Smeltertown: Making and Remembering A Southwest Border community (review)

Halfway through her study of Smeltertown—the ethnic Mexican community linked to the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) plant in El Paso, Texas—Monica Perales displays the moving prose and critical humanism that are consistent features of her book. Culling family memory, she reconstructs the life story of her grandfather, a man who spent four decades as a smelter worker, placing it alongside those of other men who spent their entire adult lives in the same work environment. After establishing the dynamic ways, laborers used their work positions to subvert dominant discourses casting them as "racially inferior, transient, unskilled, and exploitable" and, in so doing, collectively resuscitating their masculinity, she provides a poignant interpretation of her grandfather's voice. Personally recalling him as "a man of few stories," she recounts how at the end of each workday he would "shower away the oil and grime that came from a hard day's work, put on a fresh set of clothes, and bring home his dirty uniform to be washed." In the context she frames for us, these routine actions are powerfully symbolic of smelter workers "craft[ing] a new narrative of their experience." "As I considered these memories in greater depth," she writes, "I realized that Manuel Gonzales had been telling us his story all along" (146-47).

Smeltertown is an exhaustively researched and engaging history of the generations of ethnic Mexicans who lived and died in the community they called "La Esmelda." In a narrative spanning more than a century, Monica Perales meticulously reconstructs the social and working lives that are the foundation of a vibrant community of people struggling to carve out lives of dignity in a context inordinately shaped by one company. Consciously framing the story to "illuminate the centrality of place in working people's lived experiences" (2), Perales seamlessly weaves extensive archival data such as newspapers, industrial records, personal records, and court proceedings together with extensive oral histories—both those she accessed in local archives as well as those she recorded in her own sustained interview project. The end result is a deeply personal (her family's history in the town spans the entire narrative) and yet highly scholarly narrative that comes alive with the voices of the workers and their families.

In Perales' capable hands, Smeltertown becomes a multifaceted historical inquiry, at once the story of a community and its people but also of the rise of a transnational industry along the border; the structured labor and residential systems accompanying industrial production; the roles of work and the workplace in shaping personal and collective identities; the complex social histories of acculturation and cultural resilience marking life within institutions like the church and schools; and the rich contradictions of late twentieth-century industrial decline, when the forces of environmentalism found themselves competing with the quest for self-determination and preservation. These stories emerge in chapters that not only cover the century-long rise and decline of the industry and town but also give structured focus to life and identity both inside and outside of the plant.

This is well illustrated in the chapter "She Was Very American," where Perales explores the experiences of young women in the schools, including the Smelter Vocation School. Deftly integrating her subject's memories, Perales allows the young women to emerge as dynamic social subjects, deliberately confronting a context of deficiency to "create a women-centered world where they could engage in American pastimes and enjoy their freedom beyond their parents' control" (221). In an environment marked with the cultural assumptions of early century Progressivism, Perales demonstrates the hybrid ways young women experienced "cultural coalescence" as well as how they actively shaped their own sense of what it meant to be American.

Ultimately, Smeltertown is a nuanced history of memory and the precious ways it constitutes the collective groupings of which we are a part. This is vibrantly clear after the physical decline...