Crossed Over by the Border:
The Unspoken History of El Paso’s
Multiethnic, Multicultural, and Multiracial Groups
Anita August
The city, however, does not tell its past,
but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets,
the gratings of the winds, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
--Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Like Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities who linguistically struggles to describe the unique characteristics of the cities he has traveled, I too, feel “arrested” in trying to convey the many textures, myths, and the vast desert landscape of El Paso, Texas. For me, the expansive desert terrain of El Paso which is home to a variety of flowers that require little water but thrive in the oppressive desert heat, such as Chocolate Daisy, White Evening Primrose, and Cardinal Red Justicia symbolically represents the diverse, and “invisible” multiethnic, multicultural, and multiracial groups that live here, but historically have been silenced in the archives, memory, monuments, and history of this “border” city.
According to David Dorado Romo in “Ringside Seat to a Revolution” even before the Mexican Revolution, El Paso was a city of diverse multiethnic, multicultural, and multiracial images, which created thought-provoking moments when some of these groups migrated to “unwelcome” parts of the city saying, “El Paso’s racial terrain was also a kind of battleground” (197). And yet, Romo argues, these interstices between the “Others” and El Paso’s largely Mexican American population created meaningful insights regarding the “image” of the “Other” and how they structured knowledge about the unfamiliar ethnic, cultural, and racial groups that were descending increasingly upon El Paso. Also, according to Romo, the Mexican Revolution exacerbated racial tensions that were strained before the war; however, when the revolution reached its peak, so did racial conflict.
Before the Mexican Revolution the Americans of African descent in El Paso regarded Pancho Villa very highly and provided some assistance for him, it was rumored, with arms smuggling (Romo 206). But that friendly alliance would soon change and create tensions that perhaps still exist today between African Americans and Mexican Americans, when the United States government used African American soldiers to fight against Villa and his revolution on at least two separate occasions—one in 1916 and the other in 1919, argues Romo when “Villa attacked Juarez for the third time” (206). However, after the Battle of Carrizal, on June 21, 1916, when the 10th Calvary comprised of African American soldiers and Mexican troops clashed, the good will between African Americans and Mexican Americans declined rapidly, and so has their rhetoric towards one another, especially when valued government resources are scarce. According to Romo, the tensions between the two groups, which is girded in racists rhetoric and ideology, has been nourished by the U.S. military. “[T]he American military policy of pitting Blacks against Mexicans on the border drove a wedge between two ethnic groups who might have otherwise collaborated against Anglo hegemony” (208).
View the following websites for more on the charismatic Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution:
View the following websites for more on African Americans and their role in the Mexican Revolution:
Unspoken: Ideology and Identification in the “Other”
In “Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence,” Cheryl Glenn reminds us that “All silence has a meaning” (11). However, for the African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Chinese Americans whose familial roots are firm and run deep in El Paso’s history, one may ask, considering their erasure from the rhetoric of this border city, what is the “significance” or “relevance” of their silence? What is “unspoken” in the silences of these multiethnic, multicultural, and multiracial groups? And further, is it forced or self imposed? Additionally, does their silence create an illusion of harmony? Or, is their silence an act of rebellion? In “La Respuesta” the feminist and subversive nun, Sor Juana suggests an intersection between the personal and the political in silence which houses “identification” and “ideology.” She writes, [O]f those things that cannot be spoken, so that it may be known that silence is kept not for lack of things to say, but because the many things there are to say cannot be contained in mere words” (43).
The Chinese community in El Paso, more than any other ethnic group walked the thin rhetorical line in silence between the personal and political. When the government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 making it illegal to traffic Chinese immigrants for labor, according to Romo, “Anti-Chinese sentiment cropped up almost as fast as Chinatown itself” (199).
View the following websites for more information on the Chinese in El Paso and their role in the Mexican Revolution:
Rhetorical Distance
In “Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students” Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee situates and describes the “rhetorical distance” experience by different subjectivities in relation to spatial and social distance. For Crowley and Hawhee, stylistic choices or “voice” may appear to play a tacit role in the relations between the speaker and audience, but realistically since the rhetors aim is to persuade, according to Crowley and Hawhee, “Voices affect the rhetorical distance” (182). Further, Crowley and Hawhee provide a deeper and richer scholarly context for Romo’s interracial relations position.
For, those who are not culturally, ethnically, or racially representative of the dominant group in a city, searching for a productive “discourse space” to close the rhetorical distance can either reinforce and intensify racial, ethnic, and/or cultural stereotypes or, it can open an “unmarked” rhetorical space for meaningful dialogue without regard to those identity borders that elevate differences. However, in the end, an individual’s representation is crucial and they are largely engaged by their “voice” which for people in very distinct racial, ethnic, and cultural categories can have significant social, economic, and political consequences.
Crowley and Hawhee write,
[R] hetors can narrow or widen the rhetorical distance between themselves and their audiences by means of stylistic choices. When creating a voice, rhetors should consider the situation for which they are composing: how much distance is appropriate given their relationship to an audience; how much distance is appropriate given their relationship to the issue. As a general rule, persuasion occurs more easily when audiences can identify with rhetors. Identification increases as distance decreases. (182)
An African American El Pasoan with Mexican Americans in a leisure moment (Romo 203).
