by Sid Holt
This is the order in which their portraits appear in the yearbook-program, the order in which they are presented at the November father-daughter dance, the order of their names in the paper. In the citywide parade, at which each girl has her own corporate-sponsored float, blue-eyed Andrea Gutierrez’s float will drive through first, at nine-thirty a.m. Those farther back will wait their turn in the heat until finally Angela Moreno of Nuevo Laredo passes by, sometime after noon.
I don’t know what I had imagined would happen during the pageant. Maybe a little play? Maybe elaborate choreography? Instead, when each girl was announced, as she appeared in silhouette in the plywood double doors and began descending to the stage, hand firmly gripping that of her escort for balance, the emcee read aloud an account of her breeding. Whether she was in boarding school or on the honor roll, where she would be attending college, which tony activities she excelled at. More time and emphasis were devoted to who her mother was, who her father was, who their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles were; what important positions, associations, or distinctions they had enjoyed, as far back as possible. Two girls’ bios made proud mention of genealogical connections to people who were involved in the Revolutionary War. One triumphantly traced her ancestry back to Patrick Henry, information that was received with excitement.
While her social stats were being announced, each girl walked a slow oval around the stage, smiling widely, moving carefully so that she could be admired from every angle. I understood, suddenly, why the girls had been so nervous about falling, wobbling, and tripping. Though their order of appearance identified the innate hierarchy, which was out of their hands, each girl’s promenade was her moment of evaluation before her community, much like the purebred’s turn in the arena at Westminster. This slo-mo one-woman parade was her opportunity to be judged or celebrated for her beauty, grace, breeding, and accomplishments.
All the members of the Society I spoke to were nervous that I would portray this enterprise as elitist. They pointed out that anyone is welcome to apply for a membership and that in the past several years they’ve welcomed a number of members who had no family ties to the organization. They pointed out as well that any woman, once a member, has the right to present her daughter as a debutante when she is eighteen, and that, conversely, it’s perfectly common and acceptable not to debut your eighteen-year-old.
It was important to them that I know they are mostly working women. Nearly a dozen women I interviewed told me that the membership is full of “judges and doctors and lawyers and professors.” The list was always the same: judges, doctors, lawyers, professors—indicating, I suppose, hardworking careerism and advanced education. Furthermore, they pointed out, the Society spends quite a bit of time and money on local philanthropy. It pays the fees for low-income Laredoan teenagers to go to a week-long civic-engagement program in Washington, DC, every year. And furthermore, they told me, the pageant contributes millions of dollars to the local economy. Out of their own pockets they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to hairdressers and seamstresses and caterers, jewelry designers and florists. The pageant effectively spreads their wealth.
Leaving aside the critique of trickle-down economics that notion might invite, it seemed what they were trying to convey was that though they may be wealthy and interested in exclusive memberships based around traditional definitions of “high society” as a group of people with special value (related to but not exactly synonymous with their special wealth), they’re not unkind or unprincipled.
It is true that they were kind. I wrote again and again in my notebook that the women and girls (and orbiting young men) I interviewed were warm. They were skittish about having a reporter around because they felt they had been betrayed and misunderstood by other journalists, who had painted them as frivolous elitists, but still they were welcoming. They seemed motivated by love of family, love of tradition, and love of country. They spoke over and over again about inclusivity, standing for unity with their “brothers and sisters in Nuevo Laredo.” They mostly didn’t speak the name of the president, but they often declared meaningfully that Laredoans believe in building bridges, not walls.
Neither did they seem to be rude about their wealth, unless you think public celebrations of one’s wealth and status are inherently rude—which, granted, some people do. The children were unfailingly polite and well spoken. The mothers were anxious but reasonable. In general, they seemed to be a group of people aware of being on view, setting an example. They adhered, perhaps, to an old-fashioned notion of gentility.
It may be true that the millions of dollars spent on the Colonial Pageant and Ball stimulate the local economy, and it may be true that the members of the Society do not intend to place themselves unpleasantly above the people who cannot participate. But it is also true that exclusivity is predicated on someone being excluded. It is also true that when you designate a group of young women to be the “best of Laredo,” you are saying something about all the young women who have not managed to make their way into that glittering formation.
Throughout the pageant, I kept thinking of a moment from earlier in the day in the makeup salon, after Tami left. I was hanging around chatting with a makeup artist while she did another debutante’s makeup, and she told me that years ago, when she was first starting to do makeup for the pageants, the hardest thing for her was remembering that the girls in the Society have different coloring.
“Most people in the Society are lighter?”
“Yes,” she said. “Most are. Or they have European blood in them. And that’s what it is, the pageant. They’re telling you all their lineage, and that’s European blood.” She smiled a little smile. “I call them Martians. Because they look good in greens.”
