Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community

By Monica Perales

Company town. Blighted community. Beloved home. Nestled on the banks of the Rio Grande, at the heart of a railroad, mining, and smelting empire, Smeltertown--La Esmelda, as its residents called it--was home to generations of ethnic Mexicans who labored at the American Smelting and Refining Company in El Paso, Texas.

Using newspapers, personal archives, photographs, employee records, parish newsletters, and interviews with former residents, including her own relatives, Monica Perales unearths the history of this forgotten community. Spanning almost a century, Smeltertown traces the birth, growth, and ultimate demise of a working class community in the largest U.S. city on the Mexican border and places ethnic Mexicans at the center of transnational capitalism and the making of the urban West. Perales shows that Smeltertown was composed of multiple real and imagined social worlds created by the company, the church, the schools, and the residents themselves. Within these dynamic social worlds, residents forged permanence and meaning in the shadow of the smelter's giant smokestacks. Smeltertown provides insight into how people and places invent and reinvent themselves and illuminates a vibrant community grappling with its own sense of itself and its place in history and collective memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9780807899564

Monica Perales

Monica Perales is assistant professor of history at the University of Houston.

Book preview

Smeltertown

Published in Association with The William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, by The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill

Smeltertown

MAKING AND REMEMBERING A SOUTHWEST BORDER COMMUNITY

Monica Perales

© 2010 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

All rights reserved. Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker and set in Quadraat and Univers by Rebecca Evans. Manufactured in the United States of America. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Perales, Monica.

Smeltertown : making and remembering a Southwest border community / Monica Perales.

p. cm.

"Published in association with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies,

Southern Methodist University."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3411-4 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8078-7146-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Mexican Americans—Texas—Smeltertown—History. 2. Mexican Americans—Texas—

Smeltertown—Biography. 3. Mexican Americans—Texas—Smeltertown—Ethnic identity.

4. Working class—Texas—Smeltertown—History. 5. Smelting—Social aspects—Texas—

Smeltertown—History. 6. Community life—Texas—Smeltertown—History. 7. Collective

memory—Texas—Smeltertown. 8. Smeltertown (Tex.)—History. 9. Smeltertown (Tex.)—

Biography. 10. Company towns—Mexican-American Border Region—Case studies.

I. William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies. II. Title.

F394.S64P47 2010

976.4□96—dc22 2010004479

A portion of this work appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, as Fighting to Stay in Smeltertown: Lead Contamination and Environmental Justice in a Mexican American Community, Western Historical Quarterly 39 (Spring 2008): 41–63, copyright by the Western History Association, and is reprinted by permission.

La Vieja Esmelda (The Old Smeltertown) by María Mata Torres is reprinted by permission of Adolfo Mata Jr.

cloth 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

paper 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

Para la gente de La Esmelda,

Que sus historias no se olviden.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I. Making Places

1. Making a Border City

2. Creating Smeltertown

Part II. Making Identities

3. We're Just Smelter People

4. We Were One Hundred Percent Mexican

5. She Was Very American

Part III. Remembering Smeltertown

6. The Demise of Smeltertown

Epilogue Finding Smeltertown

Notes

Index

Illustrations, Maps, and Tables

Illustrations

Early view of the El Paso smelter and surrounding area

Home of ASARCO chief metallurgist J. J. Ormsbee

El Bajo, 1911

Santana family home, ca. 1930s

El Bajo, 1931

Paz Luján holding her nephew, ca. 1930s

Manuel Gonzales and Marciano González

Men outside the smelter gate

Mexican brick workers inside the smelter, ca. 1910s

Jesús Perales's identification card

Members of the smelter safety committee, 1954

Two strikers outside the smelter, July 14, 1949

Women workers at ASARCO, ca. 1940s

First Communion at the smelter parish

Unidentified patrolmen overlooking Smeltertown, 1920s

Five Mexican revolutionaries with bandoliers

Los Trovadores

Monsignor Lourdes Costa

Mexican girls with American flag

Luz Luján (Perales) and Carmen Martínez (Escandón), 1929

Young women on the porch of the Smelter Vocational School

Luz Luján (Perales) studio portrait

Smelter Vocational School alumnae and Mrs. Gryder, March 1943

View of Smeltertown and County Road in the 1950s

Texas Air Control Board meeting at Liberty Hall, May 15, 1970

Esmeltianos’ parting words, January 22, 1973

Maps

ASARCO and affiliate properties in the western United States and northern Mexico, 1904

