By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Summer 2019

Since 1898, border town and busiest U.S. inland port Laredo, Texas, and its twin city across a Rio Grande curlicue, Nuevo Laredo, have thrown a joint party for George Washington’s birthday.

Born out of efforts to Americanize a historically Mexican area, the Washington’s Birthday Celebration has grown from a two-day fair to a February-long festival. Now it fetes the southern border’s binational culture as much as our founding-est of Founding Fathers, if not more.

It is, to an outlander, a strange occurrence—it can even be strange to the initiated. GW American studies associate professor Elaine Peña grew up in Laredo, and the bizarre to-do—it stews together July the 4th, Mardi Gras and a very large county fair—has puzzled the 40-year-old her whole life.

The WBC itinerary is as vast as it is incongruous. There are about 30 events every year. Among them are the expected and obvious (George and Martha impersonators, a carnival, a parade), the less expected but understandable (a jalapeño-eating contest, a classic car show, an air show, two debutante balls, a 5K) and the not at all expected and very weird (a comedy jam, Pocahontas being given a key to the city in a ceremony that kicks off the parade).

Peña has been around the WBC since she was a kid. She and her three siblings moved around a lot but never seemed to live more than a few blocks from the parade, during which Peña would sometimes sell soda and bottled water to make extra money. As she got older, Peña found the WBC more and more confusing, especially its bedizened portrayal of Native Americans.

“I felt uncomfortable watching the pageant,” Peña says by phone from Scotland, where she spent the spring semester as a visiting scholar at the University of Edinburgh. “I had questions about it and I didn’t know who to talk to because everybody seemed to take its content for granted. It was something that I wanted to understand, and then it was something that ended up being extremely complicated.”

An anthropologist who specializes in religion and ritual, Peña has researched professionally the origins, implications and form of the Washington’s Birthday Celebration for more than a decade. She’s explored Laredo’s and Nuevo Laredo’s town archives and those of local organizations like the Webb County Heritage Foundation—Laredo is the county seat of Webb County—and the Washington’s Birthday Celebration Association, even helping the WBCA catalogue some of its old-timey photos along the way.

Peña is the first person to academically and so exhaustively study the WBC, becoming perhaps the expert on the event. Along the way, she broke news about the fraternal order that founded the WBC and, most notably, the beginnings of paso libre, a now-retired tradition that from the 1950s to the 1970s allowed people to move between the United States and Mexico without a passport.

Peña’s also attended several WBCs in an ethnographic capacity, most recently in 2017. She wanted to see if the festival would be different in a world where noted wall enthusiast Donald Trump is president of the United States.

“Everything went just the same, even with all of this anti-border politicking that had really informed the campaign,” Peña says. “It just went on as usual.”

Peña says her research started with her trying to figure out how and why the WBC’s less than politically correct depiction of Native Americans had persisted into more enlightened times. The research morphed to become a more encompassing study of the festival. Thirteen years later, after $11,000 in seven grants—notably she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship—$20,000 from GW and quite a chunk of her own money, Peña’s got her second book. In fall 2020, University of Texas Press will publish the tentatively titled The Festive Border: Ritual, Infrastructure, and Cooperation at the Port-of-Laredo.

“It took me 10 years to figure out that I didn’t know what I thought I knew,” says Peña, whose first book, Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe, emerged from her PhD dissertation. She got her doctorate in 2006 from Northwestern. Postdoctoral fellowships at Illinois and Yale followed. “It’s not just one thing or the other. It’s not just caricature. It’s not just class. It’s not just citizenship. Those two cities, although they’re on different sides of an international boundary line, they’re connected in deeper ways. It may seem like these kind of performances undermine that bond, but the thing is, that bond is actually linked to both of the cities as a port of entry.”

The halcyon moment of the WBC is the abrazo (Spanish for “embrace”) ceremony in the middle of the Juárez-Lincoln International Bridge. There, officials and children share a few hugs in the name of amity between abutting countries that in 1848 exchanged custody of Laredo after the United States won the Mexican-American War.

