The Border Fence, Brownsville 
A River Runs Through It
El Paso and Juárez were like two halves of a single community, and growing up I traveled back and forth between them without a second thought. Later, as a historian, I came to understand how fraught those border crossings were.
Carlos Rodriguez says: Congratulations David and thank you for a wonderful story. (May 27th, 2010 at 6:02pm)
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When I was in elementary school, I used to visit my tía Adela almost every weekend at her red-brick apartment building on South Oregon Street. I became a historian to a large extent because of my great-aunt and her old Segundo Barrio apartment. I remember the smell of mothballs in her room and photographs of her as an attractive young woman during the twenties. Her street ran from downtown El Paso to the Rio Grande. It’s in an area of town that used to be part of Mexico until the river shifted in the 1860’s and it became U.S. territory.
Of course, as a kid I didn’t know any of this. All I saw when I looked out from Tía Adela’s apartment terrace were other century-old buildings like her own. I didn’t know that her neighborhood had helped spark the first major revolution of the twentieth century. Didn’t know that Mariano Azuela had written and published the preeminent novel of the Mexican Revolution, Los de abajo (The Underdogs), in 1915 in a building standing kitty-corner from her apartment. Didn’t know about the multitude of ghosts who had left their mark on her block. It was not until many years later, when I was doing research for my book, Ringside Seat to a Revolution, that I learned that Pancho Villa and radical newspaper editor Ricardo Flores Magón had plotted the overthrow of the Mexican government from rooming houses and newspaper offices on this street. So had Teresita Urrea, a young healer from Sonora whose name helped start uprisings from El Paso against the hated Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1896. Urrea had lived a few yards down from my great-aunt’s apartment.
During the turn of the century, El Paso was the perfect launching pad for a revolution in Mexico. Having the largest ethnic-Mexican population in the United States and a location at the crossroads of major binational railroad lines made it the most strategic site along the 1,900-mile border from which to carry out gun smuggling, espionage, and recruitment and to publish newspapers denouncing the dictatorial Díaz regime. When New York journalist John Reed arrived in El Paso in 1913 in search of Pancho Villa, he wrote that “in every hotel and lodging-house a junta is in session at all hours of the day and night—revolutionary juntas, counter-revolutionary juntas and counter-counter revolutionary juntas.” Thanks to the Mexican Revolution, El Paso’s economy boomed. Local merchants made a fortune selling weapons, ammunition, and supplies to combatants on both sides. The director of First National Bank managed to double his profits by selling barbed wire to the federal troops and barbed-wire cutters to the revolutionaries. The business of revolution caused the city’s bank deposits to increase 88 percent between 1914 and 1920. During that same period, El Paso’s population nearly doubled in size. Most of the Mexican exiles who sought refuge in El Paso lived in my great-aunt’s neighborhood.
Before 1917, when freedom of movement was still a basic tenet of laissez-faire American capitalism, Mexican border crossers were not considered “illegal” in this country. El Paso and Juárez citizens could freely cross back and forth between the two countries without need of a passport. But the upheaval in Mexico that my great-aunt and her family fled from profoundly changed all that. Mostly because of the Mexican Revolution and World War I, that freedom was severely curtailed in 1917. That was the year the U.S. Public Health Service began bathing and fumigating with pesticides all “second-class” citizens of Mexico who crossed into the United States through the El Paso-Juárez international bridge. That was also the year that El Paso and Juárez effectively became two separate communities. For those of us with deep roots on both sides of the bridge, nothing has ever been the same.
Sometimes you have to go halfway across the globe to understand your own part of the world. I was sixteen years old the first time I visited Israel. I went on a Holy Land tour organized by my Uncle Rubén, a Pentecostal pastor from Laredo. We did all the required religious tourist stops: the Mount of Olives, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Tomb of David, the Wailing Wall, the Temple Mount, et cetera. But what struck me the most during my visit was how much the partition between the Arab and Jewish sections of Jerusalem reminded me of home. After that first tour, I knew I had to revisit the Middle East.
When my sophomore year at Stanford ended, I enrolled at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I rented an apartment in lower Abu Tor, an East Jerusalem neighborhood that lies a few hundred yards away from the Green Line, which divides Israel from the Palestinian territories. Although I arrived at the start of the 1982 Lebanon war—long before the current border wall between Israel and Palestine was constructed—crossing the military checkpoints between the two zones was very much a déjà vu experience for me. The Israeli soldiers at the checkpoints asked those of us deemed suspicious the same kinds of questions the customs agents do at the El Paso-Juárez bridge—except in Hebrew. Mi eifoh atah? (“Where are you from?”) Lama atah kan? (“Why are you here?”) Lean atah noseah? (“Where are you going?”)
When you live in a war zone, the tension seeps into your body almost unconsciously. People get shot and blown up. You read about it in the newspaper; you hear about it from your friends; and sometimes it happens to people you know. But no matter how close it hits, it always seems distant. You function under the illusion that you’re living a normal life and that it—the endless violence—is on the other side of some imaginary line. Only occasionally does the tension in your gut remind you that war is all around.
In 1984 I came back to El Paso from Israel, but the tension did not go away. I brought the war home with me. Or maybe there had always been a war here and I just hadn’t seen it before. The concrete barricades at the Santa Fe Street bridge. The barbed wire. The Border Patrol checkpoints. The surveillance cameras and sensors along the river levee. The hovering helicopters. The floating bodies in the Rio Grande. Before, it had all seemed so normal to me that I hardly noticed. But I had come back with new eyes and now understood how abnormal everything was.
My great-aunt Adela no longer lived in south El Paso by then. She had moved to an assisted-living facility near the freeway. I visited her often in her new residence, and she would tell me astounding stories about her life in Mexico. She told me that Mexican soldiers had stolen her when she was twelve years old. The soldiers, under orders of a federal officer who wanted Adela for himself, forcefully abducted her from her village near Torreón and placed her in a burlap sack. During the revolution, she followed the man who ordered her abduction, often tied behind his horse with a lasso. He violated and brutally abused her for years. During one of his drunken rages, he threw a hot iron at her stomach. My great-aunt told me this was the reason she was never able to have children of her own. I was the grandson she never had.
When she began losing her memory, she had to move once more, from her assisted-living facility to an old folks home. She would often forget to turn off the stove, and it had become dangerous for her to live alone. When I went to visit her there, she didn’t recognize me at first. She looked at my face for a long time and asked, “Are you David?”
I nodded. Her eyes lit up and she smiled. “Remember when you were a little pip-squeak—una mirruña?” she asked. “You and your best friend, Fernie, were playing in the backyard and you got in a fight. He had you by the ankles over a hole both of you had dug, and you were slinging mud at his face. I came out and pulled you both by the ears and brought you inside the house. When I asked why the two of you were fighting, you looked at your little friend and asked, ‘Fernie, why were we fighting?’ And he shrugged and said, ‘Who knows?’ And right away—luego, luego—you went back out and started playing again.”
My great-aunt took obvious delight in recalling this story of childhood innocence. I, on the other hand, had completely forgotten it. Every time I went to visit she would tell the same story. But little by little, even these last vestiges of the past were erased from her mind.
Several years after her death, in 1997, I was doing research at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., when I came across a photograph of a large steam dryer at the Santa Fe Street international bridge. Another photograph showed a pile of shoes belonging to Mexican border crossers undergoing the delousing process at the El Paso quarantine plant in 1917.
My great-aunt’s memory, it turned out, had not failed her at all.
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