El Paso neighborhoods

Smeltertown and surrounding area

Tables

1 Smeltertown Population Totals, 1900–1930

2 El Paso Population, by Race, 1930

3 Scale of Daily Wages for Selected Positions in the City of El Paso, 1911 and 1919

4 Ethnic Distribution of 10 Percent Sample of New Employees at ASARCO, by Decade, 1910–1950

Acknowledgments

This book has been a true labor of love, and its completion is a bittersweet end to a wonderful journey begun many years ago. Along the way, I have been fortunate to have had the encouragement, guidance, and support of many individuals who believed in Smeltertown's story and in my ability to tell it. In countless ways, they made this book possible.

I am deeply grateful to the many former Esmeltianos and their families who opened their homes to me, who shared their time, memories, mementos, and photographs. In those conversations and exchanges about La Esmelda, I learned not only of the beauty and challenges of living in the shadow of the smelter, but also important lessons about resilience and the enduring power of community. Writing the history of Smeltertown from the point of view of Esmeltianos was a responsibility I took seriously. I am humbled that they entrusted me with their stories and hope that they find something of the place they loved in the pages that follow.

I have benefited from the guidance of many amazing teachers and scholars who have helped me to grow as a historian. The seeds of this project were planted at the University of Texas at El Paso. Ron Weber taught me that history is the stories people tell to give themselves an identity, a definition that has remained with me to this day. Cheryl Martin, Sherry Smith, and Yolanda Chávez Leyva were enthusiastic supporters. Ernesto Chávez has been a generous mentor and friend, and I am truly grateful for his insight, keen observations, and always spot-on advice. At Stanford, Albert Camarillo and Richard White nurtured my intellectual development through their tough and thoughtful criticism, and have continued to provide wise counsel and direction.

The ideas in this book matured during my year as a Summerlee Fellow in Texas History at the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. The opportunity to devote a full year to writing in a collegial setting transformed this project in significant ways. I am thankful to David Weber, Sherry Smith, Andrea Boardman, and Ruth Ann Elmore for making my time in Dallas possible and productive. Ana Alonso, Susan Johnson, and all the participants of my manuscript workshop challenged me to conceive of this project in broader terms. Chris Wilson, Cynthia Radding, Debbie Kang, Andrew Needham, John Chávez, Benjamin Johnson, and Michelle Nickerson have left a positive imprint on this book and made that year in North Texas a real joy.

When I arrived at the University of Houston (UH), I found a supportive community of colleagues and friends who shared their time and immense knowledge. The entire faculty of the Department of History encouraged my project. I owe special thanks to Joe Pratt, Marty Melosi, John Hart, Nancy Beck Young, Landon Storrs, Cathy Patterson, Sarah Fishman, Kathy Brosnan, and Susan Kellogg for reading drafts, for offering help with the writing and publishing process, and for their encouraging words. Kairn Klieman has been a trusted friend, and our walks at Memorial Park fed my mind and spirit. Raúl Ramos took the time to teach me how to navigate the world of academe. Raúl, Eduardo Contreras, and Todd Romero provided insight, smart advice, and good doses of humor. Their friendship and camaraderie made all the difference. Beyond the department, Christina Sisk and Guillermo de Los Reyes gave constructive criticism on early drafts. Michael Olivas offered much wisdom and perspective.

I have been extremely fortunate for timely and generous financial support at various phases. The Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, the Ford Foundation/National Academies, the Mellon Foundation, and the Stanford Humanities Center all provided early assistance. The completion of this project was facilitated through grants from the Grant to Enhance and Advance Research and the New Faculty Research programs at the University of Houston. An award from the UH Small Grants Program assisted with its publication. Tatcho Mindiola and the Center for Mexican American Studies at UH provided intellectual and financial support in the form of a Visiting Scholar Research Program fellowship and travel grants to present my work at various academic conferences. A junior faculty semester leave from the History Department gave me much appreciated time in the critical final stages.

