¡Viva George!: Celebrating Washington's Birthday at the US–Mexico Border

Abstract

Performance scholar Elaine A. Peña examines the George Washington's Birthday Celebration (WBC) held each February in Laredo, Texas, her hometown and mine. WBC began in 1898 and consists of a parade, balls, costuming, visiting dignitaries, and carnivals, some featuring American colonial themes but also Native American, principally a Pocahontas figure. White, Mexican, and Native American are only three of the ethnicities at play in this celebration where a predominantly ethnic Mexican and poor border city invests considerable time, energy, and capital to celebrate the “founding father” of a predominantly white and eastern United States.The study is in two parts. The first is clearly historical, from 1898 to ca. 1925; the second extends into the present. With limited space and for this journal, I concentrate on part 1, where we see more clearly the inter-play of class-inflected ethnicities. In substance, if not perspective, Peña's historical account has been anticipated by Elliot Young's 1998 “Red Men, Princess Pocahontas, and George Washington: Harmonizing Race Relations in Laredo at the Turn of the Century” in Western Historical Quarterly, minimally adduced in this study. I will put these two treatments in conversation.Like Young, Peña discusses WBC's creation by the Improved Order of the Red Men (IORM), a national group promoting “Americanism” based on George Washington, albeit through the symbolism of the latter's affinity for Native Americans, the subject of Colin Calloway's absent 2018 The Indian World of George Washington. Peña does add some biographical detail such as one Charles Barnes, who organized chapters in various Texas cities. Laredo was a special case. He and other white Texans believed that, after 1848, the city had, for too long, fostered its “Mexicanness” in its celebrations such as Mexico's Independence Day. Barnes organized the WBC for Laredo's multi-ethnic ruling elites, an interesting mix of local ethnic Mexicans, immigrants from continental Europe but also the Middle East, and some native white Texans. IORM “played Indian” during the WBC in various performative ways. For Young, these elites symbolically inverted the festival primarily to distinguish themselves from Native American and African Americans. Along with these ethnicities, however, Young also noted as foils for Americanization “other Mexicans,” working-class and recent immigrants, of which there were many more than Native Americans and African Americans and therefore, in my view, the more likely targets of the WBC campaign (p. 57).Peña is not quite as interested in WBC's historical relation to ethnic/class tensions, with one exception. In 1925, one Señor Matias de Llano, identified only as a Mexican businessman, initiated an ethnically countervailing Noche Mexicana to be held within the WBC celebration, or what she calls “playing Mexican.” For the IORM, this unwelcome addition precipitated an internal struggle, although the de Llanistas prevailed over time. Sr. de Llano's ethnic motivations are unclear, but as a businessman, he also wanted to use the WBC to foster better overall relations with Mexico, especially after the Revolution.Sr. de Llano serves as a transition to part 2, where Peña focuses on WBC's role in cross-border relations with Mexico. She brings an admirable measure of ritual and performance theory to bear on what she calls “border enactments” and “scaffolding”—symbolic and practical actions—fostered by the WBC and oriented toward Mexico, especially events enacted at the International Bridge. In her view, these help to create a largely beneficial international solidarity, actions such as “paso libre,” largely unregulated crossing back and forth across the international bridge during these festivities. Such enactments, she thinks, “can resolve international and cross-border tensions as well as sustain communication in spite of a volatile political landscape and charged regional histories” (p. 11). Peña thus wishes to focus on “overlooked aspects of border social life,” while “pivoting away from” current discussions of border life that stress “pathos, poverty, and illegality” (p. 9). Therefore, she takes “a calculated risk,” which is “to side-step what seems incorrigibly wrong-headed” in WBC (p. 127).While not specified, what seems to be primarily sidestepped is WBC's relationship to the residue of its founding history. Not as evident in her present-day ethnographic account are the more expressive practices such as the elaborate colonial costuming and galas. These seem more oriented, not to Mexico, but to internal Laredo, perhaps a symbolic scaffolding of differentiation from Laredo's “other Mexicans.” Perhaps Peña could not access these elite enactments, as “the majority” of the locals “are unable to secure tickets,” including to the Noche Mexicana, now a “gala” ironically sponsored by LULAC (p. 3). WBC began in 1898 in response to the presence and agency of those “other Mexicans.” Today, their contemporary counterparts participate in WBC largely as passive spectators of elite behavior and a public parade. However, they can attend a recently added “Jalapeño Festival” with a jalapeño eating contest and working-class conjunto music. If not cake, then let them eat jalapeños.