JE #4

In “A Racial Geography of El Paso,” David Dorado Romo illuminates the great complexity of El Paso’s racial climate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one which involved much more than tensions between Anglos, Mexicans, and Mexican-Americans. The Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, Romo explains, incited “illegal” Chinese immigration into El Paso via “Manzanillo, Ensenada, or Mazatlán” (pp. 198). I learned for the first time in this chapter that some Chinese laborers migrating to the U.S. by way of Mexico would disguise themselves as Mexican in order to gain access into El Paso. What a prime example of cultural schizophrenia. It could be argued that the Chinese Exclusion Act encouraged and institutionalized racism and discrimination against Chinese immigrants living in El Paso. Romo sites an El Paso Times editorial that disparages “The Chinese” for having “no conception outside of profit…” and because “…their only desire is to make, create, or spend” (pp. 199). Is this not the aim of capitalism? The American Dream? But within the culturally schizophrenic environment in El Paso, Chinese laborers and business owners were not welcome to take part in the “American” way of life.

Romo also discusses aspects of the African American and Japanese experiences in El Paso during this period; he then moves into the Mexican/Anglo relations in the years leading up to the Mexican Revolution, and the blanqueamiento that began with the “first en masse encounter between Anglos and native inhabitants of El Paso” in 1846 and gained momentum with the completion of railroads. Among many other factors, Romo sites the “U.S. soldiers stationed at Fort Bliss” during the Mexican Revolution as the “group with greatly exacerbated racial tension between Anglos and Mexicans in El Paso” (pp. 218). Further, the economic “boom” brought on by the Revolution attracted new groups of Anglos from other parts of the South who “brought their racist cultural baggage with them” (pp. 218). 

While I found much of the information in “A Racial Geography” to be shocking, the information Romo presents in “The Bath Riots” was utterly appalling. It was hard for me to read these details. El Paso Mayor Tom Lea’s “disinfection campaign” and the abuses and violence that it involved were deeply disturbing. Romo explains the way in which the El Paso jail fire and the Bath Riots contributed to climate of racism and cultural schizophrenia in El Paso: “The upheavals in Mexico greatly altered the demographics of El Paso. Everything was much more tense. Almost every day there was some kind of scuffle between Anglos and Mexicans” (pp. 229).

The “Disinfection Plant Boiler Room, 1917” photograph on page 240 is for me one of the most haunting. Tom Lea’s neurosis about “dirty lousy destitute Mexicans” (pp. 233) carrying disease into the U.S. and his disinfection strategy to prevent his fears from becoming reality received praise from Adolf Hitler. In the photo, the incandescence within the furnace; the empty coat hanging on the wall that once kept a body warm; the man stirring the coals wearing thick rubber gloves, a side glance, and a smirk; and the glowing white light at the top center of the image and beaming in through the door at the rear of the room eerily seem to suggest that the route for exiting this chamber is by way of light -- heat -- death. It is a wonder that incidents like the jail fire did not occur with more frequency, considering the span of time that this program was active.

Romo describes the circumstances of the photo on pages 210-11: “Photographer Otis Aultman placed a large cone hat and sat this Mexican American boy from South El Paso on a burro to make this shot more marketable to his American audience. Kansas Street, ca. 1915” (pp. 211). The Mexican American boy on the burro sits in the center of the image, while other young boys in the background stare at him with various looks of what seem to be amusement, confusion, and disgust. This image would probably fit right into one of Nericio’s galleries: this boy as a construction of a fetishized “Mexican” identity, ready to be consumed by Anglo eyes.