¡Viva George! Celebrating Washington's Birthday at the US–Mexico Border by Elaine A. Peña

Abstract

Reviewed by: ¡Viva George! Celebrating Washington's Birthday at the US–Mexico Border by Elaine A. Peña Elliott Young ¡Viva George! Celebrating Washington's Birthday at the US–Mexico Border. By Elaine A. Peña. ( Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020. Pp. 199. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Elaine Peña's ¡Viva George! is a much-needed academic analysis of the history and meaning of the binational celebration of George Washington's birthday sponsored by Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, the most significant fete of the first U.S. president's birthday. Peña employs a performance studies lens, using the frameworks of border enactments and border scaffolding to examine the celebration. In addition to using archival research to examine the origins of the event and its ensuing development, Peña conducted ethnographic work on both sides of the border with a variety of celebration actors, including politicians, participants, and observers. The birthday celebration began in 1898 as an effort to Americanize the "dos Laredos" area, which was and still is inhabited overwhelmingly by people of Mexican descent. Peña notes that Mexican American elite (the so-called gente decente) participated in the early years of the celebration and were not antagonistic to its Americanizing goals. The celebration was started by a local branch of a national fraternal organization, the International Order of Red Men, and Peña explains that "playing Indian" was central to the celebration. Elite Laredoans, dressed as Indians, enacted an attack on city hall, engaging in a ritual of inversion in which the actors playing Indians vanquished the building's Anglo and Mexican defenders. The book does not address the role of "playing Black," which was also central to the celebration in the early years, including minstrel performances and the song Dixie. The first two chapters focus on this ethnic cross-dressing, showing how the celebration offered Laredoans a chance to play Indian, colonial, and Mexican. A Mexican-inspired Noche Mexicana event began in 1925 to foster cross-border trade, shopping, and goodwill, but ambivalence about celebrating [End Page 116] Mexican heritage in the Washington celebration led to a behindthe-scenes backlash that suspended Noche Mexicana for another decade. In 1954, Hurricane Alice destroyed the international bridge that served as a vital link between the two cities. Rebuilding efforts led to a dispute when the Laredo construction group announced a new, higher bridge toll. The Nuevo Laredo group simply stopped construction, halting progress for several months. Peña shows how negotiations over the toll ultimately allowed Mexicans to cross into Texas during the Washington Birthday festivities without special visas. This so-called paso libre, beginning in 1957, was all the more surprising because it happened in the wake of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service's Operation Wetback (1954), in which more than a million undocumented Mexicans were rounded up and sent back to Mexico. The final chapter addresses the increasing securitization of the border following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and especially after drug cartel violence spiked in 2006. Even so, one of the birthday celebration's prime rituals of binational friendship, the abrazo (embrace) of figures representing George Washington and Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, along with children representing each country, continued throughout this period. By 2015, following the traditional embrace on the bridge, U.S. law enforcement formed a human chain to prevent Mexicans from slipping across the border. Peña ends by suggesting that Laredo never needed a literal border wall because the children's embrace "differentiates American and Mexican populations symbolically but effectively enough to avoid having to compromise trade and security relationships that actually produce quantifiable benefits" (128). Are the cross-border cooperation strategies inspired by Washington's birthday celebrations a solution to immigration restrictions or are they a sophisticated articulation of a longer history of exclusion on the border? This book provokes these and other important questions. Elliott Young Lewis & Clark College Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association