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Associate Professor of English

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

Educating the Enemy charts the story of how two groups of immigrant students both considered enemies of a sort—children of Nazi scientists and Mexican American children—fared in El Paso schools and what their experiences reveal about postwar American schooling and political culture. In 1946-47, 179 Nazi rocket scientists and their 147 elementary-aged children were relocated to Fort Bliss through Operation Paperclip, a military operation designed to build postwar American missile programs. Like these German youth, Mexican American children (the majority of whom came to school speaking only Spanish) met with a carefully planned effort to “civilize” and assimilate them in schools. Yet the pedagogical and political beliefs the two groups of students encountered in the same school district were distinct. In telling this story, Educating the Enemy connects local history to broader arguments about the central role that Cold War era schools played in defining “foreignness” and in serving as vehicles of both international outreach and domestic segregation.