My research was made possible—and more enjoyable—through the help of archivists, librarians, and many other knowledgeable individuals. I am indebted to Claudia Rivers and the excellent staff at the C. L. Sonnichson Special Collections Department at the University of Texas at El Paso. Patricia Worthington, Barbara Rees, Lynn Russell, and Carolyn Drapes of the El Paso County Historical Society offered enthusiastic support and assistance with locating photographs and other resources and hidden gems. El Paso historian Fred Morales kindly shared his knowledge of Smeltertown and early El Paso history, and Jesus Reynoso at the El Paso City/County Environmental District helped me navigate the archives. I am especially grateful to Larry Castor and Lairy Johnson, formerly of Asarco's El Paso plant, for granting me access to employee records and photographs, and to Ray Muñoz and the other members of the Asarco Security Department who were extremely accommodating during my research visits. Teresa Montoya was incredibly generous with her time and indispensable as a liaison with the company in the final stages of this book. Marta Estrada at the Border Heritage Center at the El Paso Public Library offered much kind assistance. Simón Elizondo Weffer, Lorena G. López, and Marilyn Espitia helped me make sense of quantitative employee and census data. Juan Galván and Jeff Womack were able and thorough research assistants. Chuck Grench, Katy O'Brien, Ron Maner, and the staff at the University of North Carolina Press shepherded the project through the publication process; I am immensely grateful for their patience and the great care they took in seeing this through to completion. Stevie Champion helped me clarify and smooth out my prose. Vicki L. Ruiz's and Stephen J. Pitti's careful reading of the manuscript improved it in immeasurable ways.

If it is true that a friend is your needs answered, then I consider myself especially blessed to have a wonderful group of colleagues and friends who have sustained me throughout this project. Magdalena Barrera, Marisela Chávez, Marilyn Espitia, Gina Marie Pitti, Gabriela González, Mary Ann Villarreal, Elizabeth Escobedo, Shana Bernstein, Judith Segura, and Christian Clarke Cásarez have been with me nearly every step of the way. Whether reading drafts, offering supportive words, or simply providing a much-needed shoulder to lean on, their friendship has enriched my work and life in profound ways. Luis Alvarez, José Alamillo, Gabriela Arredondo, Matt Bokovoy, Antonia Castañeda, Matt García, Steve Mintz, Natalia Molina, and María Montoya exemplified the true meaning of collegiality, taking the time to help this fledgling scholar find her way. Words cannot convey my gratitude to Vicki L. Ruiz. Though busy enough with her many students and countless responsibilities, she warmly welcomed me into the fold, and has been a staunch advocate and trusted mentor. Her commitment to the field and her generosity never cease to inspire.

Most of all, my deepest gratitude and appreciation go to my family. My parents, Manuel and Carmen Perales, nurtured my love of learning from an early age. They taught me about strength and the importance of remaining true to myself—lessons that have carried me through the ups and downs of this project. They have kept me grounded, while encouraging me to reach for the stars, the greatest gift any child can receive. My sister Cristina Perales accompanied me in the back seat of that Gran Torino station wagon, and together we watched for the red and white smokestacks to appear in the distance. She has lifted my spirits more times than I can count. Her willingness and ability to hunt down obscure references in microfilm (for free, no less!) helped me to cross the finish line and earn her an honorary degree as far as I am concerned. I do not know if my grandparents, Luz and Lorenzo Perales and María Isabel and Manuel Gonzales, ever imagined that their life stories would find their way into a history book. Writing this book afforded me the precious opportunity to know them in a new light, which has been one of the greatest blessings of all.

In the summer of 2004, Matt Perkins came into my world. My life is all the richer because he is in it. For his patience, faith, and love, I will be forever grateful.

