Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands

by Jonna Perrillo

Compares the privileged educational experience offered to the children of relocated Nazi scientists in Texas with the educational disadvantages faced by Mexican American students living in the same city.

Educating the Enemy begins with the 144 children of Nazi scientists who moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1946 as part of the military program called Operation Paperclip. These German children were bused daily from a military outpost to four El Paso public schools. Though born into a fascist enemy nation, the German children were quickly integrated into the schools and, by proxy, American society. Their rapid assimilation offered evidence that American public schools played a vital role in ensuring the victory of democracy over fascism.

Jonna Perrillo not only tells this fascinating story of Cold War educational policy, but she draws an important contrast with another, much more numerous population of children in the El Paso public Mexican Americans. Like everywhere else in the Southwest, Mexican American children in El Paso were segregated into “Mexican” schools, where the children received a vastly different educational experience. Not only were they penalized for speaking Spanish—the only language all but a few spoke due to segregation—they were tracked for low-wage and low-prestige careers, with limited opportunities for economic success. Educating the Enemy charts what two groups of children—one that might have been considered the enemy, the other that was treated as such—reveal about the ways political assimilation has been treated by schools as an easier, more viable project than racial or ethnic assimilation.

Listen to an interview with the author

Genres: History

216 pages, Hardcover

Published March 3, 2022

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the epilogue: this book "is about the treatment of children--the country's own young citizens--as foreign and less American than actual foreign children. It is about a nation that has historically been capable of seeing some children as enemies of the American promise because the promise historically had not been made to them."

Basically, the children of Nazis brought to El Paso by Operation Paperclip were firmly embraced and given every opportunity to succeed by the Anglos in charge, while the "Mexican" children (Latine citizens) were short-changed at every turn, their systemic disadvantages treated as individual failures and their failure to thrive chalked up to racial inadequacies. Anglo Americans could see the Nazis' children as fellow white people with a common cultural heritage of domination, whereas they could not see the Mexican children as belonging to their cohort.

I would've been much angrier at the revelations of this book if I hadn't grown up in the rural counterpart to El Paso, where power dynamics between the Anglo minority and the Mexican-American majority were much the same. Even during my childhood, the 80s, students were threatened with paddling if they were heard speaking Spanish in the classroom--and this was in a school with a Latino principal and mostly Latine teachers. So the racist mindset, supposedly an apolitical ambition to achieve the best for the child, was well internalized.

This is a scrupulously researched book that takes care not to stray too far from its subject when drawing conclusions, but I wanted more. For example, I would be interested to see how the Paperclip children's experience in Huntsville, Alabama, compared to their time in El Paso. But I may only be dissatisfied because, as I wrote above, I was already prepared for the discoveries Perrillo describes.

[Jerusha J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned so much about El Paso and really the U.S. in this book! Quite honestly, the epilogue in March of 2025 frightens me. Being a teacher and a lesson planner and a curriculum writer IS a political act, even if we don’t necessarily believe that to be true. We continue to reinforce the status quo or we chip away at the systems of oppression that have been woven into the educational system itself with little and big acts every.single.day.

[Helmling · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with her Uncivil Rights, professor Jonna Perrillo draws on meticulous research and deploys intricate prose to probe the intersection of politics and education. This time, though, she brings her considerable talents as a researcher and scholar to bear on a peculiar chapter in the history of her adopted home, El Paso, Texas. The arrival of the children of Nazi scientists repatriated to El Paso’s Ft. Bliss after WWII to advance America’s missile and space exploration programs (Operation Paperclip) presents Perrillo with a previously overlooked lens to understand the ways that Cold War politics and racial identity are expressed through education policy and practice.

Ferreting out connections between the settlement and education of the Paperclip children to layer upon layer of American mythos, from the cowboy’s role as Cold War icon—as both supplanter and champion of the indigenous lifestyle—to the concept of the void of space as the last frontier in need of Western civilization’s domination, Educating the Enemy is a fascinating investigation of education’s role in society—both in America and in fascist states and democratic states more broadly.

[Alaina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really well researched book and also depressing to read about how little changed in some aspects of education from the 40s to the 70s when my mom attended elementary school. She started off not knowing a word of English and there was no support offered, just sink or swim. I also think you can still argue that there is still segregation, maybe more economically, in El Paso based on the makeup of the high schools but there are still racial undertones to it as well. Really interesting and important, especially with what we are seeing at the federal level right now