{"id":169454,"date":"2026-02-18T08:51:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T08:51:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/169454\/"},"modified":"2026-02-18T08:51:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T08:51:13","slug":"have-we-underestimated-el-paso-all-along","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/169454\/","title":{"rendered":"Have We Underestimated El Paso All Along?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unless you\u2019re an El Pasoan or a sojourner who has visited the downtown museum<\/a> that richly captures the city\u2019s complex history, you probably wouldn\u2019t know that it\u2019s been a hell of a century for Texas\u2019s sixth-largest metropolis. Numerous recent scholarly works have begun to detail El Paso\u2019s neglected epic legacy: There have been legendary riots; spiritually inspired insurgencies; flu epidemics amid revolutionary fervors, conspiracies, and intrigues; and blistering immigration crackdowns, mass deportations, and scourges of violence against Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and others who were seen as foreign. At least a few wars\u2014the Mexican Revolution, the long war on drugs, the war on terror\u2014have left a deep impression.<\/p>\n

Few days in the city\u2019s history, though, have reverberated as profoundly as August\u00a03, 2019, when a white supremacist drove into town from North Texas with the stated aim of killing Mexicans. He murdered 23 people<\/a> and injured 22 at a busy Walmart. It was yet another brick in a wall of misery that has been under construction for longer than anyone can remember. The sequence of discord, loss, trauma, and recovery eerily repeats across generations.<\/p>\n

The Walmart massacre had already inspired one book, the late journalist Richard Parker\u2019s The Crossing<\/a>: El Paso, the Southwest, and America\u2019s Forgotten Origin Story, which was published last March<\/a> (and included a laudatory blurb from me). Now, almost exactly a year later, we have a second, Jazmine Ulloa\u2019s El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory. In some ways, the two books share a mission: In the wake of tragedy, both writers wish to rescue their hometown from its also-ran status as a city at the edge of an empire. Against that notion, Parker argued that El Paso is an \u201cunacknowledged cradle of American history.\u201d Ulloa similarly asserts that the city \u201chad not been given its due place in the founding mythos of our country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet the books are very different in method. Parker\u2019s telling spans the millennia, commencing in the primeval landscape of 40,000 years ago. He chronicles the ensuing centuries of conflict, starting from the battles between Indigenous groups and continuing through colonialist incursions, the reverberations of the Texas and Mexican Revolutions, and the Walmart massacre. Throughout, he highlights the resilience of Mexican Americans aspiring to become equal citizens of the United States. Parker ends with a call for El Paso to secede from Texas and join New Mexico, a repudiation of his home state\u2019s hostility to immigrants.<\/p>\n

Ulloa, a national reporter for The New York Times<\/a>, focuses on a narrower time frame\u2014her narrative begins in the nineteenth century\u2014in a work that\u2019s part reportage, part historical chronicle, part memoir. The book\u2019s structure is ambitious: Ulloa interweaves her family\u2019s fraught history along the border with the lives of five El Paso families that arrived from Latin America over several generations. The Martinezes, the Holguins, the Rubios, the Mura\u2019ls, and the Chews came, respectively, from various regions of northern Mexico, the Central American world of the Ixil Maya, and southern China by way of Peru. For all their diverse journeys, the families shared the experience of finding their way to the American dream in the dual worlds of Ju\u00e1rez and El Paso.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t think of another work focused on the twentieth-century borderlands that attempts something at this scale. And as anyone who knows El Paso knows, there\u2019s nothing forced about the disparate choices that Ulloa has made. The city has long been a haven for Mexican, Anglo, Chinese, Jewish, Syrian, Greek, Lebanese, and Slavic workers. The families Ulloa follows are made up of grocers, entrepreneurs, agricultural workers, bus drivers, judges, and elected officials. To her eyes, El Paso isn\u2019t just a site of conflict; it\u2019s a landlocked Ellis Island<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"One of the Paseo de las Luces arches on South El Paso Street, which serves as a gateway to Ju\u00e1rez. Charles O. Cecil\/Alamy<\/p>\n