“What the book figures out is, yes, on the surface and even deep into these traditions, as misguided as they seem, there is a logic to it—an economic logic to it,” Peña says. “But then there’s another part of it which is: Yeah, it may seem bizarre to celebrate George Washington’s birthday, but for me that became more a question of not, ‘What’s wrong with it?’ but, ‛How is this related more to our general thinking about patriotism? Proper geography? About where American history thrives? The proper place for American history?’

“In other words: You can find America everywhere, in theory, but where do you expect to find it in a way that persists in its proper place?”

The 2019 Washington’s Birthday Celebration, officially the 123rd—Peña discovered proto versions as early as the 1870s—attracted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She is the highest ranking U.S. official to attend a WBC, which always has drawn local and state poohbahs while their national equivalents essentially have standing invites. Two sitting presidents, Dwight Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter flirted with a pop-in. Neither made one.

Pelosi’s appearance was overtly political. With the Trump administration’s dark fetishization of the U.S. southern border and its walling off, the once largely anonymous, at least beyond the Texas borderlands, and innocuous WBC is drawing national glances.

“Even with everything going on, it hasn’t affected the celebration,” says U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Laredo native who’s been his hometown’s congressman since 2005. A Democrat, he serves Texas’ 28th District. He also years ago played the baritone and marched with his high school’s band in the WBC parade. “In fact, it’s still very strong. This rhetoric—it’s just the wrong rhetoric. People who live further away from the border are usually the ones who don’t understand the border.”

Trump visited Laredo in July 2015 while campaigning for president. He met with local officials, including Mayor Pete Saenz, a Laredo native and Democrat elected in 2014.

“We took it as an opportunity,” Saenz says, “to visit with him and tell him how we live here and how we do business here and how important commerce and trade is and about our relationship with Mexico.”

Trump got 22.8 percent of Webb County’s vote in the 2016 presidential election. Hillary Clinton got 74.3 percent. Laredo, a town regularly immortalized in cowboy fiction and country song, is about 150 miles south of the closest major American city, San Antonio, and it’s one half of an international metro area.

Combined, Laredo and Nuevo Laredo have a population of more than 630,000, only about 70,000 people fewer than Washington, D.C. Laredo’s population is about 260,700, 95 percent of it Latino. The city is home to the second busiest of the United States’ 328 ports, 29 of which are in Texas. In 2018, Laredo handled $235 billion in trade, 98 percent of it with Mexico, and accounted for 5.6 percent of all U.S.-international trade. Los Angeles, the busiest U.S. port, saw $299 billion in trade, 7.1 percent of all U.S.-international trade.

More than 11 million pedestrians, cars and trucks move from Mexico to the United States through Laredo every year, and the port of Laredo is responsible for more than 360,000 jobs and contributes more than $52 billion to Texas’ GDP. Mexican tourism alone accounts for up to 50 percent of Laredo’s retail sales. In 2017, the most recent year for which complete figures are available, that amounted to about $1.7 billion.

The Washington’s Birthday Celebration remains vital. It continues to be well and thoroughly partied, drawing about 400,000 people each year and generating tens of millions of dollars for Laredo while replenishing and sustaining the old and commodious relationship between two countries and two Laredos, for which the border has always been the most invisible of lines.

“It’s like everything goes into [high definition],” Peña says of the festival. “All of a sudden, everything becomes sparkly, and the things that are being done on a day-to-day basis, they’re done in a more perfect way. … It’s the best version of the port.”

The Improved Order of Red Men, a still-extant fraternal society founded in 1834 and modeled on the Sons of Liberty, invented the WBC in 1898. The idea was to use a birthday party for Washington, whose birthday became a federal holiday in 1879, as a fun way to nudge Laredo’s Mexican residents toward a more alacritous Americanization.

