Smeltertown

Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community

Monica Perales

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780807899564
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

PART I Making Places

1 Making a Border City

It remains for the citizens of El Paso to encourage and foster the mining and smelting industries that have sought this city as their natural center and base of operations, for it is a patent fact that it depends more upon these two industries for its future progress and the extension of its limits than upon all other interests combined.

—CHARLES LONGUEMARE, El Paso Times, December 1888

The story of Smeltertown is a story about the U.S.-Mexican border, but it does not begin on the banks of the Rio Grande. It begins deep in the ground, in the mineral-rich mines of Santa Rita, New Mexico, the Santa Barbara and Ahumada mines of Chihuahua, and the numerous independently operated mining properties throughout the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico. It was there that thousands of tons of copper and lead-silver concentrates began their journey to El Paso on the intricately interlaced tracks that wove their way to this West Texas town. Small rail lines connected the mines to the major railways—the Mexican National Railroad, the Santa Fe, and the Southern Pacific—and all converged in El Paso and the unloading yards of the El Paso Smelting Works. Capable of handling 350,000 tons of lead charge and 500,000 tons of copper charge annually by 1914, the smelter had made El Paso the premier center for copper and lead processing in the region, virtually unparalleled in its importance. Unloaded by an army of Mexican contract workers, the ores began their odyssey from railroad cars and gondolas into the mouth of the massive plant. After hand sampling, the lead ores went through a complicated process of crushing and roasting before being blasted in one of the plant's eight lead furnaces and then poured into small pots. Skimmed of its impurities, the molten end product was cast into bars. Copper extracted from the lead ores, as well as copper concentrates, followed a separate path, each load making its way through one of the smelter's eight Wedge roasters, three reverberatories, and three converters. Forgoing mechanized cranes, the company employed a crew of Mexican workers to load locomotives to haul copper slag, matte, and bullion out of the converters. Giant ladles poured the molten copper into cast-iron cylinder molds. With the excursion through the smelter complete, another team of Mexican workers loaded the lead bars and copper anodes back onto railroad cars headed for their final destinations: the ASARCO-owned Perth Amboy, New Jersey, refinery for the lead and the Baltimore refinery for copper, where they would be processed into finished products. The migration process resumed, this time moving east and north on the same tracks out from El Paso.¹

Ore was not the only product that made the journey to El Paso on the rails in those days. With revolution brewing south of the border, the grandparents of Manuela Vásquez Domínguez began to look at the tracks as a possible way to escape economic hardship and secure their personal safety. Sabino Vásquez's family, like countless other Mexican families across the countryside, had been deeply affected by the devastating poverty that wracked the country. The economic policies enacted by Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz simultaneously encouraged the corporatization and proliferation of mines and smelters owned and operated by American-based companies like ASARCO and discouraged small-scale farming, leaving many families in dire straits. With few options available, Manuela's grandparents and several of their children began their own journey that would lead them north. Initially, they migrated from hacienda to hacienda as a means of scraping together enough resources to support their growing family. The oldest daughter had already made the trip to El Paso, settling in the bustling district of Smeltertown, where her husband worked at the Southwestern Portland Cement Company. Opened in 1907, the cement plant was booming in the early decades of the twentieth century; as the only cement plant in the area, it provided building materials for the growing city as well as the entire region.² Producing as many as 1,500 barrels of cement per day required hundreds of laborers; add those jobs to the ones at the smelter, the nearby limestone quarry, and brick plant, and economic stability seemed all but assured in El Paso. Personal issues factored in too. Vásquez's daughter urged her parents to join her there so they might be reunited. “She would say, ‘Come, so that we might die together,’ ” Domínguez explained. One day they finally decided to make the trip north. Vásquez helped his family board the flatbed railroad car pulling out of the station at San Luis Potosí, but the train began to move before he could get on. Determined, he followed the tracks on foot, eventually catching up with his family. And thus they slowly embarked on their trek toward El Paso. The rail lines, built largely by American investors to extract mineral wealth from Mexico, became the channels by which its other valuable resource—laboring hands—also moved up the line.³

