Smeltertown

🏛️The era

In the late 1800s, railroads turned El Paso into a crossroads of the Southwest. Rail lines met there from several directions, connecting the mines of the American West and northern Mexico with markets in the East. That made the city an ideal place to process ore.

Smelting was dirty, dangerous, labor-hungry work. Huge furnaces turned raw ore into usable metals like lead and copper, and the operations needed thousands of workers. Just across the river, Mexico was going through hard economic times and then the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. Many Mexican families crossed north looking for work and safety.

The result was a pattern seen across the industrial Southwest: company towns built on company land, populated largely by Mexican and Mexican American workers. Smeltertown was one of the best known.

👥People & events

The smelter began with the Kansas City Consolidated Smelting and Refining Company, and in 1899 it passed to the American Smelting and Refining Company, known as ASARCO. Its demand for labor brought thousands of Mexican immigrants, who built homes for their families on company land beside the plant.

What they built was much more than worker housing. Smeltertown, or La Esmelda, became a small city within a city, divided into upper and lower sections called El Alto and El Bajo, each with its own smaller barrios. Residents had their own schools, including the well-remembered E.B. Jones School, and their own YMCA branch. They opened stores, restaurants, and businesses, and formed clubs and organizations.

Faith was at the center of daily life. The church of San José del Rio served as both a place of worship and a community hub. Parishioners regularly climbed the nearby peak then called Cerro de Muleros, and they led the effort to create the Cristo Rey Monument on its summit, finished in 1940. The mountain has been known as Mount Cristo Rey ever since. The community also honored its own: residents named streets after neighbors who died serving in World War II.

In the early 1970s, environmental officials found high levels of lead in the soil. The community's buildings were razed and its families relocated. Only one barrio, La Calavera, or Skull Canyon, still remains, along the road to the Smeltertown Cemetery.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Smeltertown tells two big American stories at once. The first is how immigrant labor built the industrial West. The metals that went into wires, pipes, and machines across the country came out of places like this, and much of that work was done by Mexican workers and their families.

The second story is about the cost of that industry. Smeltertown was among the communities where Americans began to face up to industrial pollution in the 1970s, as new environmental science and new regulations exposed the dangers of lead, especially to children. The solution here was to remove the people rather than the pollution, and a whole community disappeared.

Today the story is often cited in discussions of environmental justice, which asks who lives closest to pollution and who pays the price. Smeltertown's former residents still gather each year, a sign that a community can outlast the place it lived.

🧭If you visit

Very little of Smeltertown survives, so come ready to imagine. The site sits along the Rio Grande on El Paso's west side, where the United States, Mexico, and New Mexico come together. The smelter's famous smokestacks, long a landmark of the city skyline, were demolished in 2013.

Look up toward Mount Cristo Rey, just across the New Mexico line. The large limestone figure of Christ on its summit is the monument the people of Smeltertown helped create, and it is still a pilgrimage destination. Climbing it is a strenuous hike, so plan with care and check conditions before you go.

If you're touring El Paso, this stop pairs well with the city's other borderland landmarks and missions. Take a quiet moment here to think about the families who built a whole world on this ground, and who still come back each year to remember it.