Smeltertown

Introduction

On the evening of March 27, 1972, the parish hall of San José de Cristo Rey Catholic Church in Smeltertown was packed with angry neighbors looking for answers. Just two years before, the city of El Paso and the state of Texas had filed suit against the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) for violating the 1967 Air Safety Code, based on complaints over the air pollution caused by ASARCO'S giant smokestacks. As city and county health officials investigated the case, they made an even more alarming discovery. More than one hundred children in the predominantly Mexican, working-class community had abnormal, and potentially life-threatening, levels of lead in their bloodstreams.¹ The public meeting that night was one of many that had taken place in Smeltertown since the lead contamination story had erupted. However, it was not lead, Smeltertown's children, or public health that had residents so fired up that spring evening. What had incited such emotion were rumors that the city had targeted Smeltertown for demolition and that it would be condemned for habitation in thirty days. Before long, the meeting attended by Mayor Bert Williams and members of the El Paso Housing Authority turned into what the El Paso Times termed a stand off confrontation between city officials and residents over the fate of Smeltertown. One attendee called Williams a liar when he claimed that the city had spearheaded earlier improvements in their neighborhood. Others booed and jeered the mayor and El Paso Housing Authority director Woodrow Bean as they described federally subsidized low-income housing in other parts of the city that would be made available to Smeltertown residents.² Tempers flared among residents who resented what they saw as a politically motivated relocation project, not a response to a public health crisis. In their minds, city and health officials were not there to help their community. They were there to destroy it.

At first glance, the responses of Smeltertown residents at that community meeting seem completely out of step with what one might expect in light of such an environmental disaster. To be sure, the residents cared about the health of their children, but the events of that night revealed that there was something just as important as the physical well-being of their families at stake in the debate over Smeltertown. Their vocal reactions against relocation powerfully illuminate the centrality of place in working people's lived experiences, its role in shaping a sense of self and one's relationship to a wider world, and the important ways in which individuals created meaningful lives and claimed a sense of dignity in what appeared to be the most unpromising of settings. For residents, Smeltertown—La Esmelda as they called it—was home. It was a place they created through generations of labor at the smelter and over almost a century of shared, intimate contacts with one another. Despite the contamination and pollution, the years of corporate intrusion into many aspects of their lives, the grueling labor, and myriad other hardships, residents held a deep attachment to Smeltertown. It defined their place in the city's past, drove their desire to save their homes, and profoundly affected how they viewed themselves and their legacy for the future. The struggle over Smeltertown lays bare the intricate web of relationships, shared traditions, cultural practices, and memories that formed the basis of a working community, and the remarkable ways that people derived meaning from and forged a deep connection to this place on the banks of the Rio Grande.

Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community traces the formation, evolution, demise, and collective memory of one of the largest single-industry Mexican American communities on the U.S.-Mexican border from the closing decades of the nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century. Formed at the base of the American Smelting and Refining Company, Smeltertown served as home to thousands of Mexican-origin ASARCO employees and their families. Smeltertown was generally divided into two major areas. Upper Smeltertown, or El Alto, sat on company property on the bluff overlooking the Rio Grande and was itself divided into racially segregated sections. Anglo managers and their families lived in what was called Smelter Terrace, while ethnic Mexican workers and their families resided in company-owned tenements in a separate section they called El Alto. Lower Smeltertown, or El Bajo, was the predominantly ethnic Mexican area nestled between County Road and the Rio Grande. It comprised a number of smaller barrios, including La Calavera, or Skull Canyon, the only neighborhood that remains today. As El Paso grew, Smeltertown's boundaries also expanded, and by the 1930s and 1940s this nearly self-contained community boasted several other industries, a Mexican-owned commercial district, and a population of several thousand.

In a region shaped by industrial capitalism, transborder commerce, and international migration, Esmeltianos forged a sense of community through a variety of daily practices, social interactions, and familial and kinship relationships, creating a social and cultural geography rooted in their lived experience. Although the company exerted a powerful control over their lives, and they encountered countless hardships, the residents made Smeltertown to suit their immediate needs. They molded and transformed institutions such as work, the church, schools, and Mexican-owned businesses and shops into spaces within which they articulated a sense of community and identity over the course of nearly a century. Following the lead contamination controversy in the early 1970s, city and company officials dismantled Smeltertown, relocating many of its remaining inhabitants to low-income housing projects around the city of El Paso, bringing about the neighborhood's demise. Yet Smeltertown still exists in the memories of the people who once called La Esmelda their home. The creation of community, and later the rearticulation of community through collective memory, served as a mechanism by which working people found agency within their limited range of choices and allowed them to rewrite their presence onto a landscape from which they had been erased.

