Smeltertown
Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community
Monica Perales
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 09/2010
Pages: 352
Subject: Political Science, History, Social Science
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9780807899564
DESCRIPTION
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.