Viva George!: Celebrating Washington's Birthday at the Us-Mexico Border (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781477321430)

2021 Jim Parish Award for Documentation and Publication of Local and Regional History, Webb County Heritage Foundation

For 120 years, residents of the cross-border community of Laredo/Nuevo Laredo have celebrated George Washington's birthday together, and this account reveals the essential political work of a time-honored civic tradition.

Since 1898, residents of Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, have reached across the US-Mexico border to celebrate George Washington's birthday. The celebration can last a whole month, with parade goers reveling in American and Mexican symbols; George Washington saluting; and "Pocahontas" riding on horseback. An international bridge ceremony, the heart and soul of the festivities, features children from both sides of the border marching toward each other to link the cities with an embrace. Viva George! offers an ethnography and a history of this celebration, which emerges as both symbol and substance of cross-border community life. Anthropologist and Laredo native Elaine A. Pe shows how generations of border officials, civil society organizers, and everyday people have used the bridge ritual to protect shared economic and security interests as well as negotiate tensions amid natural disasters, drug-war violence, and immigration debates. Drawing on previously unknown sources and extensive fieldwork, Pe finds that border enactments like Washington's birthday are more than goodwill gestures. From the Rio Grande to the 38th Parallel, they do the meaningful political work that partisan polemics cannot.

Author: Elaine A. Pe
ISBN-10: 1477321438
ISBN-13: 9781477321430
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Language: English
Published: 11/03/2020
Pages: 216
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.07lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d