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.