JE #4: El Paso's Cultural Schizophrenia

After reading David Romo’s Ringside Seat to a Revolution one of the things that shocked me most about the historical reality of El Paso and Texas was the racial mixing that occurred during this time.  After being more familiar with Greasers, which mostly focuses on Mexican-Anglo relations, this reading put into perspective that the Chinese, African-Americans, Japanese, Mexicans and Anglos all constituted some part of Texas during this time.  However, it is clear that racial tensions existed among all racial groups, and not just people of color against Anglos but people of color against one another.  This latter aspect at first shocked me then when I reflect on it, I realize that many minorities still perpetuate the same distrust and prejudice against other people of color as a reflect of their petty tyrant borders, where any racial privilege or esteem, though it will never parallel that of whites, is enough of an impetus to form antagonistic views of one another.

It is clear that the Chinese exclusion act further marginalized the Chinese communities which inhabited Texas at the time.  When they were no longer valued as workers, they represented a racial alien which was resented and subjected to much of the same racial discrimination and wild prejudice Arnold de Leon demonstrated in Greasers.  This not only set up racial tensions between Anglos and the Chinese but also between Chinese and Mexicans who would eventually come to think of them in much of the same way as the Anglos after their relatively quick economic establishment in Mexico (Romo 200).  The bath riots also further demonstrate the extent of the racial ideological terrorism Anglos inflicted upon Mexicans by forcing them to sanitize themselves in gasoline, Zyklon B, vinegar, and other corrosive chemicals.  Collectively, would imagine these events which reflected white, racist ideologies and Anglo’s struggles for dominance incited racial tensions such as the bath riots and killings of Chinese, blacks, and Mexicans.

     1. One photo that communicates this sense of cultural schizophrenia is on page 238 and 239 where a long line of Mexican men look like they are being examined for potential diseases and contagious infections the Anglos disseminated within El Paso.  When I look at this photo, I think of the racist Anglo constructions of Mexicans as dirty and diseased and the disconnect between the humiliation and rage from Mexicans knowing the realities of their situation to be at odds with how whites understood them.  Moreover, it is the helplessness of the men within their situation that is also salient.  Before the U.S-Mexican war, this idea of needing to sanitize brown bodies would seem ludicrous, but such ideas had gained such traction in white imagination that these men were indeed treated like filthy rats.

     2.  The second photo that also communicates a sense of cultural schizophrenia is on page 204 where the author has captioned the photograph as “social fraternization and friendship between blacks and Mexicans was not uncommon in ciudad Juarez during the turn of the century” (Romo 204).  This photograph is interesting as it reflects the racial diversity at the border between Mexico and the U.S. and yet Romo also speaks about the solidarity and antagonism between Mexicans and Blacks during this time.  Being a bi-racial child of black and Mexican parents, it is interesting looking at this picture and realizing that an actual history between these two groups existed.  But the mobilization of blacks against Mexicans at the border in military disputes and the black individuals who were “sympathetic to the revolutionary cause” (Romo 205) paints a complex pictures of the border in the 20^th century.