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Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands

Online ISBN:
9780226815961
Print ISBN:
9780226815435
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands

Jonna Perrillo
Jonna Perrillo
University of Texas at El Paso
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Published online:
22 September 2022
Published in print:
3 March 2022
Online ISBN:
9780226815961
Print ISBN:
9780226815435
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

This book traces the education experiences of 144 children of Nazi scientists who relocated to El Paso, Texas, in 1946 as part of the military-sponsored Operation Paperclip. It compares their experiences to those of the Mexican American children who made up the majority of the city’s public school student population. In charting the two groups of children, it reveals how political assimilation has been treated by schools as an easier, more viable project than racial or ethnic assimilation. Through racial segregation, unequal resources and school conditions, and a patriotic curriculum that was more inclusive of the Paperclip children than of Mexican American child citizens, schools served both as exclusive, segregationist institutions and as cultivators of white identity. Furthermore, schools and beliefs about schools were connected to seemingly distinct political developments, including Cold War foreign policy and diplomacy, federal power over immigration, and a growing military industry. Bridging these histories, the book uncovers the central role schools played in defining “foreignness” in a postwar international order, the Cold War dissonances between international tolerance and domestic segregation, and the influence of both military and diplomatic initiatives on American public schools.

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