University of Texas at El Paso DigitalCommons@UTEP Open Access Theses & Dissertations 2010-01-01 El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, 1880-1930: A Material Culture Study of Borderlands Interdependency Gladys Arlene Hodges University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd Part of the Architecture Commons, History Commons, and the International Relations Commons Recommended Citation Hodges, Gladys Arlene, "El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, 1880-1930: A Material Culture Study of Borderlands Interdependency" (2010). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 2505. https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd/2505 This is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UTEP. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UTEP. For more information, please contact [email protected]. EL PASO, TEXAS, AND CIUDAD JUÁREZ, CHIHUAHUA, 1880-1930: A MATERIAL CULTURE STUDY OF BORDERLANDS INTERDEPENDENCY GLADYS ARLENE HODGES Department of History APPROVED: Cheryl English Martin, Ph.D., Chair Samuel Brunk, Ph.D. Paul Edison, Ph.D.. Rex Koontz, Ph.D Patricia D. Witherspoon, Ph.D. Dean of the Graduate School Copyright © by Gladys Arlene Hodges 2010 EL PASO, TEXAS, AND CIUDAD JUÁREZ, CHIHUAHUA, 1880-1930: A MATERIAL CULTURE STUDY OF BORDERLANDS INTERDEPENDENCY by GLADYS ARLENE HODGES, B.S., M.A. DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY History Department THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO December, 2010 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The assertion, endorsed by some architectural historians, that “architecture never lies” may sound overly dramatic. However, this dissertation is based on the proposition that the built environment, urban space and its large scale architecture, is a valuable analytic tool for examining the bi-national relationship between El Paso del Norte (in 1888 renamed Ciudad Juárez), Chihuahua, and El Paso, Texas, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Industrialization and modernizing forces swept across the U.S.-Mexico border region during this period, enfolding the two towns into an inescapable interdependency that endures to the present. I will use the built environment explore that relationship. Practitioners in several disciplines have issued calls for more attention to paired borderlands towns through research into the built environment. Daniel Arreola and James Curtis note the need for studies in urban morphogenesis, defined as the creation and subsequent transformation of city form. 1 Their analysis is concerned especially with those elements of urban landscape most diagnostic of cultural heritage: town plan, land-use pattern, and building fabric. They contend that urban landscape offers a convenient visual medium for understanding place personality, defined as the result of environment, history, and people interacting in a particular locale and situation. Michiel Baud and Willem Van Schendel invite empirical and comparative studies of a dynamic nature for border situations, whether these involve confrontational attitudes, cooperative alliances or other nuances of interdependency. 2 C. Grieg Crysler throws down a further challenge by observing that the status of buildings as signifying systems in the contemporary metropolis remains largely unexamined. Crysler sees architecture as contingent rather than autonomous and self-fulfilling, as enmeshed in circumstance, connected to power and institutional authorities. The constructed architectural object is understood as “text” that signifies iv and transmits socio-cultural meanings, but in a manner that is specific to architecture, whether produced through specialized aesthetic judgments or by shared cultural processes.3 Fitting into Crysler’s framework, Tim Dant persuasively insists on the power of “things,” humanly conceived and constructed, that incorporate physical presence.4 Dant’s theories help to explain that specific sets of objects in an urban setting share the work, social, political, and economic, that created the sui generis ambience in the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez amalgam. The works of Dant and Henry Glassie encourage the use of “architecture” in its broadest dimensions for examining a society.5 I employ their views of the importance of combining vernacular and formal architecture for study of urban material culture. The way these calls and assertions were framed led me to draw together a triangular constellation of concepts which form the bounds of this investigation. Theories and pragmatics of borderlands interdependence, material culture, and urban history shape this work. I understand Oscar Martínez’s formulation of “interdependence” to mean the direct linkage of the interests of towns or states to the degree that when the position of one shifts the position of the other is affected but not necessarily in the same direction. Interdependency in this dissertation focuses on the mutual relations between two towns within local and state systems but also against a national and international backdrop. Martínez developed the four-part model now generally understood to characterize bi-national borderlands relationships. He identifies states of alienation, coexistence, interdependency, and integration. The history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands follows a temporal linear progression he outlines. Beginning with a period of alienation from 1848 to 1878 prevailing conditions included warfare, political disputes, intense nationalism, ideological animosity, cultural dissimilarity, and ethnic rivalry. Negotiations at the presidential level reduced this tension-filled climate to a short-lived state of coexistence soon overtaken by the initiation of v interdependency. In Martínez’s schema “the greater the flow of economic and human resources across the border, the more the two economies are structurally bonded to each other.” He qualifies the categorization by noting that elements of alienation and coexistence sometimes overlap onto the predominating interdependency.6 My research is aimed at exploring the fluidity between the two El Pasos over their first half-century of fluctuating partnership. While Martínez paints with a broad brush, I try to examine the conceptual construct as it applies to local trans- border conditions at the Pass. Following up on Martínez’s hypothesis, I apply the assertion of Baud and Von Schendel that people ignore borders whenever it suits their convenience. Crysler agrees, seeing cities as “unbounded domains” that carry a special significance in a trans-border setting. Economic organization, social and political activities, and physical constructions overlap international borders far beyond city limits and create new circulatory systems. I identify and analyze the political and economic ideologies and cultural preferences reified in the humanly constructed urban environment at the Pass, in an attempt to understand some of the attitudes and messages those constructions conveyed. Crysler further declares that architecture is a concrete expression of capitalist ideology, and thus, appropriate as an analytic tool for exploring the development, stagnation, or regression of urban development. Capitalism constructed a built environment in the industrial era by the same logic that mercantilism erected the Baroque structures in Mexico City, and manorialism created the fortified centers of medieval Europe. To attempt to understand buildings outside of their economic context leaves a huge silence. This theoretical principle is an underlying assumption of my study. Capital investment and management in the late nineteenth century was a crucial and controversial element in the towns’ shared role as an expanding transportation hub vi linking bi-national trade patterns. Growing production and consumption demanded wider and wider distribution, which translated to uneven urban growth on the border. The urban built form became a visual affirmation of economic activity in a new town arising on an architectural tabula rasa, and in an old town in the throes of transition into modernization and industrialization. In addition to themes of interdependency and material culture, urban history underwrites this study. Urban history asks how towns got started, how and why they grew, what problems they have faced, who the inhabitants were, and how their past has shaped their future. Urban history in a borderlands region takes on additional dimensions. Many answers to these questions lie in the non-pedigreed structures taken for granted, the work-horses of municipal life, as well as in highly visible, often costly, civic monuments. I find that urban history is fundamental to a study of the interdependency between this pair of border towns. I treat interdependency as a state of being which originally arose within what Dolores Hayden identifies as the “power of place.”7 More than two hundred years of occupation in the geophysical space at the Pass of the North established a certain urban existentiality. This led to a specific “place personality,” a type of urban history expounded by Arreola and Curtis. This is the concept upon which I base the identity of El Paso del Norte/Ciudad Juárez when compared with other settlements in the larger surrounding region during the colonial period. The old town’s long history contrasts sharply with the abrupt emergence of the