Pride and Prejudice
It’s time for Texas to get smart about its westernmost—and most ignored—city, where an old pass tracks the route of our future.
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Though more what you’d imagine seeing on an episode of Cops, the “El Paso” tale is recounted as a nostalgic romance—of the bad, dark woman, the manly cowboy, crossing borders, living fearlessly—for those whose Jane is Felina. It’s hard to deny that it’s not the best image for El Paso’s women to start out from. Compare that to a woman from Paris or L.A. Doubtful, too, it’s the model El Paso itself would choose. Though not everybody, for example, thinks of the JFK assassination as Dallas, it lingers steadily, a second if not first thought. Chicago hasn’t seen Al Capone since the thirties, yet there he is when people go mentally, or even actually. These images are what draw tourists in, and El Paso takes what it’s given, as any city would. Everyone, everywhere, wants to fall in love with the outlaw, or the sexiest, or to be free of civilized restrictions other than those defined by Freud and guns, living life as an adventure. El Paso as the last outpost of the Old West isn’t a bad business.
It’s the border town in this adventure fantasy that’s the problem. Because the border is “foreign,” El Paso is treated as though it were too. Not Romania, or Laos, or Uruguay, or Canada, but full of unique stereotypes that reach back a century and more. Ask Texans, even, what they think of when they think of El Paso, and there’s no doubt that if it’s not specifically Juárez (more so now, way wrongly, than ever because of the narco violence), it’s generally Mexico. That’s not to say that there aren’t positives about having an association with our culturally rich, beautiful friend with a shared past. There’s the tradition of fine art and architecture, the historical missions and trails. There are the ornately staged and costumed folklórico dances, the mariachis with brass and strings, the famed boleros and corridos, the música ranchera and American tejano. Above all, there are the plates of tacos and enchiladas, the flour tortilla, fajitas: all of this is extraordinarily popular within and across ethnic lines. And it’s now all become a source of pride in Texas, but even more as Texas.
Unfortunately, the city that has benefited here is San Antonio, not El Paso. That’s because San Antonio is not a border town. Far from Mexico, it’s a safe American city with a huge tourist center that especially highlights all of the above, lucratively, on its River Walk.
El Paso shares the border with Juárez. To those driving by, it’s subliminal Mexico or a real one, cheap-motels scary. Is it only coincidence that the ugliest things that outsiders say about the city and its residents are the same things said about Mexicans in neighborhoods everywhere? We have all heard them in their formal disguises and convoluted euphemisms. It really comes down to poverty. In this country’s history, maybe dislike of Mexican poverty only looks a lot like racism. A couple of the dumbest canards are that these are people who don’t care about speaking English (and, oddly, don’t speak Spanish properly either), and that the girls get pregnant so young because it’s Mexican in nature. Or that the same nature keeps them in jobs that are menial and low-paying, just as their heritage doesn’t value educating children. And . . . look at the dirty streets.
How can it be that so many are so naive as to confuse issues of poverty, a socioeconomic condition, with the essence of a people? Or a city? But I ask you right now to recall that European visitor outside the city limits, who simply acquired her information impersonally.
This lowly projection is not just offensive; it’s factually untrue, false about El Paso, where a population of strong, good families reaches back to the Mexican and American eras. Texas is not Arizona, where a list like the above would be longer, and more public and overtly racist. In Texas even the worst bigots are polite and believe that it’s better to say nothing if you don’t got nothing decent to say. El Paso doesn’t have the economies of Houston or Dallas or Austin. It is poor. And poor doesn’t look as bright-lights, fashion-glamorous, haute-cuisine, big-stadium, or high-tech as rich.
If not outright dismissed, El Paso more often feels ignored. And so it is, in the silence, six hundred miles from the state capitol. How I’ve heard it explained is thus: she is the dark child of a crazy night on the border, and married Austin pays his legally obliged child support. The rest of Texas ought to have sympathy for El Paso’s larger, unseemly reputation. Much of the country still reports that it’s what all the state, end to end, looks like for hours and hours of highway—and as unexplainably wild as the West Texas wind, even as most days are as wide blue and bright sunny as . . . most days really.
Those dirty streets of El Paso. It’s absolutely true that, like on a worn horse trail, the dry dirt that dusts up in the wind is not held down by well-groomed, watered green meadows. In the desert, brown is the dominant earth tone. Just like in an old western. Like the Old West in a popular country-western song even.
There is good reason why so many love the West—the historical fable of it, its natural beauty, the opportunity to start over it has always symbolized. Only one city is still so landlocked in both an American past and a Mexican one, a combination that will be the foundation of our New West. The raw forces of desert are still a daily part of El Paso life, from vinegaroons and scorpions, tumbleweed and ocotillo to the throbbing of the sun and the horizontal speed of the wind, resources of metaphor and energy. The beauty that reaches up into the Franklin Mountains and over to Hueco Tanks. A legacy of Spanish conquistadores, from canals to routes, an Indian nation transplanted after a loss in a world war–like, seventeenth-century battle of cultures, a settlement that has been the midpoint as a south-to-north national power shifted to an east-to-west one.
We all know that one about the thin line between love and hate. Or the other one that has ignorance as bliss. I still don’t remember where my wife and sons and I had been that particular day way back when, staring up at El Capitan. Let’s just say it was Fort Davis, a cavalry garrison erected to protect white settlers from hostile Indians. What I still recall understanding well, right then and there, was how doomed those hated Apache were. Sure, there were the modern artillery and well-equipped manpower of the fort, but what I mean here is the tide of inevitability, of history. Neither side could know, least of all imagine, that a continental tsunami was on its way, and a few years here or there . . .
The next tsunami is a blink away. There is now even more reason to love the West, and intimacy with Mexico will be the plus it should be once we rid ourselves of the ignorant, crude xenophobia of a national Arizona. Time to stare. To be curious. To get smart. At the most western corner of Texas, an old pass tracks the route of our future.
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