The Importance of Researching Uniqueness in Time and Place

Dr. Esmacher’s specialty as a historian of World War II helped give a background in what was happening nationally on the American home front, but we wanted to see the ways in which El Paso was – or was not – connected to national trends during the war, including racial tensions and violence like the race riots Dr. Esmacher studied for her doctoral dissertation.

Researching El Paso during World War II
One of the first tasks in doing historical research is to do a literature review – a survey of scholarship that has already been done on the topic you’re investigating.  We quickly discovered that there were only three “big picture” studies on the El Paso home front during World War II, all unpublished works by UTEP students: a dissertation by Winifred Dowling (2010) and master’s theses by Mabel Vaughan Keeney (1950) and Daniel Skertchly (2008).¹  The bulk of work that focused on El Paso during this time period was either on very specialized topics (like Braceros, food rationing, and Mexican-American military service) or this time period was part of a broader study on big topics like the militarization of the border or U.S.-Mexico relations.  We also searched for discussions of El Paso in more nationally focused work on World War II, an activity that often felt a bit like panning for gold. 

This literature review, which has been the big focus on a lot of work we’ve done since June 2019, has laid the groundwork for more in-depth primary source research.  Searching through newspaper archives and the collections at UTEP’s Institute of Oral History and the UTEP Library’s C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections gave us better understanding of the situation in El Paso during World War II and has given us leads for further research at the National Archives, which we are scheduled to do in early 2020.  Despite still being engaged in the research process at this time, we have been able to make a few observations about El Paso’s World War II-era history.

Unique Borderlands
One of the things that made El Paso unique during WWII was its racial makeup. In many ways, El Paso’s racial makeup was similar to that of many border cities, such as Los Angeles, California, in that they both had large Latinx populations which were confined to small areas and neighborhoods.  In contrast, El Paso certainly was not like many other Texan or southern areas, which typically had much smaller Latinx populations. During the Mexican Revolution, so many Mexicans fled to the El Paso that it became known as a “Mexican Ellis Island,”² and over time Latinxs became the majority of the population. By the 1940 census, El Paso’s Mexican population was somewhere around the 50% mark, with an Anglo minority.³  Even though Mexicans constituted such a large part of El Paso’s population, during WWII nearly all of them were found on one side of the future Interstate 10 and in one neighborhood called El Segundo Barrio. According to Camarillo, El Segundo Barrio was “arguably one of the poorest and most unhealthy neighborhoods in the nation.”⁴ This segregation ultimately made it so that Mexican El Pasoans had very little contact with Anglo El Pasoans. In one instance that occurred in 1949, a high school team from El Segundo Barrio were shocked when they traveled to other parts of Texas. El Paso had so effectively segregated them that they did not know about all the racism that went on when the two groups had close contact as they did in other parts of Texas.⁵

El Paso’s African American community also differed from the rest of the South and Texas in that it was very small, and most of them were soldiers. In the 1930 census, African Americans only made up 1.5% of El Paso’s population.⁶ But although their population was small, Anglos in El Paso responded to them with fear and suspicion, reflecting the prejudices of Anglos all over Texas and the southern states regarding African Americans. An El Paso Herald-Post article from June 2, 1943, titled “More Negroes Not Coming to Ft. Bliss,” illustrates this fear. The article tries to calm the worries of El Pasoans who were alarmed after hearing a rumor that 30,000 African American soldiers were going to come to Fort Bliss, as opposed to the less than 4,000 that were there at that time. Besides Anglos, Latinxs, and African Americans, other ethnic and racial groups in El Paso constituted very small communities during WWII.

Another characteristic that made El Paso unique was its close connection with Mexico and Ciudad Juárez. Generally, this was not a mutually beneficial relationship. Instead, the U.S. repeatedly benefited from cheap laborers from Mexico, and the Mexican government often became concerned about the terrible ways that its people were treated in these work environments.  One of the early signs of this pattern was when almost 1.5 million Mexicans tried to escape the hardships of the Mexican Revolution and get jobs in the United States.⁷ The United States started exploiting these Mexicans to get cheap labor, and soon Mexican laborers became a vital part of El Paso’s economy. The exploitation got so bad that Mexican newspapers recurrently warned immigrants that they would be exploited, and the Chamber of Commerce in Ciudad Juárez even tried to restrict the number of immigrants that were allowed into the U.S.A. for this reason.⁸ During WWII, the United States again started getting more cheap Mexican labor with the entry of the Bracero program in 1942, which was a series of agreements that permitted millions of Mexicans to immigrate to the United States.⁹ As before, the United States benefited from increased war production at a low cost to itself, but again took advantage of the workers. The situation escalated until in June 1943, the Mexican government ordered Braceros to stop working in Texas because of all the discrimination.¹⁰ Later, the Mexican government also expressed concern over how Mexican-American children were treated in American schools and even over how zoot suiters were treated. Often El Paso newspapers tried to portray that the two cities’ relationship as unstrained and pleasant, but their history shows otherwise.

