Smeltertown: Lead, Lies, and the Erasure of a Community

For nearly a century, a Mexican-American neighborhood called Smeltertown occupied the ground beneath the stacks of the American Smelting and Refining Company's El Paso facility. The company built its smelter on the western edge of the city in the eighteen eighties to process copper, lead, zinc, and silver ores from mines across the region. The workers who kept the furnaces running lived close to their jobs. They built their own community, with a church, a school, a cemetery, and the dense social fabric of a working-class neighborhood that had no other option for where to live. At the smelter's peak, somewhere around two thousand five hundred people lived within the shadow of its eight-hundred-and-twenty-eight-foot smokestack.

The contamination was not a secret the community lacked the evidence to suspect. The soil was visibly disturbed by decades of industrial fallout. The air near the facility smelled of sulfur and metal. Children played in yards where the dust that settled was not ordinary desert dust. But the company did not tell the residents what was accumulating in their children's blood, and no regulatory agency with authority to require disclosure existed until late in the twentieth century.

When the contamination became undeniable in the early nineteen seventies, a nineteen seventy-five study found that more than four in ten children living within a mile of the facility showed signs of abnormal lead absorption. Lead at those levels causes damage to the developing brain. It impairs cognition, attention, and impulse control in ways that do not fully resolve.

The company's response was to purchase the land and evict the residents. Within a short time, the buildings of Smeltertown were demolished. The school, the church, and the cemetery were left standing. The nine hundred people who had lived there scattered.

The stack stood until twenty thirteen, when it was demolished in a controlled implosion. The lead and arsenic compounds that had accumulated in the soil over a century are still there. Former residents gather at the cemetery every year. The city in which they live was built in part by their labor and their exposure to the poisons their labor produced, and the community they built was erased when that exposure became publicly documented.