Celebrating George and Martha Washington in Laredo, Texas

April 6, 2020 9:07 AM

Like many community festivals, Laredo, Texas has an annual celebration in February that is a broad collection of different events, from the Pipes and Stripes Car Show (LMT Online), a 5k race (It's Your Race), a Jalapeño festival (LMT Online) with food and music. And then there are the central, formal festivities, the annual naming of a Martha and George Washington (LMT Online), and the Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant & Ball (WBCA Laredo). Las Mathas -- a visit to colonial debutante ball in Texas, where young ladies wear hundred-pound dresses and pretend to be Martha Washington—and the question of what it means to find yourself in the in-between. (The Believer)

The WBCA [Washington’s Birthday Celebration Association] was started by members of Laredo’s mostly-white upper class, but in the almost one hundred years since the association’s founding, the city has become almost entirely mixed-ethnicity: on the 2010 census, 96 percent of the population identified as Hispanic. Through intermarriage, the upper class of Laredo has come to include not only the Lyndeckers and the Bunns (two original WBCA families still prominent in the Society) but also families named Rodriguez, Gutierrez, Martinez, and Reyes. Today, Martha, George, and the girls are mostly Mexican Americans. Many of them descend from the original WBCA families, but just as many are descended from the people who were categorically oppressed—and, in several instances, massacred—by an American colonialist expansion set in motion by the Founding Fathers they dress up to honor.

In Nahuatl, there’s a word for in-betweenness: nepantla. The Aztecs started using the word in the sixteenth century when they were being colonized by Spain. Nepantla means “in the middle,” which is what they were: between a past they wrote themselves and the future that would be written by their conquerors, in the middle of the river between who they had been and who they were allowed to be now. Twentieth-century theorists have used the word shattered to describe the liminal existence of nepantleras, indicating both brokenness and the possibility of making something radically new. The word has also been used to describe the borderlands experience, the mixed-race experience, the experience of anyone who lives both in and outside their world of origin. As Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, nepantleras are “threshold people.” [PDF, (Un)natural bridges, (Un)safe spaces, preface to This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (Google books preview; Amazon; Goodreads)]

posted by filthy light thief (4 comments total)

Man of all the things to come across literally clicking through the list of Texas cities by population on Wikipedia yesterday and on MeFi today.
posted by atoxyl at 9:19 AM on April 6, 2020

Another inexplicable part of this local tradition is crowning a "Princess Pocahontas." I had a friend who had the honor of serving as Pocahontas when she was a girl. She couldn't explain it either.
posted by adamrice at 9:23 AM on April 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

According to the search function, this is the first time in Metafilter history that Anzaldúa has been mentioned in a post, so that is neat to see. (She gets recommended in answers to questions more often, but still less than I would have guessed given her prominence.)
posted by Dip Flash at 6:12 AM on April 7, 2020

I'm not a student of Nahuatl, but Jame's Maffie's discussion of the root word, nepan- in Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion, describes it's meaning as capturing, "abundant mutuality, middlingness, and reciprocity," and that. It has the sense of being "simultaneously destructive and constructive" of identity. And given the Aztec sense of the world as one eternally changing and in motion, nepantla is the normal state of the world. So we should think of mixing and becoming something different as ordinary, one of the defining processes of the world. I like to think of that as a multiracial person, and believe we could have a different, reciprocity oriented way mixture of cultures different from the violent struggle colonialism brings.

I was born and lived in Texas for the first eighteen years of my life, and had occasion to visit Laredo and see those Martha and George Washington costume's at a local mall. Weird stuff, but hell I've been known to dress in full traje de charro for similarly strange reasons.
posted by Mister Cheese at 3:06 PM on April 9, 2020