The central premise of this book is that Smeltertown was not a singular, unified place defined solely by the physical proximity of its residents and the geographic boundaries established by ASARCO. Rather, Smeltertown was composed of a number of real and imagined social worlds—conflicting, overlapping, and contradictory—that were continually created by the company, the church, the schools, and the residents themselves, for multiple purposes, both in the past and in the present. Historians, anthropologists, geographers, and social theorists have critically examined the ways in which people interact with their lived physical environments and the ways that places are created and hold specific cultural, political, and social meanings for the people who inhabit them. As these studies have shown, places do not just exist—they are a spatial reality constructed by people and the meanings of places shift and change over time.³ As environmental psychologist and anthropologist Setha M. Low explains in her study of public plazas in Costa Rica, places are spatial representations of… society and social hierarchy, and thus are venues within which people debate, contest, and negotiate the power of the state in their lives.⁴ A similar kind of spatial geography emerged in Smeltertown. In its early years, ASARCO maintained a small, racially segregated company town on plant property, complete with company store, hospital, and other amenities that established its position as the community's patron and served to cultivate a loyal workforce. Residents navigated through the world the company made, but they also purposefully engaged in creating their own Mexican world beyond the bounds of company property, building a vibrant community culture rooted in the places they inhabited on a daily basis. Although a sense of collectivity and shared experiences among Esmeltianos helped to define Smeltertown, intra- and intergroup conflict along lines of race, gender, labor, region, and religion shaped the boundaries of these multilayered social worlds as well. This multiplicity of interactions facilitated a sense of community defined not solely in terms of geographic locality, but through social memory and experience created within those locations.⁵ In this way, residents built a richly textured world through daily interactions and relationships they made both with the company and with one another, deeply grounded in the places they created in the shadows of the smelter's smokestacks.

The community culture forged by Esmeltianos served as a mechanism for survival, allowing them to mitigate the power of the company that touched every aspect of their lives. The smelter literally loomed over Smeltertown's residents. Traditional modes of resistance including labor and community organizing allowed Esmeltianos to demand benefits and services from the company and the city, and figure prominently in the story of Smeltertown. But more often, residents found daily means of making life livable and, through their community rituals and institutions, retained a sense of control over their lives in a setting where the company ultimately held the upper hand. In the words of literary theorist Ross Chambers, Esmeltianos found room to maneuver through the system of power and limitations they encountered, negotiating, challenging, and sometimes accommodating the overarching influence of the company in their lives.⁶ At times openly confrontational, at others quietly subversive, Smeltertown's residents vigorously resisted efforts to treat them as a subordinate class, and they used community institutions like the church, schools, organizations, and businesses to contest, or at least lessen, the power of the company over their lives. In these subtle and unexpected ways, they maintained their way of life for almost one hundred years, finding hope, dignity, and beauty in a setting colored by the smelter's black slag and acid fumes.

Although this book focuses on how residents ordered their immediate social worlds, Esmeltianos were an integral part of a city and region also in the process of defining itself. Smeltertown grew in the border city of El Paso, Texas, the historic crossroads of two nations, at a time when city leaders and boosters, railroad financiers, mining and smelting entrepreneurs (most notably the members of the Guggenheim-controlled American Smelting and Refining Company) sought to place the border city on the map. The arrival of the railroad in the 1880s and the subsequent development of industry and manufacturing catapulted the little village on the U.S.-Mexican border onto the national and international scene. Before long, the intricate web of rail lines and corporate investments by companies like ASARCO and Phelps Dodge connected El Paso to every major market in North America, making it a participant of the corporate frontier and an active partner in the modern capitalist transformation of the American West.⁷ By the start of the twentieth century, ASARCO, through its various operations, ruled uncontested over the mining industry, operating one of the largest mining and smelting conglomerates in the nation, representing a complex of transportation, resource development, and processing enterprises that had no equal.⁸ At the center of these massive modern networks, El Paso quickly outgrew its identity as the rough-and-tumble frontier town its local historians are often fond of cultivating in collective memory.⁹ Indeed, it was the veritable nexus of a modern railroad and mining empire.

