Reviewed by:

• ¡Viva George! Celebrating Washington's Birthday at the US–Mexico Border by Elaine A. Peña
• Elliott Young

Elaine Peña's ¡Viva George! is a much-needed academic analysis of the history and meaning of the binational celebration of George Washington's birthday sponsored by Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, the most significant fete of the first U.S. president's birthday. Peña employs a performance studies lens, using the frameworks of border enactments and border scaffolding to examine the celebration. In addition to using archival research to examine the origins of the event and its ensuing development, Peña conducted ethnographic work on both sides of the border with a variety of celebration actors, including politicians, participants, and observers.

The birthday celebration began in 1898 as an effort to Americanize the "dos Laredos" area, which was and still is inhabited overwhelmingly by people of Mexican descent. Peña notes that Mexican American elite (the so-called gente decente) participated in the early years of the celebration and were not antagonistic to its Americanizing goals. The celebration was started by a local branch of a national fraternal organization, the International Order of Red Men, and Peña explains that "playing Indian" was central to the celebration. Elite Laredoans, dressed as Indians, enacted an attack on city hall, engaging in a ritual of inversion in which the actors playing Indians vanquished the building's Anglo and Mexican defenders. The book does not address the role of "playing Black," which was also central to the celebration in the early years, including minstrel performances and the song Dixie.

The first two chapters focus on this ethnic cross-dressing, showing how the celebration offered Laredoans a chance to play Indian, colonial, and Mexican. A Mexican-inspired Noche Mexicana event began in 1925 to foster cross-border trade, shopping, and goodwill, but ambivalence about celebrating [End Page 116] Mexican heritage in the Washington celebration led to a behindthe-scenes backlash that suspended Noche Mexicana for another decade.

In 1954, Hurricane Alice destroyed the international bridge that served as a vital link between the two cities. Rebuilding efforts led to a dispute when the Laredo construction group announced a new, higher bridge toll. The Nuevo Laredo group simply stopped construction, halting progress for several months. Peña shows how negotiations over the toll ultimately allowed Mexicans to cross into Texas during the Washington Birthday festivities without special visas. This so-called paso libre, beginning in 1957, was all the more surprising because it happened in the wake of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service's Operation Wetback (1954), in which more than a million undocumented Mexicans were rounded up and sent back to Mexico.

The final chapter addresses the increasing securitization of the border following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and especially after drug cartel violence spiked in 2006. Even so, one of the birthday celebration's prime rituals of binational friendship, the abrazo (embrace) of figures representing George Washington and Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, along with children representing each country, continued throughout this period. By 2015, following the traditional embrace on the bridge, U.S. law enforcement formed a human chain to prevent Mexicans from slipping across the border.

Peña ends by suggesting that Laredo never needed a literal border wall because the children's embrace "differentiates American and Mexican populations symbolically but effectively enough to avoid having to compromise trade and security relationships that actually produce quantifiable benefits" (128). Are the cross-border cooperation strategies inspired by Washington's birthday celebrations a solution to immigration restrictions or are they a sophisticated articulation of a longer history of exclusion on the border? This book provokes these and other important questions.

审核人：

• ¡乔治万岁！Elaine A. Peña在美墨边境庆祝华盛顿诞辰
• 埃利奥特·杨

伊莱恩·佩纳 (Elaine Peña) 的《乔治万岁！是对乔治华盛顿诞辰的历史和意义的急需的学术分析，由德克萨斯州拉雷多和塔毛利帕斯州新拉雷多赞助，这是美国第一位总统生日最重要的庆祝活动。Peña 使用表演研究镜头，使用边界立法和边界脚手架的框架来检查庆祝活动。除了使用档案研究来检查事件的起源及其随后的发展之外，佩尼亚还与包括政治家、参与者和观察员在内的各种庆祝活动参与者在边界两侧进行了民族志工作。

生日庆祝活动始于 1898 年，是为了使“dos Laredos”地区美国化，该地区过去和现在仍然是绝大多数墨西哥后裔居住的地区。Peña 指出，墨西哥裔美国精英（所谓的gente Decide）参与了庆祝活动的早期，并没有反对其美国化目标。庆祝活动由一个全国性兄弟组织国际红人骑士团的当地分支机构发起，佩尼亚解释说，“扮演印第安人”是庆祝活动的核心。打扮成印第安人的精英拉雷多人对市政厅发动了攻击，进行了一场倒转仪式，扮演印第安人的演员击败了这座建筑的盎格鲁和墨西哥防御者。这本书没有提到“扮演黑人”的角色，这也是早年庆祝活动的核心，包括吟游诗人表演和歌曲 Dixie。

前两章重点关注这种民族变装，展示了庆祝活动如何为拉雷多人提供扮演印第安人、殖民者和墨西哥人的机会。一家墨西哥风格晚报墨西哥活动开始于1925年，以促进跨境贸易，购物和善意，而是庆祝的矛盾[尾页116]在华盛顿庆祝导致behindthe幕后墨西哥遗产的游隙，已暂停晚报墨西哥另一十年。

1954 年，飓风爱丽丝摧毁了连接两座城市的国际桥梁。当拉雷多建筑集团宣布新的、更高的桥梁通行费时，重建工作引发了争议。Nuevo Laredo 集团只是简单地停止了建设，使进展停滞了几个月。佩尼亚展示了关于通行费的谈判最终如何让墨西哥人在华盛顿生日庆祝活动期间无需特殊签证即可进入德克萨斯州。这种从 1957 年开始的所谓paso libre更加令人惊讶，因为它发生在美国移民归化局的“Wetback 行动”（1954 年）之后，在该行动中，超过 100 万无证墨西哥人被围捕并遣返到墨西哥。

最后一章讨论了 2001 年 9 月 11 日恐怖袭击之后边界日益安全化，尤其是在 2006 年贩毒卡特尔暴力事件激增之后。 尽管如此，生日庆祝活动的主要仪式之一是两国友谊的abrazo（拥抱）代表乔治·华盛顿和米格尔·伊达尔戈·科斯蒂利亚，以及代表每个国家的孩子们，在此期间继续进行。到 2015 年，按照传统上桥的拥抱方式，美国执法部门形成了一条人链，以防止墨西哥人滑过边境。

佩尼亚最后暗示拉雷多从来不需要真正的边界墙，因为孩子们的拥抱“象征性地区分了美国和墨西哥人口，但足以有效地避免不得不损害实际产生可量化利益的贸易和安全关系”（128）。受华盛顿生日庆祝活动启发的跨境合作战略是解决移民限制的方法，还是对边境长期排斥历史的复杂阐述？本书提出了这些和其他重要问题。