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I’ve tweeted about this before, but it seems like a good time to remind everyone. The Nazis came to El Paso Texas to tour immigrant “delousing” facilities that included areas dubbed “gas chambers.” houstonchronicle.com/news/columnist…
The migrants clothes were treated with Zyklon-B, which the Nazis would go on to use to murder millions Jews, gay people, gypsies and others they had deemed undesirable outsiders.
This program was part of a decades long, racist campaign by politicians, including President Woodrow Wilson, to “other” non-white immigrants, most notably Mexicans. They used Typhus and other disease outbreaks to claim these invaders were bringing disease to the US
They scared the white population into believing these “undesirables” coming to the US were killing Americans and destroying the country. For decades this fed panic and helped fuel lynchings of Mexican Americans nytimes.com/2019/03/02/us/…
While a lot of this history happened in and around El Paso, the city in many ways was able to heal and move past it, even while the rest of the country hadn’t. It became a beautiful, binational place. Which makes the return of this rhetoric and attendant violence all the worse
I think one reason El Paso is different is because it and Juarez are just one city with a nasty metal scar running across its belly. But also people there remember and accept their history, good and bad. That makes evolving and growing easier
Too much of America willfully ignores and misinterprets our history, preferring instead hollow stories made up of only the good things and fables. Not being perfect is normal. It’s natural. But ignoring our bad stunts our growth and turns us hard and mean.