The transformation of the region not only occurred on an east-west axis but also spanned the continent north to south; as such, Smeltertown's history is deeply transnational. Capital did not see international boundaries. The immense investment of American businesses in the post–Civil War period, particularly during the reign of Mexican president/dictator Porfirio Díaz (1876–80, 1884–1910), intimately linked northern Mexico with the U.S. Southwest. American capital helped to build Mexico's transportation infrastructure and contributed to the transfiguration of its economy, which all but ensured the continuous flow of capital, in the form of ore and Mexican laboring hands, ever northward.¹⁰ Through cooperation, collusion, and coercion, American industrialists and their powerful allies in Washington, D.C., assured U.S. economic expansion and domination in Mexico. By the time Smeltertown appeared on the scene, the United States had established the framework of what historian Gilbert González calls a culture of empire that effectively rendered Mexico an economic outpost of American capitalist interests.¹¹ Powerful transnational operations like ASARCO benefited handsomely; by the close of the century, American-owned companies controlled more than 80 percent of mining capital in Mexico and owned more than half of the nation's thirtyone largest operations.¹² The rapid growth of the southwestern economy, its deep ties with Mexico, and the economic and social unrest that erupted into revolution in 1910 combined to make El Paso the largest port of entry on the southern border. During this period of civil war, thousands of Mexicans poured through El Paso's inspection checkpoint each month. Smeltertown emerged at this pivotal moment, at the dawn of an industrial boom and on the eve of one of the largest human migrations of the century. The global impact of industrial capitalism and migration affected local communities, and immigration policy and repatriation, revolution and world wars, assimilation and urban reform, economic prosperity and recession played central roles in the daily lives of Esmeltianos. A critical examination of Smeltertown thus reveals how globalization, free trade, transnational capitalism, and transborder flows of people and products—issues we associate with the late twentieth century—have profound roots in the history of the region.

Smeltertown's location on the border provides the opportunity to examine the development of a vibrant and permanent Mexican American community in a place marked by the constant flow of people and capital through the border city. Smeltertown experienced similar patterns of social, economic, and political disenfranchisement—as well as resilience and persistence—found in barrios across the country.¹³ However, border cities like El Paso were not just places Mexicans passed through on their way to become Mexican American in Los Angeles, Chicago, or any number of other American cities. Building on Mario T. García's influential study of Mexicans in El Paso, this story of Smeltertown reclaims the border as a dynamic and historically contingent site where questions of citizenship, legitimacy, and nation are negotiated in people's everyday lives.¹⁴ Indeed, for people on the U.S.-Mexican border, these issues manifested themselves in ways that were grounded in a border setting, where two sovereign nations, with their long and complicated histories, met in a messy and sometimes hostile manner. The border matters precisely because it is the site where cultural and national citizenship is determined immediately upon crossing; as sociologist Pablo Vila contends, it is a place where what is Mexican, foreign, and racially other is constantly redefined by what lies just across the easily traversed river.¹⁵ As inhabitants of a border community, Esmeltianos fashioned a sense of community and sense of self along multiple axes in light of changing immigration law, labor relations, economic shifts, and major political events. Daily encounters with what was on the other side forced them to make choices about who they were (and were not) vis-à-vis the racial backdrop of the workplace, their community, and the border city as a whole. At times, conflict, more than collaboration, determined how Mexicans in El Paso viewed their relationship to the border, and in times of economic and political strife, the Rio Grande proved to be an impassable gulf between them and the mexicanos on the other side. The case of Smeltertown thus not only reveals how people created stasis in a place of constant movement, but also how lived experience determined how border dwellers viewed themselves in racial, cultural, and national terms.