These migration stories powerfully illustrate how the global forces of capitalist development and human migration, facilitated by the expansion of the railroad, became deeply intertwined in the late nineteenth century, and how the destinies of a region, city, and individuals converged in the border city of El Paso. This chapter illustrates how copper and capital transformed El Paso into an international center for railroad, mining, and smelting activities by the turn of the twentieth century. For centuries, El Paso had served as a center of trade and transportation, first for the native populations that inhabited the region and later as a point on the heavily traveled Camino Real. In the years following the Civil War, the United States engaged in an aggressive campaign to extend its dominance to the territories of the Southwest and Mexico. As American financiers and industrialists established the broad architecture of an economic imperial project in Mexico and Latin America more generally, El Paso emerged as a critical player in these efforts.⁴ With lines that connected east and west as well as north and south, El Paso became the nerve center of the flow of capital—in the form of money, resources, and labor—throughout the region. The city's political and economic elite, recognizing the benefits of making El Paso into an industrial and commercial city, energetically worked to cultivate its image as a center for industry and tourism. They took full advantage of the perfect storm of conditions that existed in the border city: a convenient and strategic location as the geographic passageway to the north; a long-standing history of travel, trade, and commerce on the Spanish, Mexican, and, eventually, American frontier; thirty years of Porfirian-era policies courting American investment in Mexico; and most important, the proximity of Mexico, with its vast mineral resources and its seemingly limitless supply of cheap labor a short distance from the center of town. Seizing on its advantageous position on the eve of one of the largest waves of migration from Mexico, city leaders, boosters, and business giants placed El Paso squarely on the national and international map. In terms of financial power and significance, the El Paso they made remained one of the most prominent industrial southwestern cities for more than half a century.

Once the economic infrastructure had been laid, El Paso's business and political leaders also determined the roles that people would play within it. At the same time that they encouraged economic development in the making of their modern city, they also had to confront the realities of being a border city. Although the abundance of Mexican labor and the accessibility to Mexican resources and markets were clear advantages to the city's growth strategy, it did not necessarily mean that El Paso was, or should ever be, a Mexican city. Anglo leaders remained ambivalent about Mexicans’ place in their city. On the one hand, some praised the cultural diversity and expressed a desire to maintain certain customs that spoke to the region's rich history. But more often, Mexican residents found themselves on the literal and figurative wrong side of the very tracks that had brought many of them to El Paso. While the line between Anglos and wealthy Mexican exiles was less absolute, for the vast majority of working-class Mexicans, daily life was marked by residential, economic, and social segregation.

This chapter also traces how El Paso's political and business powerbrokers not only shaped the political economy of the city, but sought to establish a social and racial hierarchy within its boundaries as well. Despite El Paso's origins and long-standing connections to Mexico, from the 1880s to the 1920s its leaders crafted their idea of a modern American border city: the gateway to old Mexico yet markedly different from anything in its sister republic. In El Paso, Mexicans fit into a distinctly subordinate social position, its boundaries reinforced by daily practice and law. In the end, this context would determine how residents of Smeltertown came to see themselves: essential to the city's growing economy and to one of the most important companies in town, but occupying the lower rungs of the social pecking order. Over the course of nearly a century, Esmeltianos struggled to define their place in the border city whose economic, social, and racial contours were coming into clear relief at the dawn of the new century.

From Supply Outpost to Railroad Hub and Manufacturing Center

Historically, El Paso had always served as an important transportation and commercial center—a place of movement and migrations of people and products. The region that would become modern-day El Paso and Ciudad Juárez sat at the natural conduit between two rugged mountain ranges that cut across a vast swath of desert landscape. The area was home to diverse native populations who began to blaze the trails later generations would use for trade, exchanging surplus crops with communities as far away as Casas Grandes, Chihuahua.⁵ Following the conquest of the Mexican interior, Spanish explorers and missionaries set about to claim their vast empire. Through a combination of violence produced through military force, missionary efforts, and cultural adaptation and coercion, Spain secured its foothold in the Southwest.⁶

