I am a travel writer. My job is not to make places sound good; it is to uncover whatever the most unique and wonderful aspects of a place are and report on them. It is to find out how a city breathes and describe the inhalations and exhalations for others. It is to pinpoint the rare corners of the world and bring them to life on a page.
When I first started writing this book, my knowledge of El Paso was shallow: a few good restaurants, the main tourist sites, the bridges to Juárez (and why not to cross them), the best areas of town for shopping. But through this process, I have come to understand that El Paso is not like Santa Fe (my hometown) or Tucson or even Los Angeles. Its charms bubble far below the surface and you have to dive deep to see them. El Paso is not a shallow city—it is not a place of glowing magnetism and it certainly isn’t a tourist trap. What I have uncovered here is the lifeblood of a true American city. If you ever want to understand the earliest beginnings of this country or get a sense of what life in the Southwest is really about, minus the turquoise jewelry and faux Navajo rugs, then you absolutely must spend some time getting to know El Paso.
If you’ve picked up this book or even casually flipped through the pages in a bookstore, you have at least some interest in the Sun City. Maybe you are passing through on your way to somewhere else (as many of El Paso’s visitors are). Perhaps you are being relocated here or stationed at Fort Bliss. You might even be an incoming college student enrolling at UTEP. And you might be simply interested in learning about the American Southwest through its last authentic outpost. If you are of that last group, congratulations, for you are a rare and important breed. No matter what brings you to El Paso, though, you will find something in this book to help you get around, from relocation advice to accommodation listings and sightseeing spots.
Despite spending the better part of four months every day living and breathing El Paso, I’m still not sure I completely understand it, for it is a city that takes an incredible length of time to reveal itself. The layers of culture, heritage, background, socioeconomics, politics, and language here are so thick that it would perhaps take a lifetime of living here to really get El Paso. But that doesn’t mean that the average visitor can’t experience some of the city’s finest and most authentic aspects, whether they be shopping for cowboy boots or discovering the nation’s oldest churches, on even the most casual of trips.
I hope you will find this book useful and inspiring on your journey into El Paso, and I truly hope that you can, as I did, find something here worth writing home about.
Trying to understand the Borderlands is trying to understand a 1,960-mile length of land that runs from San Diego and Tijuana in the west to McAllen, Harlingen, and Heroica Matamoros in the southeast. As it travels from end to end, La Frontera—the U.S.–Mexico border—touches dozens of cultures and hundreds of years’ worth of history. The stories here are of struggle—struggle to find an identity, a sense of place, a common ground. For many, the border is blurred by time, culture, and ethnicity. For others, it is ever more real as a 700-mile-long fence continues to be constructed, furthering the physical sense of “us versus them” and forcing many people to watch their homes, land, and cultures be physically yet unnaturally divided.
The Borderlands have always been a difficult place to define, for the border itself was constantly changing for most of its history. Ever since the Spaniards arrived in the mid-1500s and began to colonize what is now the American Southwest, they relied on the Rio Grande and other natural barriers to define their borders, natural barriers that were often fickle and changing. The Rio Grande changed its course half a dozen times or more over the course of the Southwest’s history, blurring the lines between countries, states, and cultures as it flooded.
For El Pasoans, or Paseños as they are known in Spanish, the border is quite simply a way of life. It literally cuts in half the historic Pass of the North, creating two cities—El Paso and Ciudad Juárez—and the largest binational metroplex on earth. As you drive into El Paso on I-10 heading east, you are shocked with the expansive view of shanty homes rising crustily up along the desert mountains, providing the stark realization that there is Mexico, a literal stone’s throw away.
In the 1960s, the Rio Grande border was finally put to rest with the Chamizal Convention Act of 1964. Mexico and America agreed on the final line, trenches were dug, concrete was poured, and the Río was put into its coffin, never to change course again. Bridges were erected to facilitate movement between the two cities—movement that was, for most of history, as fluid as the river’s water that had to be crossed. The identities of the two cities were one, as were the metros themselves—joined like Siamese Twins of the Southwest.
Overview
The land that lies between the Gulf of Mexico and Baja California was first inhabited by a number of Native American societies. Later, Spaniards took ownership of this land, and then out of this mix came Mestizos, whose lifestyles mirrored their ancestry of combined Indian and Hispanic heritage. Finally, Anglo citizens of the U.S. arrived, bringing with them the English language and their ideas of land ownership, informed by commercial capital and manifest destiny. And so the Borderlands are usually thought of as composed of these main groups, who were landowners, former landowners, and workers. But the environment of La Frontera is one of opportunity that has attracted many other types of people, and their presence continues to transform the socio-cultural life of the region.
Here, then, is the difficulty that Paseños (and indeed all Texans that live along the border, as well as New Mexicans, Arizonans, and Southern Californians, and Mexican citizens on the other side) have always faced in understanding their cultural heritage. Are we Mexican? Spanish? Native American or Anglo? The answer is, of course, a mix of them all, if not ethnically then indeed culturally. Borderlands scholar Olivia Cadaval called El Paso and Ciudad Juárez a “crucible of cultural identities, in which shared border personas are created, exported, re-imported, and transformed.” Some scholars even consider the Borderlands region to be the massive, confusing meeting point of Hispanic South American cultures and Anglo North American ones—the place on earth where this change in backgrounds, heritage, language, and culture takes place.
So, to understand what makes El Paso and its people tick, we must somehow take in the entire blend of backgrounds and heritage that has shaped the city, both good and bad, and let them be together in spirit and in practice. In truth, El Paso is a remarkable place where people of strongly different backgrounds live and let live, and where who you are is okay, no matter where you’re from or what your outlook on life may be.