Furthermore, the story of Smeltertown is fundamentally one steeped in memory, shrouded in a foggy mix of nostalgia, myth, and misperception. Writing the history of Smeltertown has been immensely complicated by its erasure from the physical landscape and, to a great degree, from the dominant story of El Paso's past. Where a bustling and dynamic community once stood is today a large empty lot covered in overgrown desert brush. Historical studies of the city are similarly silent when it comes to the existence of Mexican Smeltertown.¹⁶ Years after its physical demise, however, residents and nonresidents alike continue to remember and re-create Smeltertown. Former Esmeltianos gather for annual reunions each summer and pass down their stories of the lives and relationships they built in La Esmelda. At least one former resident has created an online community of former Esmeltianos and their descendants in an effort to archive stories and photographs, making a virtual Smeltertown across time and space. In the same ways that their forbearers made Smeltertown in a particular time and place to meet the needs of their daily lives, Esmeltianos today craft their own versions of Smeltertown in memory, often devoid of labor conflict, transience, or the painful experiences of racial discrimination. These stories serve as a way to assert their place in the past, their sense of community in the absence of a physical Smeltertown, and a legacy for their descendants. This book contends that these memories are more than simple nostalgia and longing for a bygone time and place. Through their stories and positive memories of place, Esmeltianos write themselves onto a landscape that today betrays Smeltertown's existence and its historical significance to the economic, cultural, and social fabric of the region. They inject themselves into the history of the U.S. Southwest, not as supporting characters, but as central actors in the shaping of a major border metroplex.

My search for Smeltertown has deep roots in these stories. For as long as I can remember, Smeltertown has figured prominently in my memory, even though it is a place that I never saw with my own eyes. When I was growing up, my family and I routinely made the seemingly interminable drive along Interstate 10 from our home in Phoenix, Arizona, to El Paso, to visit grandparents and extended family for the holidays or summer vacations. Camped out in the backseat of a white Gran Torino station wagon, along with my sister and sometimes the family dog, we spent hours waiting to get to Nana and Grandpa's house. The desert scenery did not change much, making the ride all the more unbearable. We knew we were almost there, though, when the giant red and white ASARCO smokestack appeared on the horizon. Its twinkling red lights flickering on the dusky sky were a welcome sight for the weary child traveler. It was only then, when I could see that smokestack, that I knew we were almost there. That smokestack was a welcome beacon guiding us in our white Gran Torino home.

Home was the little barrio called Buena Vista, just a mile or so up the road from what had been Smeltertown. The majority of the people in Buena Vista were connected through family or friendship, but also through their ties to Smeltertown. My father's father, Lorenzo, was born in El Paso in 1909. Lorenzo's Mexican-born father, a boilermaker by training, found employment at ASARCO as early as 1901. My paternal grandmother, Luz, had migrated to Smeltertown as a child in 1917. Her father, José Luján Meléndez, had worked for an ASARCO-owned enterprise in Parral, Chihuahua, and moved his family north to escape the violence and uncertainty wrought by the Mexican Revolution. After they married in 1934, Luz and Lorenzo Perales, both graduates of the company-sponsored Smelter Vocational School, set out to start their life together and were among the first to purchase a home in Buena Vista. Their two-room house on Vista Hill Drive was a huge step up from the ASARCO-owned housing in which they had spent their childhoods, but they were never far removed from Smeltertown. They remained involved in the activities of the Vocational School and its community programs, as well as the San José de Cristo Rey Catholic parish. Their children attended E. B. Jones Elementary School, and Luz was active in the PTA. Though they had moved from the old neighborhood, La Esmelda was still a regular part of their lives.

My mother's family was also from Smeltertown. Her father, Manuel Gonzales, was born on M Street, in the heart of Smeltertown, at the base of the hill that led to the front gates of the smelter. When he began working at ASARCO shortly before World War II, he was among the third generation in his family to do so. María Isabel, my grandmother, was from La Calavera, the tiny subsection of Smeltertown tucked into an arroyo near the smelter. After Manuel and María Isabel married in 1944, they lived in La Calavera and later moved into a little house off the main County Road, directly under the railroad trestles that brought ores from across the Southwest to be processed at the smelter. Over time, with better pay resulting from successful strikes waged by the union, they eventually settled into their own home on Vista Hill Drive. Like my father's family, the Gonzaleses retained ties to Smeltertown. Extended family members remained in the homes in which they had been born and reared. And, of course, there was the work. Grandpa worked at ASARCO for forty-one years, until he retired in the 1980s. Throughout that time, Smeltertown continued to be a regular part of his daily life. Whether he was clocking in at the smelter, participating in the union's strikes, or watching a softball game at the company-sponsored field, ASARCO and Smeltertown were a part of his routine. When he died in December 2006, the pension he received for his many years of labor transferred to my grandmother, continuing the link between the company and our family.

