The Mediated Jorge Washington: Father of Our Countries

In the early years of the Great Depression, as Laredo's annual Washington Birthday Celebration entered its third decade, the bilingual Laredo Times crusaded for the cash-strapped city it served to keep staging yearly commemorations of the first U.S. president. This article analyzes 339 articles, photos, columns, cartoons, and advertisements that appeared in the Times between 1929 and 1934 to show how the newspaper created a cross-border public memory of George Washington for its increasingly desperate imagined community of transnational readers. Moreover, this article demonstrates the role of the Times in transforming the Washington celebration from its origins as an 1898 Americanization tactic of Anglo city fathers into a twentieth century regional, cultural, and economic vehicle that conceptualized “American” liberty as English and Spanish and Mexican and American.