I asked about the other pageant that happens at this time of year: the Princess Pocahontas Pageant and Ball. It started around the same time as the Colonial Pageant and Ball, but it carries on by honoring Pocahontas’s original role in the festivities. As it’s described on the WBCA website, this pageant celebrates the “regal Indian maiden” and “presents the Native Americans in a setting that is both mystical and natural.” I wondered aloud whether the girls who played Pocahontas and her court were also Martians.
She shook her head. “No. The Society is … the crème de la crème, so to speak. It’s—you’re born into that.”
She told me that this year, Tami had invited her to one of her parties for the Society. “Tami is so down-to-earth, and so nice,” she said. “But are you kidding me? I don’t have anything to wear; I don’t even know what to wear. I shop at Target and Walmart, and there’s just no way I can be there and feel comfortable.” She shook her head, her expression somewhere between amused and grimacing. “You realize, Oh, wow, there’s a really different world out there. It’s not my world.”
I recalled this as I watched one winsome young woman after another arrive at the top of the stage and float down the stairs to applause. This is your world, their community was telling Andrea Gutierrez and Bianca Martinez and Jordan Puig and Rebeca Peterson and Rebecca Reyes and Lauren Moore and Azul Martinez and Leticia Garcia and Marissa Gonzalez, and all the rest. This whole beautiful world is for you.
When my mother was five years old, my grandmother tried to put her in a pageant. Specifically, my grandmother entered her in a contest to select the Court of Queen Citrianna for the Mission Texas Citrus Fiesta, the pageant that still takes place every year in my great-grandparents’ hometown. Mission is one of the primary producers of citrus in the country, specifically of ruby red grapefruits, and my mother’s grandfather was a foreman for one of the citrus producers. “I didn’t even know what I was doing,” my mom said when she told me about her audition for the littlest citrus girl. “I had to learn to curtsy and all that. It was probably the blonde girls who were selected.” She made a sound between a laugh and a sigh. “My mother came from a really nothing family, right, but she had these aspirations.”
While I was in Laredo, we had been talking on
and off about a dynamic at work on the stage at the Jesus Martinez Performing Arts Complex, a dynamic that I’d seen play out before: an equation of Americanness with middle-class “whiteness” that’s exerted so powerfully on brown people that they eventually begin to accede and conform.
After finishing high school in Mission, my grandfather enlisted in the army and spent his career as a helicopter pilot, in part to facilitate getting out of Mission. My grandparents left the Rio Grande Valley and raised their children while traveling between San Antonio and far-flung military bases throughout the United States and in Italy and Turkey, where they lived mostly among white people. It seemed important to my grandmother to fit into these spaces and for her children not to seem too Mexican, too “from the Valley.”
Though Spanish was both of my grandparents’ first language, they only spoke English to their children because they believed that speaking Spanish would do them no favors in Texas. My grandmother would punish my mother if her words ever took on the melodic singsong intonation of Spanglish from the Valley. “Do not speak like that,” my mother says, imitating her mother’s voice, which is itself accented. “You’re going to sound like you’re Mexican. As Mexican Americans, you pretty much wanted to subsume your racial identity. And there was no ‘Mexican-American’ when I was growing up! You didn’t hyphenate. You lost that. You were just American.”
All of my grandmother’s seven children married white people. None of her fourteen grandchildren speak fluent Spanish. It is a source of great pride and patriotism in our family that one of my uncles and several of my cousins and cousins’ husbands followed my grandfather into the armed forces. No family is more American than a military family, the logic goes. Everyone who had an opportunity to change their last name through marriage did, with the exception of my mother. The parts of the family history that included poverty or immigration or the “wrong” kind of Mexicanness or any other perceived stain were dropped from conversation so that my generation would never know them.
But why? I’d always wanted to know. This was all totally antithetical to the kind of pro-multicultural America I was told I lived in as I was growing up. When I asked my mother, who hasn’t typically wanted to talk about this kind of thing, she was quick to point out that in the areas where she grew up, Mexicans and indigenous people were enslaved. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the same thirty years between the founding of the WBCA and my grandparents’ birth, Texas Rangers tortured and executed Mexicans en masse down in the borderlands. A Texas newspaper defended the killings as a reasonable response to “a serious surplus population that needs eliminating.” Prominent Texas politicians were calling for “all those of Mexican descent” to be sent to concentration camps.
When my grandmother was young, there were still teachers who were against speaking Spanish in public school, and so she was punished for speaking her first language on the playground. There were separate drinking fountains. My mother recalls that in Mission, the train tracks really were the dividing line between the white neighborhood and the Mexican neighborhood, and that the roads on the Mexican side went unpaved until the late seventies.
My grandparents grew up in a geographically and culturally marginal part of the country that was desperately economically depressed. My grandmother in particular was raised in poverty. Neither of them went to college. In the decades between their coming-of-age and mine, American politics has developed a new term for people who fit my grandmother’s description in the moment when she was making decisions about who and how to be. They’re called “vulnerable populations.” What would a refusal or failure to assimilate have cost her?