The Question of Identity and its Relation to Language
In “The Ethics of Identity,” Anthony Appiah analyzes incisively the question of identity and how cultural nationalism problematizes political views in a democratic political culture where justice equalizes conflicts that are situated in a us against them and me against you paradigm. While Appiah is not calling for complete abandonment of cultural and ethnic attachments, he argues, quite persuasively, that if an individual characterizes himself too rigidly under the rubric of his cultural identity—in political matters—this identification sutured with cultural customs and traditions can invoke tensions that can compromise “common citizenship” (271). For Appiah, however, behavior undergirds ethics, which undergirds identity, which informs the cultural and ethnic practices of the community. For the Black, Japanese, and Chinese-Americans in El Paso, in many instances, these groups did not erase their racial, ethnic, or cultural difference—in fact, they elevated them, which may have increased the inharmonious relations between them and the Mexican Americans. For Appiah, an individual’s cleavage to one’s cultural community also informs identity.
He writes,
Conduct is shaped by ethical concerns—by our membership in an ethical community, which is to say, by aspects of our collective identities—is part of what gives content to those ethical relations, that ethical community, that identity. Ethical obligations, that is, is internal to the identity. Who you are is constituted, in part, by what you care about; to cease to care about those things would be to cease to be the sort of person you are. (236)
This is an English language class of Chinese students in El Paso around 1905 (Romo, 198).
For the Japanese who migrated to El Paso, assimilation by choice appeared to be the answer to their lack of social cachet. In fact, their notion of a “collective community” was perhaps more embraced by them than the African Americans and Chinese Americans. However, by narrowing the rhetorical distance between them and the Mexican Americans should have, according to Crowley and Hawhee, given the Japanese more opportunities for meaningful discourse with their rivals. Further, Appiah proposes that any restrictions on the ethical conscience which create divisive us against them parameters will compromise tasks that benefit all saying,
Since an ethical community is constituted in part by special responsibilities that obtain among its members, if nobody felt such special responsibilities, there would be no such community, no such demands. In the realm of the ethical, you can only [his italics] get an “ought” from an “is. (236)
Ultimately, though, the Japanese who proposed a more community-oriented rather than an autonomous and culturally situated notion of self, did not serve neither their community, nor was it a protective barrier against the racism that their African American and Chinese American contemporaries endured. And although I agree with Appiah that without an ethical sense of identity which is foundationally and philosophically grounded in justice, there is no hope for crafting a communitarian sense of justice, which detaches one from the strictures of cultural customs and traditions, to the more all inclusive and embracing proposal of coalition building.
For ethnic, cultural, and racial groups whose heritage, customs, and traditions are perceived as marginal, their only recourse is to preserve what is fundamentally most important to them. According to Suzanne Romaine, and first and foremost it is their language, which signifies a “common root” among members of a particular group. If they do not defend or safeguard that fundamental feature along with their religion, the result, is what Romaine calls “language death” which signals not only an end to the unique linguistic characteristics of an ethnic group, but also to what constitutes “a community” for that group as well.
For bell hooks in “Language: Teaching New Worlds/New Words” clearly the safeguarding of language practices for people with a shared and common set of cultural and ethnic traits is sometimes sufficient enough to resist the hegemonic forces of the dominant group in power. “[I]n that recognition was the understanding that intimacy could be restored, that a culture of resistance could be formed that would make recovery from the trauma of enslavement possible” (169-70). hooks further proclaim that these rhetorical tropes serve as referents in generating an identity and ideology, as long as they (ethnic and racial groups) are perceived as “Other” by the larger society. “Possessing a shared language, black folks could find again a way to make a community, and a means to create the political solidarity necessary to resist” (172). For the Japanese Americans in El Paso this was a hard battle, for they relinquished, for a while their identity. However, in the end, they too, prospered economically in El Paso despite their cultural, racial, and ethnic differences with the Mexican Americans, and still thrive, as their African and Chinese American contemporaries.
View the following websites for more information on the Japanese in El Paso and their role in the Mexican Revolution:
Conclusion
In a perfect setting, communities should act, as far as its distribution of social justice without prejudice neutral. However, despite being targets because of a being a member of a particular racial and ethnic group, African, Japanese, and Chinese Americans thrived within their particular communities during a time of unspeakable exploitation and discrimination in El Paso and the larger American setting. The isolating and divisive “us” against “them” ideology which was and is corrosive, alienating and stifling, perpetuated a “social disorder” rather than “social order” in the political culture of El Paso and yet, still they managed, in small steps, to create “pockets” of communities which heralded their unique cultural traits, traditions, and customs. However, for all groups their “unspoken” histories still sit on the margins of El Paso’s history. For them, and the many other cultural, racial and ethnic groups whose voices and communities are left muted, I hope this paper is the start of a meaningful and vibrant discourse.
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