The Chinese Exclusion Act led to El Paso being an area for Chinese people to travel to the U.S. through Mexico because the act no longer allowed Chinese immigration to the U.S. This had to be done secretly so that adds on to the erasure of Chinese presence in border areas. Chinese history and presence and influence in El Paso is not widely known or researched. Romo also writes of the Mexican Revolution as leading the Chinese to be in an area that was between two powers that did not legitimize their existence such that led to a shrinking of the Chinese population in the border areas by the early 20th century. There was a Chinatown in El Paso that Romo said was mostly gone or taken elsewhere by the 1920s. Romo also documents African American soldiers as being called upon to join the Texas Rangers against Mexican rebellions or against Pancho Villa’s attacks. Large instances of cultural schizophrenia are documented as different groups fighting against others or being on the side of the oppressor to aid in the oppression of others.
I got to the section on the Bath Riots while I was waiting for the bus and with every paragraph was silently yelling more and more. Which I guess is a metaphor for how that event has been passed down through the years. “Carmelita Torres and the ‘ignorant class of Mexicans’ didn’t need a doctorate in sociology to understand that the gasoline baths were more than just baths” (Romo 243). The Bath Riots is such an amazing and empowering piece of mujerstoria that I am really pissed off about not knowing until now. And I’m also pissed that no one has reblogged the post I made about her and this erased history with an excerpt from Romo’s book on my other blog. She took a stand along with the eventual one thousand people who joined her against what she knew was wrong and a humiliation that she did not have to accept as normal and deserving of her. She knew the sterilization was harmful before it was acknowledged as such as well as potent for uses in Nazi Germany. And her story was erased, unable to fuel the desire to revolt for other people in the future. Which is exactly the point of letting this piece of history be forgotten, to uphold the power structures that are in place, both de facto and de jure.
I had to stop and look at the photo on page 206 that reads “If We Must CLEAN UP Why Not Let the GOLD DUST TWINS do the work” for a moment. It appeared in the “El Paso Herald” in 1914. The photo is of two Black children wearing tutus and what looks like a ranger’s hat cleaning Central America which is black and changes to white at the U.S.-Mexico border. The two representations of people of color are “cleaning up” or whitening up Central America and Mexico starting with Panama so that it may match the cleanly whiteness of the U.S. They are called the Gold Dust Twins which connects them to the Gold Rush in California half a century earlier which was a factor leading to Anglos populating the South West. So after some Anglos got wealth off of the land, this advertisement shows the words “gold dust” across the tutus of the Black children maybe representing the capital that Anglos could make/did make off of Black people and after the Anglos got what they could from exploiting people of color they could then use them towards assimilation of people into white Anglo American culture to quell any rebellions.
The two photos on page 217 show El Paso Street in 1882 and then on 1885 with the buildings made out of adobe destroyed to make buildings made out of brick as a result of the construction of railroads and ensuing Anglo arrivals in the area. I was reminded of what we talked about in class of how Anglos created immigration laws to make sure that Mexicans and “foreigners” could not do to them what they had done to Mexicans and the native people of that land. I linked that to the construction of railroads in the 19th century and the construction of public transit today. I can’t remember if we talked about this in class but I thought about how people in affluent communities today use the argument that having public transit run through their area will bring in the “wrong sort of people” if the public transit is linked to poorer communities. And the construction of the railroads in the 19th century definitely did bring in the wrong sort of people. “In 1876, the Anglo population of El Paso was less than 100. By 1884, four new railroad lines connecting the city to the rest of the United States brought a huge influx of whites” (Romo 215). And I feel broken? disgusted? violent? that this influx changed the architecture of El Paso from adobe which as we learned in They Called Them Greasers were seen by whites as really crappy “mud huts” but which was a very resilient mixture for homes and buildings with so many years of history, to bricks.
I guess it is sort of difficult now to be surprised by the new instances of racism and injustice that I learn of in history? I expect them and when I learn of them I add them to my reasons to be angry and to legitimize my anger. But I was most surprised about the Bath Riots I suppose. Maybe not surprised but I was very hopeful that when I searched for information online that I might find photos of the day but could not find any.
No comments:
Post a Comment