Love Letter to El Paso (Post, Mart: university, wages, quality of life)

[Violet West]

Appeared in the Huffington Post. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, apparently.

Here's the link: Love Letters: El Paso*|*Love Letters

and the text:

Natalie Felsen spent her first eighteen years in El Paso, Texas. In the two years since, she has been pursuing bachelors' degrees in political science and Hispanic studies at Columbia University in New York City. When she isn't planning her next adventure, Natalie feeds her wanderlust through multicultural culinary concoctions or spontaneous expeditions spanning the city.

Dear El Paso,


Only once I had left you did I love you.



I'm sorry. That isn't appropriate to tell a city that gave you the first 18 years of your life. I'm sorry if my words are harsh, because that's really inexcusable. But I have to explain myself fully to you, El Paso. This letter is long overdue.


I recognize that I am the rebellious teenager to your motherly resignation, the trapped bird who broke free to fly and only then recognized the comforts of what she had considered a cage. You are consolation, El Paso, you are confluence, the consolidation of the three states which foster your culture. And in this mixture, you are like me. Forever on the border, fundamentally defying simplistic categorization.


I remember your food, El Paso. New Mexico, your neighbor a half-hour west, holds its sway over you in that regard. I crave your cheese-drenched enchiladas, the spicy sauce made from chiles grown half an hour away. I miss smelling poblanos roasting black. I miss the pan dulce, gingerbread maranitos so dry that they're impossible to choke down without milk. I love your bowls of posole, pork and hominy stew made fresh, the ease which which I can obtain a mixing bowl-sized portion belying the hours spent in its preparation.


Your ethos is Texas, El Paso, or at least the ethos of the El Paso that I knew is Texas. You defy generalization, for each can experience of you what they will. But when I left your sunshine and crystalline sky for the cloud-swallowed towers of Manhattan, I recalled the fierce independence with which you claimed your soil, the pride which you took in coaxing pecan orchards and cotton fields out of your stark desert earth. I missed your Lone Star flag flying bright in the shadow of your mile-high mountains, their stars mirroring each other. I think of the brisket slow-smoked for a full day in spicy barbecue sauce, the twangs and tall Stetsons of the cowboys in town, the pervasiveness of the quintessential cowboy boots.


But your spirit is Mexico, El Paso, the Mexico foreign to me though it runs though half my veins. You host the daughters of your ghost-twin across the border, Ciudad Juárez, severed from you by cruelty, by cartels and chain link fencing, insuperable barriers rending family from family. I hear your Spanish (which you favor over English), the drawly border accent from which I turned to Castilian, and I miss its melody. I see the Anapra from the university summit, I see the poverty of its dirt-lined streets, and I imagine how you, El Paso, must appear through the eyes of its residents below.


El Paso, the city only ever passed through, possessing an unassuming veneer over your rich cultural treasures. You hosted the conquistadors, the first Thanksgiving, Billy the Kid, Pancho Villa. And you continue to foster the wanderers as you yourself, meander into the future, as winding as the riverbed of the Rio Grande.


Te amo y te extraño,


Natalie

[XChucoresident]

This letter echoes our sentiments and feelings for the thousands of us that have left because of family or jobs including myself..I live in the DFW metroplex...I myself could have never found these words to convey my feelings for the city and family I left behind..but I continue to come here every chance I can..sincerely Marta

[HookTheBrotherUp]

Nice poem. She could have made it succinct with just the last line. There are no regrets in her words though, and the novelty of moving away and missing El Paso is evident, but it probably ends there. Maybe she will move back after her studies at Columbia. 'You think?

I find it more of an exercise of her artistic creativity, but on the other hand, I find it similar to the geek guy who publicly and embarrassingly spills his heart out on the internet because a girl he took Starbucks one morning won't marry him for it, and for which he will recover from and move on.

BTW..Marta....I think you accidently.. revealed your name.. in the moment......did you mean to do that...?

[Chuco]

I saw it earlier this week and it was a really awesome letter. Great job to the author Natalie Felsen! I felt a lot of the same way she feels now when I used to live in LA for close to ten years. There's just something about this place that many of us miss when we actually leave this town.

[malamute]

Originally Posted by HookTheBrotherUp

Nice poem. She could have made it succinct with just the last line. There are no regrets in her words though, and the novelty of moving away and missing El Paso is evident, but it probably ends there. Maybe she will move back after her studies at Columbia. 'You think?

I find it more of an exercise of her artistic creativity, but on the other hand, I find it similar to the geek guy who publicly and embarrassingly spills his heart out on the internet because a girl he took Starbucks one morning won't marry him for it, and for which he will recover from and move on.

BTW..Marta....I think you accidently.. revealed your name.. in the moment......did you mean to do that...?

True, she left it for more money -- her poem to money must be really dramatic.

[Bron_Brodir]

Nostalgia - How it clogs our minds, and helps us forget the reason we leave the places we come to love when far away.

[Violet West]

I don't think leaving town to get a good job and make more money is a bad thing. Wish there were more opportunities here, though.

[Mass Transit user]

EP is not that great. Good Mexican food and very moderate weather is pretty much what makes it a "nice" town for most people who live and visit.
But it would practically be a ghost town if it were not for Ft. Bliss bringing in all of the business, sales, money etc. that keeps everyone busy in that little town.
But opportunities are better for most outside of El Paso. What you mostly have in EP are a few people with the few best jobs and who are planning to keep them for many decades while the rest of the population has to take any job they can get at very low wages. Probably the national trend as well.
El Paso like the rest of America, lacks vision and thanks to decades of Republican-think ruling the land, according to the Bible, "the people perish". That is slowly happening now everywhere. Sorry to say.

[malamute]

Originally Posted by Mass Transit user

EP is not that great. Good Mexican food and very moderate weather is pretty much what makes it a "nice" town for most people who live and visit.
But it would practically be a ghost town if it were not for Ft. Bliss bringing in all of the business, sales, money etc. that keeps everyone busy in that little town.
But opportunities are better for most outside of El Paso. What you mostly have in EP are a few people with the few best jobs and who are planning to keep them for many decades while the rest of the population has to take any job they can get at very low wages. Probably the national trend as well.
El Paso like the rest of America, lacks vision and thanks to decades of Republican-think ruling the land, according to the Bible, "the people perish". That is slowly happening now everywhere. Sorry to say.

You cannot blame Republicans for problems of El Paso anymore than you can blame them for problems of Detroit. There are so few Republicans here that very often there is only one political party putting up a candidate. El Paso is very much a liberal Democrat run city - far more voters living on welfare handouts than there are Republicans.

[Violet West]

It's hard to have "vision" if you are struggling day to day, as many of us do. I think some of the wealthier people and community leaders here DO have vision -- building hospitals, ball parks, bonds for quality of life, etc. Everywhere needs more jobs and opportunities -- not just here.