The saga of the Chew family provides a window into both Ulloa\u2019s methodology and the city\u2019s mosaic-like history. Carlos Wong, the scion of a wealthy family from Guangzhou, China, arrived in Peru in the nineteenth century, where he helped other Chinese immigrants find work building railroads and then became a successful hotelier in Guadalajara. He married a Mexican woman of Indigenous ancestry, and their daughter, Herlinda, married Antonio Chew, a prosperous grocer in Ju\u00e1rez. Chew\u2019s store was a hub for Villista revolutionaries, and Herlinda was famously photographed<\/a> sporting a bandolier beneath the legend \u201cYaqui Indian Girl a Revolutionist.\u201d She eventually worked as an advocate for immigrant rights, helping Chinese Mexicans navigate the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Several of her children would become esteemed judges\u2014and her great-granddaughter Linda Chew presided over the Walmart killer\u2019s arraignment.<\/p>\n

Those sorts of cultural and political collisions and combinations are hardly unique to the Chew clan. The El Paso that Ulloa portrays is a frontier agora of liberal thought, with a sometimes-prophetic aura. The spiritual healer Teresa Urrea<\/a>, \u201cla Santa de C\u00e1bora,\u201d who made a home in the city late in the nineteenth century, inspired an ill-fated uprising of her believers against the landed elite in Mexico. The politics of the Mexican Revolution took shape, in part, in the neighborhoods of El Paso, where exiled thinkers and activists imagined a country liberated from the exploitation of dictator Porfirio D\u00edaz\u2019s technocratic elites. And, Ulloa argues, El Paso is where the philosopher and
revolutionary-era education minister Jos\u00e9 Vasconcelos\u2019s vision of Mexico\u2019s mestizo \u201cla raza c\u00f3smica,\u201d a race of all races, manifested in the early twentieth century.<\/p>\n

Yet decade after decade, reality keeps dragging those dreams down to earth. Calls for mass deportations mount. Immigrants are subjected to delousing baths in Zyklon B. Riots and unrest ensue. If much of that sounds familiar in 2026, Ulloa reminds us that El Paso, and the nation, has been here before.<\/p>\n

Despite this litany of setbacks, what emerges from El Paso is the persistent force of \u201cla conciencia colectiva\u201d that Ulloa believes El Paso embraces. It\u2019s an ethic of mutual aid and caring that nurtures the families she follows through all their tragedies and triumphs.<\/p>\n

In this sense, perhaps Ulloa has gotten one thing not quite right. She calls her book \u201can attempt to restore El Paso to its rightful position: at the center, rather than at the margins, of our American story.\u201d But perhaps the margins are exactly where El Paso stands, and not just geographically. The city isn\u2019t the cradle of a particularly American creed; as Ulloa tells it, El Paso challenges our nation\u2019s survival of the fittest ethos, offering a heritage of compassion to which we pay too little attention, much to our detriment.<\/p>\n

Ulloa, who, unusually for a daily newspaper journalist, skillfully deploys a lyrical literary voice, portrays El Paso as an emblem of Texan and American imminence. This book\u2014her first and, one trusts, not her last\u2014can be read as a deeply moving record of our fitful attempts to become a state and a nation that welcome people from all over the world. Or, if we don\u2019t heed El Paso\u2019s history and pay attention to its present, that fail to do so. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n

When you buy a book using this link, a portion of your purchase goes to independent bookstores and Texas Monthly receives a commission. Thank you for supporting our journalism. <\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in the March 2026 issue of\u00a0Texas Monthly with the headline \u201cA Landlocked Ellis Island.\u201d\u00a0Subscribe today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Opening image credit: El Paso Museum of History\/The Chew Family\/University of Texas at El Paso Library Special Collections Department, Eva Ross; retouching: Texas Monthly<\/p>\n

When you buy a book using a link on this page, a portion of your purchase goes to independent bookstores and\u00a0Texas Monthly\u00a0receives a commission. Thank you for supporting our journalism.<\/p>\n

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