I myself never lived in Smeltertown. I never saw the homes or the businesses and stores, the puente culumpio (swing bridge) that spanned the Rio Grande, E. B. Jones School, the local YMCA, or San José Church. By the time we made those regular treks to El Paso, what had been Smeltertown was nothing more than a deserted patch of land on the river's edge. Even still, Smeltertown existed. It existed at the annual church kermés (bazaar), held in conjunction with the Smeltertown reunion each summer, when people connected by generations of family and kinship traded funny stories about growing up in La Esmelda—recalling old nicknames and reminiscing about schoolyard antics and old sweethearts. It existed in my Grandma Luz's photo albums and shoe boxes filled with cracked and fading sepia-toned photographs. The names and dates, in her careful script, anchored the subjects in time and space; the ever-present smokestacks anchored them to Smeltertown. Smeltertown was also present in the sad news of someone who had died—"You remember them, eran de la Esmelda… they were from Smeltertown." My family's memories became my memories—by and large, happy ones of a bygone time and place. These memories and the stories of Smeltertown served as my family's touchstone, the point of origin to which we could trace our bloodlines in the United States, a reference that defined who we were and from where we came. My whole life, Smeltertown had been a part of me and a part of my family's past, as well as the pasts of many Esmeltianos.

This study thus emerges from the intersection of the memories of the place I knew but never saw and the history of a place and region. Using the historian's tools and methods, I scoured census data, newspapers, employee records, court papers and proceedings, and other archival collections to bring Smeltertown back onto the landscape from which it had disappeared more than thirty years ago. Oral history became invaluable in attempting to reconstruct a historical narrative of Mexican Smeltertown from the pieces of memories and fragments of history that remain. Many came from the University of Texas at El Paso's Oral History Collection, but others I gathered through the intricate web of family and kinship that still connects the dispersed community. My Smeltertown lineage proved a considerable help in this endeavor. Interviews often began at family gatherings, or with people suggesting I talk to their grandparents or family friends. "Diles quien eres" (that is, tell them you are from a Smeltertown family). People shared not only their stories, but also photographs and other mementos, and interviews lasted for hours. When I was allowed access to ASARCO employee records, I am certain it had as much to do with my lineage as it did with my credentials and timing. Within clearly established limitations regarding the privacy of employee personal data, I was permitted to search through dusty file box after dusty file box of employee records noted on old yellowed cards, some dating back to the late nineteenth century. Then–plant manager Larry Castor and the rest of the personnel at ASARCO were immensely gracious and welcoming, genuinely interested in helping me to present a more richly textured picture of the company and its relationship to Smeltertown.

Where the archives are silent, memories speak volumes of this community on the banks of the river. Admittedly, these memories are problematic; filtered, altered, and selective, they more often tell us about the present needs of the people who relate them than they tell us about the past. The facts of history do not always align with the stories we tell. In interviews, with few exceptions, former residents described Smeltertown in positive terms. People recalled the good old days, when folks could leave their doors unlocked without fear, when everybody knew everybody, when you could always count on your neighbor for a cup of frijoles. These fond memories consistently forced themselves to the foreground, as they glossed over the painful or troubling things that people would rather not remember. History is the enemy of memory, cautions Richard White, because it challenges what we think we know about the past and intrudes in rude ways on our positive memories of place. But, he concedes, there are regions of the past that only memory knows.¹⁷ For a place like Smeltertown, long disappeared from the landscape and historical record, these words ring especially true. This does not mean that Smeltertown's history is unrecoverable, however. When only fragmentary evidence and memories remain, historians must take a different path through the inconsistencies, contradictions, and unknown. As David Blight explains, "As historians, we are bound by our craft and by our humanity to study the problem of memory and thereby help make a future. We should respect the poets and priests; we should study the defining myths at play in any memory controversy. But then, standing at the confluence of the two streams of history and memory, we should write the history of memory, observing and explaining the turbulence we find."¹⁸

This