Historians of education understand the political nature of schools and schooling, especially in the 20th century. Jonna Perrillo’s Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands not only reiterates “how deeply political the project of education is,” but illuminates education’s “devotion to certain ideas, social systems, and desires for stasis or change” (p. 140). These ideas, as evident in the divergent opportunities afforded Mexican American and German children in El Paso, Texas, in the 1940s, highlight the commitment of educational systems to reinforce ideologies that limit the full participation of some while rewarding others. As Perrillo argues, “These differences in treatment and opportunity illuminate not just what teachers thought of particular students in the moment, but also the kinds of lives and social roles for which they were preparing their students” (p. 3). But more than a story on the inequitable schooling received by two differently racialized populations, Educating the Enemy speaks to the intentionality behind the choice to differently school certain populations under the guise of providing a democratic education and cultivating model Americans.
The history of school Americanization projects is well documented, with the scholarship illustrating how such projects have been a tool to transform populations of people, whether immigrants or migrants, to fit within prevailing US ideologies and values. The scholarship also reminds us of the critical nature of Americanization projects in sustaining and perpetuating racial hierarchies that have reminded populations that their access to resources or ability to maneuver in different spaces depends on their proximity to whiteness. The story of the Paperclip children in El Paso in the 1940s contributes to this body of work while also complicating the very ideals that frame Americanization projects. Because, as Perrillo reminds us, the role of El Paso schools in transforming the children of Nazi scientists “reflected back to Americans the virtues of a democratic education,” for “if enemy children could be brought into the fold, seemingly anyone could” (p. 14). What was understood to El Paso’s Mexican and Mexican American residents is that such opportunities and hope would not be extended to them as they continued to attend segregated schools; they were destined to occupy a particular labor market despite their long-standing history in the city and their own commitment to their children’s education. Proximity to whiteness, as the book illuminates even further, allowed the Paperclip children and their families to maneuver through schools and a system that enabled them to alter their image from dangerous outsiders to acceptable neighbors and citizens—something not afforded to Mexicans and Mexican Americans or other racialized populations.
Perrillo meticulously details how a “political education forms from the narratives communities and families tell themselves about who they are and what it means to belong” (p. 148). By the time the German children and their families entered El Paso schools, Mexican and Mexican Americans had plenty of evidence to remind them that despite their faith in democratic ideals and the potential of education, evident in their history of legal battles, their creation of community-based organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens—LULAC—and their membership in Speak English Clubs in the city, “Mexican American students believed in this ideal more than teachers believed in Mexican students” (p. 99). This was a different experience for the Paperclip children, whose families, or more specifically their fathers, were viewed as assets to American Cold War-era progress and the fight against Communism, despite their involvement in Nazi Party politics and Adolf Hitler’s violence against Jewish people and other populations. Perrillo reminds us of the similarity between the Germany the scientists left behind and the history of their new country, as “Nazi leaders explicitly designed German racial policies on the model of civilization that American Jim Crow offered” (p. 22). Perrillo is similarly attentive toward complicating the experiences of the Operation Paperclip scientists and their families as they transitioned into their new American lives and the reception they received, as not all community members in El Paso were equally convinced about the scientists’ good intentions or had positive views of their recruitment and supposed shift in political ideology. Some officials saw the scientists and their families as strategic opportunists who continued to view their enemies in racialized or ethnicized terms, utilizing that strategy to align themselves with the United States in their ideological battle with Russia and others (p. 23). Early media accounts on Operation Paperclip families depicted them as arrogant, ungrateful, and demanding, their complaints ranging from the slowness of their mail service to the quality of bread they received. The challenge for the German immigrants, however, as Perrillo reiterates, was in ensuring their children were well received in schools, differentiated from their parents’ actions and ideologies, and that, as children, they were seen as the “least accountable for how they complied with and facilitated Nazism” (p. 28). Schools offered the Paperclip children, and by extension their families, a viable opportunity to change the narrative attached to them and position them to benefit from access to whiteness and the possibilities laid out by Americanization programs. Both of these ideals were denied to Mexican American children, especially in El Paso schools.
El Paso schools, much like other school districts across the country, continued to view Mexican American students as unassimilable, criticizing their “failure” to progress in language acquisition, achieve success in school, and even attain positive health as individual choices, while avoiding any conversation about the long-standing systems that continued to marginalize them. In contrast, the Paperclip children were celebrated for being “congenial and eager to assimilate” (p. 89), the teachers aiding in framing a narrative of the children as happy, motivated to learn, and united with other Anglo-American children.
Schools, as Perrillo demonstrates, are vital to creating, perpetuating, and sustaining the social hierarchies that assign value to some bodies and populations while reminding others of their place in that social order. El Paso schools proved that “becoming and being American … was a process determined as much by others as it was by the self” (p. 115). Perrillo shows how language became an important tool in that process: Spanish was utilized to elevate the status of Paperclip and other white children while, for Mexican American children, it was a means to further racialize and segregate the population. As Perrillo argues, as a result of school demographics and because sustained segregation practices provided Mexican American children with little opportunity to use English effectively, Spanish remained the primary language they spoke in school. However, for Paperclip children, their access to whiteness and thus schooling spaces with other white children facilitated their English language acquisition. Chapter 4, “The Promise and Peril of Bilingualism,” is an especially important read for those interested in seeing how critical a role language plays in creating borders in schools that racialize some bodies, further limiting their access to labor opportunities and keeping them locked into an economic system dependent on their labor. For Paperclip children, Spanish was a “helpful tool for taking vacations and overseeing servants” (p. 110).
Perrillo’s Educating the Enemy is an essential read for those interested in conversations on the intentional education or miseducation of Mexican Americans and other students of color, according to the space they were expected to occupy and inherit. With respect to the Paperclip children and other white immigrants, the book demonstrates the “redemptive powers of American exceptionalism,” and the “kind of assimilation best available to people who were white” (p. 141). Schools, as Perrillo presents them here, have been and continue to be political institutions because of the strategic planning of those who control these spaces and certain historical narratives.