Part of National/State Trends
While El Paso had many unique traits due to its location on the border of Texas, Mexico, and New Mexico, it also fit into state and national trends.  As mentioned previously, Jim Crow segregation was enforced since El Paso was part of Texas.  The difference was starkest for non-Anglo railroad travelers, who were forced to switch to segregated passenger rail cars when crossing into Texas at the El Paso station.  Like other places in the state, El Paso’s non-Anglo population embraced activism to try to improve their status.  El Paso’s NAACP chapter was the first established in Texas at its founding in 1913-1914.¹¹  The League of Latin American Citizens, LULAC, founded in 1929, also had an active chapter in West Texas.  These organizations were active in lodging protests and court cases to try to achieve equal access in areas like education and voting, with El Paso doctor Lawrence Nixon as the plaintiff in several influential Supreme Court cases seeking to dismantle all-white political party primaries.  Like their counterparts nationally, Latinx and African American citizens of El Paso pushed for equality and the dismantling of the Jim Crow system of segregation.

Even though activists pushed for equal treatment, the area of employment was still a challenge during World War II for minorities. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 in 1941 establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), an early forerunner to today’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).  The mission of the agency was to investigate charges of discrimination in hiring and promotion against women and religious and racial minorities in any business with a government contract.  Consistently underfunded and undermanned, the FEPC did its best to investigate a flood of cases nationwide, including in El Paso.  FEPC caseworkers came to El Paso in 1942 to investigate claims of discrimination against Mexican Americans in the Southwest, initially proposing a set of hearings on the issue that were eventually quashed.  The FEPC’s activity in the Southwest is one of the focuses of our National Archives visit in January, since the records of the organization are housed there.

Finally, El Paso was part of the national trend of military installation expansion and economic growth for host communities.  The conversion of Fort Bliss from traditional horse-based cavalry to anti-aircraft training center contributed to its rapid growth in World War II, along with its strategic border location.  Throughout the South and Southwest, existing military bases grew dramatically, and new bases were established to meet the demand for training troops for overseas deployment; many of these bases remained in their expanded size after the war due to the Cold War threat of Communism and the Soviet Union.  The growth of Fort Bliss brought a huge economic boon to El Paso during and after World War II, but its existence often highlighted tensions in El Paso.  American troops were authorized by the Mexican government to join Mexican forces in a raid of Japanese-Mexican homes in Ciudad Juárez in 1942, searching for evidence of espionage; many of the men arrested in these raids were sent to detention in Mexico City.¹² Fort Bliss also became a detention center for German and Italian POWs during the war.  Although these POWs existed rather peacefully in El Paso, they did provoke a notable incident around segregation in El Paso in 1944, when a group of German POWs were given service at the El Paso train station’s dining room after African American soldiers were denied service.  This incident received significant national press coverage, include in the Army’s weekly magazine The Yank, and served as the basis for the poem “Defeat” by Witter Brynner.¹³ Racial tensions in El Paso were further evident in the quasi-riot at Fort Bliss in June 1941, when two soldiers were killed following a rumor of an anti-African American riot in downtown El Paso.  While we have been able to research media coverage of this incident, we are hopeful to get more records from the holdings of World War II military records contained at the National Archives.

Our research project into El Paso during World War II has so far confirmed for us that El Paso, while unique in many ways due to its location in the borderland, can still be significantly connected to broader national trends during World War II.  We look forward to our research at the National Archives early next year to help us shed more light on these connections.


Written by Dr. Melissa Esmacher, Faculty Fellow; and Malia Nelson, Undergraduate Research Fellow
El Paso Community College, The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP

Bibliography
1.  Dowling, Winifred.  “The Border at War: World War II along the United States-Mexico Border,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at El Paso, 2010).  Keeney, Mabel Vaughan.  “Civilian Activities during World War II, El Paso, Texas,” (Master’s thesis, Texas Western College, 1950).  Skertchly, Daniel.  “El Paso during World War II (1940-1945): Unlike Any Other City,” (Master’s thesis, University of Texas at El Paso, 2008).
2.  Lâopez-Stafford, Gloria. 1996. A Place in El Paso: A Mexican-American Childhood. Vol. 1st ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=nlebk&AN=22521&site=eds-live.
3.  Skertchly, 11.
4.  Albert M. Camarillo. 2013. “Navigating Segregated Life in America’s Racial Borderhoods, 1910s—1950s.” The Journal of American History 100 (3): 645. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.44308757&site=eds-live: 17-18.
5.  Ibid.
6.  Will Guzmán, Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands: Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and Black Activism.  Urbana: University of Illinois press, 2016.  Page 38.
7.  Overmyer-Velázquez Mark. “Good Neighbors and White Mexicans: Constructing Race and Nation on the Mexico-U.S. Border.” Journal of American Ethnic History 33, no. 1 (2013): 5. doi:10.5406/jamerethnhist.33.1.0005: 13.
8.  Ibid.
9.  “About.” Braceroarchive.org. Center for History and New Media, 2019. http://braceroarchive.org/about.
10.  Guglielmo, Thomas A. "Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas." The Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (2006): 1212-237. doi:10.2307/4485889.
11.  Guzmán, 41.
12.  Selfa Chew.  Uprooting Community: Japanese Mexicans, World War II, and the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.  Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015.  Pages 49-50.
13.  Matthias Reiss.  “Solidarity Among ‘Fellow Sufferers’: African Americans and German Prisoners of War in the United States during World War II.”  The Journal of African American History 98, no. 4 (2013): 531-61.