ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a discourse and semiotic analysis of an annual reenactment that commemorates the entry of Spanish forces led by Juan de Oñate on to far West Texas. It begins with a short history of the racially-charged tourism efforts used in El Paso from the late 1910s to the present. This section shows the racial bias that includes a mayor elected with support of the Ku Klux Klan to a strong tendency among community leaders to maintain a strong Eurocentric bias prior to and in the contemporary postcolonial era. We then provide our analysis of the First Thanksgiving of the Americas Festival in San Elizario, Texas, using a video recording of the 2006 event and field notes from 2006–08. Our research agenda was to attend the 2016 event to address how the event had changed over the course of the past eight years. This chapter concludes with a discussion on ethnic labels and the politics of identity, noting recent actions by El Paso area political leaders to support, in one case, challenging the area’s framing of its colonial past and contemporary Mexican/Mexican American identity.
