There are many debutante balls in Texas, and a number of pageants that feature historical costumes, but the Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant and Ball in Laredo is the most opulently patriotic among them. In the late 1840s, a number of European American settlers from the East were sent to staff a new military base in southwest Texas, a region that had recently been ceded to the United States after the Mexican-American War. They found themselves in a place that was tenuously and unenthusiastically American. Feeling perhaps a little forlorn at being so starkly in the minority, these new arrivals established a local chapter of the lamentably named Improved Order of Red Men. (Members of the order dressed as “Indians,” called their officers “chiefs,” and began their meetings, or “powwows,” by banging a tomahawk instead of a gavel.)
The Improved Order of Red Men fashioned itself as a torchbearer for colonial-era American patriotism, and its young Laredo chapter was eager to enshrine that culture down at the border. So it formed the Washington’s Birthday Celebration Association (WBCA). For the inaugural celebration, in 1897, they “laid siege” to the Old Laredo City Hall, pretending to be a warring native tribe conquering the city. (The optics here must have been confusing, as the order was made up of white men, while most of the city’s residents were either Mexican by birth or indigenous.) A young woman was appointed to play Pocahontas, and after brokering peace between the tribe and the city, she received the keys to Laredo in appreciation of her efforts.
The siege was done away with long ago, but every February since 1898, the WBCA has thrown a massive festival—America’s largest, most elaborate party for its first president. Lately, the festival includes a Comedy Jam for George, a Founding Fathers’ 5K Fun Run, a Jalapeño Festival, a Princess Pocahontas Pageant and Ball, an Anheuser-Busch-sponsored citywide parade, and so on. The prestige event of the season is the pageant and debutante ball hosted by the Society of Martha Washington, which was started by WBCA wives in 1940 with the aim of adding glitz to the festival. Their daughters dress up in what is creatively imagined to be Martha-like attire (in fact, the dresses are not much like what Martha Washington would have worn), playacting historical figures who might have known her. Each year, one adult Society member is chosen to play Martha herself, and a man from the WBCA is asked to play George.
The WBCA 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.”