JE#4

Reading and reflecting on David Romo's archival photos and insights on El Paso after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Bath Riots of 1917 reminded me of the contradictory nature of El Paso and Juárez then and today. After Chinese workers began to migrate illegally to El Paso after 1882, as Romo asserts "Anti-Chinese sentiment cropped up just as fast as Chinatown itself" (198), thus the identity crisis of a region that perceived itself as a slice of Americana, had to deal with the reality of a growing Chinese population, in addition to its Mexican-American population and their rebellion against racism, case in point the Bath Riots in 1917. One of the photos in Romo's text that struck me was that of a Chinese "English class" (on page 198) taken in 1905. To paraphrase Lubheid, the Chinese Exclusion Act marked the beginning of an institutionalized immigration rhetoric and policy that concerned itself with reuniting families and maintaining the nuclear family model while maintaining a deep resentment for Chinese immigrants. In short, immigration's tight-grip on who could immigrate kept single women from arriving to El Paso in large quantities. The photo of this English class in a visual representation of these policies, where there is a clear majority of men, except for a young girl and her father in the front row. Part of El Paso's cultural schizophrenia was also its deep anti-Chinese sentiment and northern Mexico's treatment of peti bourgeois Chinese. As Romo explain, "by the 1920s, El Paso's Chinatown had either vanished or gone underground" (200). I expected the Anglo attitudes toward the Chinese, but I was not prepared to read about Mexican revolutionaries during the Porfiriato raiding and killing innocent Chinese in Torreón for example. It was definitely an eye-opening reading that kept both El Paso and northern Mexico's cultural schizophrenia in perspective. 

The second photo that struck me is that of Mexican men waiting to be doused in chemicals in a quarantine plant before they cross the border in 1917 (on page 234). This photo depicts the inhumane treatment many Mexicans experienced at the hands of the public health and border officials, who along with then El Paso mayor Tom Leary felt that Mexicans carried disease with them. This blatantly racist and inhumane practice of sanitizing reflects the deep seated anxiety Anglo El Paso felt at the prospect of Mexican immigrants. Just as the Chinese resorted to underground tunnels in resistance to the constant harassment by Anglo police, Mexican migrants led by Carmelita Torres refused to be subject to humiliation and ill treatment when the Bath Riots ensued in 1917. These photos are not just telling of these two populations but also act as a form of resistance, proving that El Paso was then, in many ways a region on constant contradictions.