Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community - Hardcover

Perales, Monica

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807834114 ISBN 13: 9780807834114

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010

Synopsis

Company town. Blighted community. Beloved home. Nestled on the banks of the Rio Grande, at the heart of a railroad, mining, and smelting empire, Smeltertown--La Esmelda, as its residents called it--was home to generations of ethnic Mexicans who labored at the American Smelting and Refining Company in El Paso, Texas.

Using newspapers, personal archives, photographs, employee records, parish newsletters, and interviews with former residents, including her own relatives, Monica Perales unearths the history of this forgotten community. Spanning almost a century, Smeltertown traces the birth, growth, and ultimate demise of a working class community in the largest U.S. city on the Mexican border and places ethnic Mexicans at the center of transnational capitalism and the making of the urban West. Perales shows that Smeltertown was composed of multiple real and imagined social worlds created by the company, the church, the schools, and the residents themselves. Within these dynamic social worlds, residents forged permanence and meaning in the shadow of the smelter's giant smokestacks. Smeltertown provides insight into how people and places invent and reinvent themselves and illuminates a vibrant community grappling with its own sense of itself and its place in history and collective memory.

About this title

Book Description

"Monica Perales is a superb oral historian who carefully calibrates the memories of her narrators. Smeltertown will be a defining work for its engagement across the spectrum of twentieth-century U.S. history, speaking to debates in Chicano history, labor studies, and memory. This is a poignant, exhaustive, and insightful community study."--Vicki Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth Century America

From the Inside Flap

Nestled on the banks of the Rio Grande, at the heart of a railroad, mining, and smelting empire, Smeltertown was home to generations of ethnic Mexicans who labored at the American Smelting and Refining Company in El Paso, Texas. Using newspapers, personal archives, photographs, employee records, parish newsletters, and interviews with former residents, including her own relatives, Monica Perales unearths the history of this forgotten community. Smeltertown provides insight into how people and places invent and reinvent themselves and sheds light on a vibrant community grappling with its own sense of self and its place in history and collective memory.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0807834114
• ISBN 13: 9780807834114
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352