A George Washington birthday party, Peña discovered, was something the Baltimore-founded Red Men tried to institute wherever it had chapters.

As they did for their then-64-year-old organization, the Red Men again coopted Native American imagery, devising facsimiles of Native American rites, rituals and terms and inserting them into the budding WBC. The Red Men believed the Indian motif to be uniquely American (and therefore non-European because Europe had no Indians), which made it useful to a group of people claiming patriotic urges trying to sell another group of people on Americanism.

The original Laredoan observing of George Washington’s birthday included a reenactment of the Boston Tea Party—another time in history when white people “played Indian”—and a staged Native American raid on city hall. It ended with the townsfolk surrendering, turning their other cheeks and giving Pocahontas a key to Laredo.

To review: A group of (mostly) white guys calling themselves the Improved Order of Red Men decided that to make a Mexican town more American, they would dress up like Indians and invoke Pocahontas in the deified name of George Washington. But then the festival got subsumed by the Mexican influence it was meant to dilute, and today the WBC above all else promotes multicultural goodwill and positive international relations. You can kind of see why all this took Peña more than a decade.

“There a lot of disparate parts about this that don’t really make any chronological sense—or geographical or historical sense,” says Margarita Araiza, who for 23 years has been the executive director of the Webb County Heritage Foundation. “But that’s what you get when you have a people desperately trying to create a holiday that doesn’t fit. What had been celebrated prior to that were all the Mexican holidays because everybody here was ethnically Mexican and still felt that way.”

The WBC has been adjusted and audited since its inaugural throwing to fit the wants and times of its celebrants. Starting in 1957, it featured the aforementioned paso libre—the “free pass.” For four days in February, Americans and Mexicans could, without paperwork or the haranguing of Customs, move at their festal leisure between Mexico and the United States.

The two governments ended that in 1976. Officially, it was for safety reasons. In 1977, they opened a new, Interstate 35-feeding and pedestrian-unfriendly bridge, the Juárez-Lincoln, and the governments wanted to use their shiny new thing for all WBC-related ceremonies. Formerly the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge had been used. It was pedestrian-friendly, and the Mexican and U.S. governments, Peña found, started paso libre to promote goodwill after a years-long toll dispute. Unofficially, paso libre ended because there was too much immigration-related political pressure to continue the tradition.

Years before all that, the WBC planners canceled the bullfight. They long ago abolished the Boston Tea Party reenactment and the Indian raid. The Native American imagery endures, albeit more befitting a Vegas residency than living history, and Pocahontas retains her starring role. One of the debutante balls is named for her (the other for Martha Washington), even though Pocahontas never went anywhere near Laredo, which the Spanish founded in 1755 as a ferry crossing. The Powhatan princess—the Lipan are the Native American tribe natural to the region—died 138 years earlier.

George Washington, born Feb. 22, 1732, never visited Laredo, either, but he was nevertheless made an agitprop in its service. The WBC planners marketed Washington as a kind of syncretic demigod—the “only white man in Indian heaven”—to make him, the most American of Americans, as saleable as possible to the most people. Pan-Americanism’s popularity in the late 19th century made this easier.

Ostensibly, the Washington’s Birthday Celebration is still about celebrating George Washington’s birthday, but it’s evolved to be more.

“It’s kind of hard to have a purely, I suppose you’d say, Anglo-American-type celebration without it morphing into a Mexican-American celebration,” Araiza says. “The Hispanic population has always been dominant economically, socially, politically, like other parts of Texas, and so it was not a rebellion by any means. At that point, the immigrants were Northern Europeans, so they were the ones who wanted to create the American holiday, but [the relationship] was always very friendly. The, shall we say, ‘social elite’ were always dominated by ethnic Mexicans, so they were always included in the whole planning and execution of the celebration, and after a couple of years, George Washington was ethnic Hispanic as well as Anglo American—whoever portrayed George Washington [in the WBC].”

