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Noon Talk: The Las Palmas Swap Meet: Establishing an Open-Air Market on the Imperial-Mexicali Borderlands, 1969-1990

Jonathan Angulo, ACLS Leading Edge Fellow
12 noon to 1 PM
The Texana Room, Fondren Library, 6404 Robert S. Hyer Lane, SMU

Mixed-status immigrants and borderland residents developed the economy via informal and formal processes along the California-Baja California border throughout a volatile twentieth century. The forming of the Las Palmas swap meet reveals how the community provided affordable merchandise and services when the United States experienced stagflation across the 1970s and the Mexican economy experienced a financial crisis in the 1980s. On the U.S. side of the border, Las Palmas and other swap meets provided affordable goods and tax revenue, which funded new infrastructure development and government services to the Imperial County community. In Mexico, Mexican residents purchased bulk U.S. products to sell the merchandise in Mexicali, which promoted employment in the metropolis. In this talk, the founding of Las Palmas will serve as an example of similar global transborder developments at the turn of the twentieth century.

Jonathan Angulo is an alumnus of SMU’s PhD program in the Department of History. He is a public historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands and Latinx History. Jonathan has been a Summer Preservation Fellow with the nonprofit Latinos in Heritage Conservation and a Postdoctoral Fellow with SMU’s Department of History and Center for Presidential History. He is currently an ACLS Fellow with the United Farm Workers Foundation. His manuscript is tentatively titled Forging a Borderland Economy: Immigration, The Informal Economy, and Belonging in California’s Imperial-Mexicali Valley, 1917-2000.  

 Photo Credit: Facebook Group "Old Calexico" and member Norma A. Saldaña

 

Free and open to the public.  No reservations necessary.  Questions? Email swcenter@smu.edu.