Thank you for the reply. Actually, I stumbled onto the answer earlier today.
If you click on the node in biztalk schema editor, in the properties window, there is a field called “RootNode TypeName”. In that field, I replaced the default with “Element_Part”. This is really nice because the incoming message will still conform to the original schema, but when biztalk builds the project to C#, it will treat the Element.Part as Element_Part.
It turns out it was a quick and easy fix for a potentially horrific problem.