“It shouldn’t have happened. People got dislocated like I did, like my family did, like my children did. And there was no need for this, for people to be dislocated. It makes me sad in a way that they took advantage of the people. That’s what it is. They took advantage. And they would say, ‘Yeah but we paid for the houses.’ Yeah, but you don’t know what those people felt inside. You don’t know how.”
— Lydia Levine, Chamizal Resident
The Underground Chamizal National Memorial seeks to honor, remember, and preserve the stories of the 5,600 South El Paso residents who were displaced by the 1964 Chamizal Treaty as well as communicate the magnitude of their sacrifice. The memorial’s attention therefore rests on these individuals and their families—those who have not only been consistently removed from this history’s official narrative, but who are frequently deemed irrelevant or inconvenient to the telling of this story.
Indeed, at the federally-operated Chamizal National Memorial in El Paso, Texas (a national park run by the National Parks Service) no list of names recognizing the 5,600 Chamizal residents exists. Omitted and trivialized, their names have been pushed underground—out of sight/site.
The Underground Chamizal National Memorial therefore seeks to remedy this omission and exclusion. It seeks to bring the names and stories of the Chamizal diaspora to the surface by telling previously untold stories about the Chamizal Treaty from the ground up. That is, from the perspective of the Chamizal “Little People” whose experiences and perspectives have—until now—been placed at the bottom of the hierarchy of historical value.
El Paso Herald Post February 21, 1963
The Underground Chamizal National Memorial
is digital public history project by Alana de Hinojosa in collaboration with Chamizal residents.
Dr. Alana de Hinojosa is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University and incoming Assistant Professor of Latinx History at Texas State University. The Underground Chamizal National Memorial is an ongoing digital project where new content is constantly being added. The project draws on research from Hinojosa’s forthcoming manuscript.