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

by Elaine A. Peña

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

265 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 3, 2020

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book--and there are fascinating and interesting things here that are very worthwhile and relevant. However, as a historian and as a spectator/participant in two Washington Birthday Celebrations in Laredo (and adventurer into Nuevo Laredo) in 2020 and 2022, I really wanted there to be more here. More what? More about basically everything. While I now have a better idea about how this interesting border festival began, and why, and how it has developed up to the present, there is an avalanche of cultural history still left to sift through, unpack, and tell. This book really makes no attempt at that, unfortunately. While early on the book seems to explore multiple aspects of the festival, Pena ultimately decides to just focus on the exchanges of hugs on the international bridge between the two Laredos. Unfortunately, while that may be the most symbolically important event of this borderlands ritual, it is merely the tip of an iceberg that this book mostly ignores for one reason or another. The book this festival deserves is still waiting to be written, it seems.

[Karis · Rating 4 out of 5]

really really enjoyed this one

[Kendal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for class, but it was very interesting and offered a unique perspective on a seemingly simple topic