Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community

Company town. Blighted community. Beloved home. Nestled on the banks of the Rio Grande, at the heart of a railroad, mining, and smelting empire, Smeltertown-La Esmelda, as its residents called it-was home to generations of ethnic Mexicans who labored at the American Smelting and Refining Company in El Paso, Texas.

Using newspapers, personal archives, photographs, employee records, parish newsletters, and interviews with former residents, including her own relatives, Monica Perales unearths me history of this forgotten community. Spanning almost a century, Smeltertown traces the birth, growth, and ultimate demise of a working-class community in the largest U.S. city on the Mexican border and places ethnic Mexicans at the center of transnational capitalism and the making of the urban West. Perales shows that Smeltertown was composed of multiple real and imagined social worlds created by the company, the church, the schools, and the residents themselves. Within these dynamic social worlds, residents forged permanence and meaning in the shadow of the smelter's giant smokestacks. Smeltertown provides insight into how people and places invent and reinvent themselves and illuminates a vibrant community grappling with its sense of itself and its place in history and collective memory.

Nestled on the banks of the Rio Grande, at the heart of a railroad, mining, and smelting empire, Smeltertown was home to generations of ethnic Mexicans who labored at the American Smelting and Refining Company in El Paso, Texas. Using newspapers, personal archives, photographs, employee records, parish newsletters, and interviews with former residents, including her own relatives, Monica Perales unearths the history of this forgotten community. Smeltertown provides insight into how people and places invent and reinvent themselves and sheds light on a vibrant community grappling with its own sense of self and its place in history and collective memory.

Library Journal

Smeltertown, or La Esmelda, was a company town that developed around the American Smelting and Refining Company plant in El Paso, TX. Perales (history, Univ. of Houston) offers not simply a narrative history of this area, but also a look at how the community was created by Anglos and Hispanics, citizens and immigrants, rich and poor. The book explores the sometimes contradictory dichotomy between the history and the development of the community, in particular the paternal and often negative treatment of the Mexican labor pool, and how the residents, Esmeltianos, created a sense of place and fashioned their identities as Mexicans and Americans. Personal stories and remembrances throughout the text help paint a picture that appears rosier, at least in the Esmeltianos' memory, than the history portrays. VERDICT Though the text is a bit repetitious, this well-researched and well-documented work would be a good addition for academic libraries, especially collections related to borderlands studies or labor issues.—Mike Miller, Austin P.L., TX

Monica Perales is assistant professor of history at the University of Houston.