The first Spanish expedition made its way to Paso del Norte (Pass of the North) in 1581, but it was not until 1598 that Juan de Oñate claimed the territory for Spain near present-day San Elizario, Texas. A few days later, Oñate's party crossed the Rio Grande to the west of what would become downtown El Paso, near the spot where ASARCO and Smeltertown would be built some three hundred years later. Over the next several months the Oñate party made its way farther north, absorbing Pueblo communities as far as Santa Fe and Albuquerque and founding the first Spanish settlements in the territory. With the northern provinces thus under Spanish rule, Paso del Norte became the official gateway to New Mexico.⁷ Pushed back to the Rio Grande following the bloody Pueblo Revolt in 1680, the Spanish relocated a temporary capital near the Mission Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Mansos del Paso del Norte (established in 1659). By the close of the century, Spain's military presence in the El Paso area ensured safe passage for merchants and travelers on the Camino Real between Chihuahua and Santa Fe, and maintained control at missions and presidios along the Rio Grande including Paso del Norte, which would become present-day Ciudad Juárez.

The region expanded significantly by the time of Mexican independence in 1820, and trade and commerce were still among the most important functions at the pass. Of the several settlements along the river, Paso del Norte stood out not only in size (with a population of eight thousand, it was more populous than neighboring communities including San Elizario, Socorro, and Ysleta combined), but also as the seat of political and economic power in the region.⁸ During the Mexican period, Paso del Norte was the site of a customhouse, and it remained a key resting spot and supply station for weary travelers along the vast desert route. Once the gateway to the northern provinces of New Spain, Paso del Norte now represented the entryway to grand possibilities and increased profits for American merchants looking southward in the 1820s. Tapping into the historic Chihuahua and Santa Fe trade seemed a lucrative opportunity. According to contemporary accounts, between 1734 and 1843 an estimated $90,000 worth of products passed through Paso del Norte annually.⁹ Numerous Americans made their fortunes in the Chihuahua trade—among them, James W. Magoffin and Hugh Stephenson, who would later be among El Paso's Anglo founding fathers; Magoffin, a Kentucky native and former U.S. consul in Saltillo, became very active in assorted business ventures in Chihuahua. Like their contemporaries engaged in the Santa Fe–Missouri trade, these entrepreneurs found themselves negotiating business in a Spanish Mexican world, bound by Spanish Mexican customs and laws. Magoffin married a Mexican woman, managed to establish a successful copper mining interest in Chihuahua, secured Mexican citizenship, and garnered enough economic, political, and social clout to become known as “Don Santiago.”¹⁰

The period of accommodation to Spanish Mexican society proved relatively short lived, as American business interests and immigrants from the United States continued to push their way into the region. Over time, Mexican officials grew uneasy with the presence of Americans like Don Santiago and of their suspected illegal dealings with neighboring Apaches; for their part, Americans yearned for a greater piece of the trade. The second conquest of the region, this time by American military and economic interests, produced equally disruptive results. The War of Texas Secession (1836) and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) that ended the War with Mexico and ceded nearly half of Mexican territory to the United States, engendered profound social, political, and economic changes that shaped the position of the Mexican-origin population of Texas, casting a long shadow on Anglo-Mexican relations for generations.¹¹ In 1846, American troops captured and occupied Paso del Norte, praising the region's potential for agricultural development; more important, however, was its strategic location and history as a transportation route. As the area around modern-day El Paso became incorporated into the United States, the region continued to function as a critical commercial and transportation hub. During the California Gold Rush, El Paso provided migrant miners a place to stock up on provisions on their way to the gold fields. In 1854, federal troops at the newly established Fort Bliss offered protection for residents from Apache raids and ensured continued and safe commercial activities. By the end of the Civil War, this historic travel pass had regular mail and stage service for multiple carriers en route from Santa Fe, San Antonio, Saint Louis, and San Francisco, and had emerged as a market for cattle from both Mexico and the United States. Although the majority of the area's residents continued to live on the southern side of the Rio Grande in Paso del Norte, by the time El Paso became an incorporated city in 1873, its population had grown to approximately eight hundred, mostly men involved in “merchandising, freighting, mining, or the law.”¹²

The power of U.S. business interests to shape the future of the border city was embedded in the very roots of the town. Not only did American merchants capitalize on the historic Spanish trade lines, but also the territorial core of El Paso consisted of several major settlements on the northern bank of the river belonging to succes...