords remain a watershed for El Salvador, but their reluctant implementation lies at the root of the problems that have beset it since. To be sure, it was no small feat to terminate the political violence, incorporate the FMLN into the political system, hold democratic elections, and restructure the security sector. But state institutions and the rule of law remain weak, corruption flourishes, poverty and inequality persist, and criminal violence has surged.