Like many El Pasoans, Jazmine Ulloa\u2019s life was forever altered on Aug. 3, 2019.<\/p>\n
Ulloa was then a reporter for the Boston Globe, which sent her to El Paso the day after the white supremacist mass shooting that killed 23 people and wounded 22 others. She grew up in El Paso, graduated from Burges High School, then went on to college and a journalism career that took her far away from home.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was a tragedy that happened just three minutes from where I went to high school, and it affected a lot of close people that I know and love, including my best friend,\u201d whose father was inside the Cielo Vista Walmart at the time of the attack, she said.<\/p>\n
Ulloa described it as \u201cone of the hardest assignments I ever had to cover.\u201d But the return home got her thinking about how the shooting was connected to other issues she had been covering.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had already been watching El Paso become this backdrop to the nation\u2019s immigration battles, and some were calling it the new Ellis Island, and then, in this new Ellis Island, we were watching children getting separated at the border, migrants getting penned up under the Santa Fe bridge,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd, so, I just started thinking that I needed to return and really start digging deeper into that history, thinking about El Paso, how that (Ellis Island) name fits and doesn\u2019t, and why we don\u2019t hold it in the same regard as we do with Ellis Island,\u201d the disembarkation point in New York Harbor for millions of primarily European immigrants.<\/p>\n
Ulloa concluded that immigration through El Paso and the U.S.-Mexico border is viewed much differently than the 19th and 20th century immigration at Ellis Island.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe people passing through El Paso were mostly blue-collar workers, they were Mexican, and they were Latino workers who were lured by the promise of the American dream and then cast out with each nativist era, with the whims of each generation,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The result of Ulloa\u2019s exploration is her new book, \u201cEl Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory,\u201d which was published Tuesday by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House.<\/p>\n
Ulloa, now a national reporter for the New York Times, will discuss her book Monday, March 9,<\/a> at an event presented by El Paso Matters and the El Paso Community Foundation. She will speak at 7 p.m. at the Philanthropy Theatre inside the Plaza Theatre in Downtown El Paso. Admission is free, and doors open at 6:30 p.m.<\/p>\n Copies of her book will be available for purchase, and she will sign copies after the event.<\/p>\n