In the months after I visited Laredo, the news broke that the U.S. government had begun separating migrant children from their parents at the Mexican border. Between May and June 2018, two thousand children were taken from their families and put into detention centers, and by July news outlets were estimating that nearly twelve thousand immigrant children were in U.S. custody. Several thousand were in a new tent camp in the desert outside El Paso. The youngest children, many of them still infants, some of them taken away from their mothers as they were breastfeeding, were sent to “tender age” shelters in South Texas. Laredo’s detention center, which is about seven miles northeast of the bridge where the Abrazo Ceremony takes place, holds mostly parents, but the press released photos of children being held in cages in McAllen, the city next to Mission, which was widely credited as the epicenter of the family separation policy. “They treated us as though we were animals,” said one woman in a letter to her lawyer. In August, a man massacred twenty-two people in a Walmart in El Paso minutes after publishing a manifesto online that explained, “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
Writing about the particular ferocity of anti-Mexican racism and violence on the border, historian Greg Grandin suggests that the border is where so-called white Americans have felt marginalized, most vulnerable to becoming the “other” they fear. If borders signify “domination and exploitation,” he writes, “they also announce the panic of power, something that overcomes a political state similar to the way dread comes over an individual with the realization that their psyche isn’t theirs to control alone, that it’s formed in reaction to others.” He quotes Freud: “The phobia is thrown before the anxiety like a fortress on the frontier.”
I’d always had the sense, formed subliminally or even innately, that it was better to erase the past. My grandmother carried and then pushed her children as far as possible from her upbringing toward an imagined ideal of power, affluence, credibility, respectability, and safety. And my mother, in turn, carried and pushed me as far from her own upbringing as she could, clear across the country to California, then to the Ivy League, and then to New York, to the life I lead now.
In ways I don’t like to contemplate, my life as an excellently educated, widely traveled, white-passing American woman was the dream behind that erasure. What could be more ungrateful than to redraw in public what was so carefully and privately elided?
Still, my mother took steps to preserve the parts of herself that her mother wanted gone. She learned Spanish in her youth, and, in the eighties, began referring to herself as Mexican American. “That’s very much the reason I didn’t change my name when I got married,” she said. After a beat, she added, “Though going to Rosette Kisner would have been the ultimate success, in a way.”
When people inquire after my mother’s ethnicity now, she tells them that she’s “as Mexican as you can get” because her father was a Garcia and her mother is a Martinez, which, she always adds, are like the Smith and Jones of the Mexican world. “Both my parents are Mexican and completely Mexican,” she says.
I’d been sort of puzzled by the emphasis, particularly because it’s not categorically true: the most Mexican you can get, in one sense, is to be from Mexico. This gestures toward a key—if confusing—element of the second- or third-generation experience: your cultural rootedness isn’t always constructed based on your relationship to your family’s actual country of origin. When I asked her about it, she said, “I feel like I have to sort of convince people that I’m Mexican. I don’t feel Mexican enough.” She moves through mostly white social spaces, and it bothers her that her features are ambiguous enough that all her life people have been asking her where she’s from.
This shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. My mother is often the yardstick by which I estimate myself, and I had always assumed that I didn’t feel Mexican enough because I was not enough like her. When I was growing up, she used to tell a story about how she and my father moved to Paris shortly after they were married, and when I was born she began to take me to the park near our apartment, in an affluent neighborhood. Most of the women at the park during the day were foreign au pairs tending to the babies of the white women who lived nearby. I was a fair baby with gold hair; my mother was mistaken for my au pair.
I always heard this story as an example of racial bias: m
y mother, a young, olive-skinned woman, was assumed to be the help rather than the mother. I also noted it as the first time that I was “not Mexican enough” to be recognizable. Subliminally, I understood it as a story about the deepest form of intergenerational betrayal: a daughter who doesn’t resemble her mother. It strikes me now that my mother might not have thought of it that way at all—that she might simply have felt lonely in the park, caught between the mothers and the au pairs.
I hesitate to draw parallels between my life and my mother’s because they are not the same life—by her design. My mother raised me with the hope that she could be my threshold, that her sacrifices and mistakes, her proximity to oppression, would deliver me to a different life, a life of being inside, where there was no space I wouldn’t occupy comfortably, where the whole beautiful world was for me. But I am nepantla, in my ways, too. I, too, know what it feels like to pass without exactly wanting to.
It does not seem like a coincidence that a pageant devoted to celebrating a Eurocentric story about the American project should involve corsets and false eyelashes and elaborate, perfectly uniform curtsies—given that modern pageantry is a kissing cousin to drag or given that sites of extreme pressure to conform racially or nationally tend to beget even greater pressure to conform along lines of gender and sex. The pageant girl reflects an ideal that’s being championed: wealth, national pride, a precise if exaggerated performance of traditional femininity, young beauty on the arm of a man. All that is in the dress.
