| Summary: | "For more than a century, the border cities of Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, have celebrated George Washington's birthday with parades, pageants, and other festivities. This project uses that long-standing tradition as a lens to examine binational relations and cross-border cooperation, especially during times of crisis (e.g., the 1954 flood, currency devaluations, present-day drug violence). It is a work of both ethnography and archival research (as well as a few uncatalogued documents the author received from private collections), and it argues that the tradition of meeting in the middle of the international bridge is more than a goodwill gesture or an exercise in identity-consolidation. Peña maintains the GWB celebration is a repository of bicultural memory, a negotiation platform, a reconciliatory course of action, and even an efficacious mode of border security"--
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