Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community (review)

Monica Perales’s Smeltertown is an in-depth look at the single largest ethnic Mexican working-class community on the border. From 1882 to 1973, Esmeltianos not only worked and produced copper, but wove a tightly knit Mexican American community in the midst of discrimination and a host of working and public health hazards. Rather than repeat familiar stories, Perales makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Chicana/o and labor history by focusing on the community that Mexican Americans produced in the midst of adversity. While not neglecting the real prejudice and dangers that workers faced, Perales’s book shows how Esmeltianos “built a richly textured world through the daily interactions and relationships they made with the company and with one another” (3). Utilizing a wealth of oral histories and records from her own family, Perales masterfully weaves an analytical narrative that transforms a community study into a wider consideration of border people in the transnational space of industrial capitalism.

Smeltertown was more than a company town on the edge of El Paso; it was a place whose ethnic Mexican residents, “found ways to construct culturally vibrant and personally meaningful worlds in spite of, and perhaps even because of the heavy hand,” of ASARCO (59). Ethnic Mexicans composed the majority of the plant’s workforce. They worked the fires, served as machinists, and occasionally became foremen. Outside the intense heat and din of the smelter was the community of Smeltertown. Women cooked, cleaned, and participated in the church while men worked and children played in the dusty unpaved streets. Perales vividly describes the daily life of the Esmeltianos. Her clear and concise prose transport readers to the heart of a world that Mexican immigrants and their children forged outside the fires of the smelter.

Perales is keen at gleaning complex insights from Esmeltianos actions. In examining the routine of Manuel González, a “smelter man” of few words, Perales turns to her recollections of her grandfather and on interviews with family members and those who knew him. Although González spoke little of his work as a machinist, Perales is able to discern the ways that he told his own story. González dressed neatly in the mornings before work and returned home in his “usual dapper way” (147) with his grimy work uniform tucked away. A strike at the plant, however, disrupted González’s routine, forcing him to take another job that did not give him the opportunity to change and clean up before returning home. Rather than coming home showered, González’s daughter saw her father come home sweaty and dirty for the first time. Perales uses this story of the care that González took in his self-image to illustrate how he and other residents shaped their own identities and recast themselves as “proud, permanent, smelter men” (147) rather than the subordinate victims of prejudice and greed.

Aside from being thoroughly researched, Perales’s book is excellently composed. Readers learning about life and labor in the plant turn the page to see sometimes jaw dropping two page photos of just that. The way that Perales brings readers face to face (sometimes literally) with the community she considers serves as a model for other historians on how to treat their subjects as the human beings they are. Smeltertown is more than a biography of a town. Perales’s study of Esmeltianos’ lives and the world they formed through their daily interactions and how they remembered it will be of use to labor, gender, environmental, and social historians. Her work also continues Chicana/o Studies’ excellent tradition of combining scholarship with community service.