Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border by Monica Perales

By Monica Perales

Corporation city. Blighted neighborhood. cherished domestic. Nestled at the banks of the Rio Grande, on the middle of a railroad, mining, and smelting empire, Smeltertown--La Esmelda, as its citizens referred to as it--was domestic to generations of ethnic Mexicans who worked on the American Smelting and Refining corporation in El Paso, Texas. utilizing newspapers, own data, pictures, worker files, parish newsletters, and interviews with former citizens, together with her personal relations, Monica Perales finds the historical past of this forgotten neighborhood. Spanning nearly a century, Smeltertown strains the beginning, development, and supreme death of a operating classification neighborhood within the biggest U.S. urban at the Mexican border and areas ethnic Mexicans on the heart of transnational capitalism and the making of the city West. Perales exhibits that Smeltertown used to be composed of a number of actual and imagined social worlds created through the corporate, the church, the colleges, and the citizens themselves. inside of those dynamic social worlds, citizens solid permanence and that means within the shadow of the smelter's mammoth smokestacks. Smeltertown presents perception into how humans and areas invent and reinvent themselves and illuminates a colourful neighborhood grappling with its personal feel of itself and its position in heritage and collective reminiscence.

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By Monica Perales

Corporation city. Blighted neighborhood. cherished domestic. Nestled at the banks of the Rio Grande, on the middle of a railroad, mining, and smelting empire, Smeltertown--La Esmelda, as its citizens referred to as it--was domestic to generations of ethnic Mexicans who worked on the American Smelting and Refining corporation in El Paso, Texas. utilizing newspapers, own data, pictures, worker files, parish newsletters, and interviews with former citizens, together with her personal relations, Monica Perales finds the historical past of this forgotten neighborhood. Spanning nearly a century, Smeltertown strains the beginning, development, and supreme death of a operating classification neighborhood within the biggest U.S. urban at the Mexican border and areas ethnic Mexicans on the heart of transnational capitalism and the making of the city West. Perales exhibits that Smeltertown used to be composed of a number of actual and imagined social worlds created through the corporate, the church, the colleges, and the citizens themselves. inside of those dynamic social worlds, citizens solid permanence and that means within the shadow of the smelter's mammoth smokestacks. Smeltertown presents perception into how humans and areas invent and reinvent themselves and illuminates a colourful neighborhood grappling with its personal feel of itself and its position in heritage and collective reminiscence.

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During the California Gold Rush, El Paso provided migrant miners a place to stock up on provisions on their way to the gold fields. In 1854, federal troops at the newly established Fort Bliss offered protection for residents from Apache raids and ensured continued and safe commercial activities. By the end of the Civil War, this historic travel pass had regular mail and stage service for multiple carriers en route from Santa Fe, San Antonio, Saint Louis, and San Francisco, and had emerged as a market for cattle from both Mexico and the United States.

During the California Gold Rush, El Paso provided migrant miners a place to stock up on provisions on their way to the gold fields. In 1854, federal troops at the newly established Fort Bliss offered protection for residents from Apache raids and ensured continued and safe commercial activities. By the end of the Civil War, this historic travel pass had regular mail and stage service for multiple carriers en route from Santa Fe, San Antonio, Saint Louis, and San Francisco, and had emerged as a market for cattle from both Mexico and the United States.

4 With lines that connected east and west as well as north and south, El Paso became the nerve center of the flow of capital — in the form of money, resources, and labor — throughout the region. The city’s political and economic elite, recognizing the benefits of making El Paso into an industrial and commercial city, energetically worked to cultivate its image as a center for industry and tourism. They took full advantage of the perfect storm of conditions that existed in the border city: a convenient and strategic location as the geographic passageway to the north; a long-standing history of travel, trade, and commerce on the Spanish, Mexican, and, eventually, American frontier; thirty years of Porfirian-era policies courting American investment in Mexico; and most important, the proximity of Mexico, with its vast mineral resources and its seemingly limitless supply of cheap labor a short distance from the center of town.

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