Now the WBC dominates Februaries in Laredo. Formerly it reached not much outside the vicinage of Texas. Once in a while, though, a curious media outlet will mosey down for a story about the festival’s grab-bag origins and how George Washington came to be commemorated so ebulliently so far from where it seemed ethnographically eloquent. Araiza says the point is often missed.

“They kind of come toward it with a patronizing attitude—‘What would a bunch of Mexicans want to have to do with George Washington?’” Araiza says. “Most people realize, ‘Oh yeah, I get it,’ after they hear about it, but sometimes they try to spin it as if it were an Anglo versus Mexican thing, and the Anglos were all in charge and the Mexicans were somehow subservient or oppressed, but that’s historically inaccurate. And I just hope that with the exposures of the whole thing and through Elaine’s book and everything else, that that comes through.”

Some in the United States would like us to believe that the southern border is hell’s frontier and that the Rio Grande might as well be the Acheron. On one side of this line is America, where things are American, and on the other side is Mexico, where things are not American. This, Elaine Peña says, mustering the might of a lifetime’s study, is very, very not true.

“It wasn’t necessarily like, ‘Oh, this is what Anglo Americans do and this is what Mexican Americans do and this is what Mexicans do,’” Peña says. “In a border environment, mostly everyone is bilingual. Before Sept. 11, it was way easier just to cross back and forth — or at least for someone with a U.S. passport or a border crossing card. It wasn’t really like, ‘Well, this is America and this is Mexico. America is white and Mexico is brown.’ It wasn’t really like that, ever. But I was just fascinated by how these things that were American could be American and echo Mexico in the same conversation.”

“One of the points of this book,” Peña continues, “is that you can have these regional expectations. But the fact of the matter is that we are absolutely interconnected. When you think about trade, when you think about the things that we take for granted — the price systems. All of that is made possible by efficient borders that take care of trade while taking care of security. Immigration in the larger scheme of things is not the border’s first and foremost problem. Immigration always takes center stage—or illegal immigration, I may say—but that is part of the dysfunction of American politics and it has been for a very long time.”

Too many nuanced issues, Peña says, are debased to talking points.

“It allows them to get into the story of the border without having to manage the way the rhetoric around immigration has been weaponized for centuries,” she says. “Then once they get into the story, maybe they’ll be able to see the economics of it, that the economics of it aren’t actually that perplexing.

“An efficient border—a border without a wall—is a win-win for everyone and it doesn’t have to undermine national identity. I think that’s the point of the book and that’s why it was so important for me to work on and develop the story in a way to cover all my bases and leave no stone untouched as best I could.”

When Peña started officially researching the Washington’s Birthday Celebration, it was to assuage a childhood bewilderment. The festival didn’t make sense, and she found its lingering use of Native-American imagery antiquated and discomfiting. But like everything else about the WBC, it’s a blending of almost a century and a quarter of customs from new and older eras. It’s a natural agglomeration of two familiar sides in an isolated place. It’s as organic as it is unavoidable.

“It goes on because there’s so much to celebrate,” Peña says. “There’s so much expectation about the celebration that it transcends whether something is politically correct or not or whether something is in its proper place or not, whether patriotism is in its proper geography. It’s something that is so deeply entrenched in the families, in the leisure time activities, in the character of the port of entry. Too many things will be lost if something comes undone.”

The WBC now honors Mexican identity and culture alongside George Washington and American history. It in recent decades added a Miguel Hidalgo stand-in to the bridge ceremony. He joined the traditional arrangement of four children—an American boy and girl in Colonial clothes, and a Mexican boy and girl in traditional Mexican clothes—hugging at the bridge’s midpoint. Borders, in a cultural sense, are imaginary, and if they aren’t, they’re made more of air than steel.

“Even if they wanted to separate the United States and Mexico,” Peña says, “they never really figured out how to do that.”

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