{"id":400653,"date":"2026-08-07T22:52:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T22:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/400653\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T22:52:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T22:52:15","slug":"el-paso-the-countrys-overlooked-immigration-anchor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/400653\/","title":{"rendered":"El Paso, the country\u2019s overlooked immigration anchor"},"content":{"rendered":"

That meditation became the seed of Ulloa\u2019s \u201cEl Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory<\/a>,\u201d published this spring by Dutton. The book follows five families from various immigrant ancestries across a century \u2014 the Chews, the Martinezes, the Holguins, the Rubios, and the Mura\u2019ls \u2014 to argue that El Paso, not Ellis Island, is the country\u2019s true immigration gateway, and that the nativism behind the 2019 massacre was never an aberration but a through-line in how the US has written its immigration laws.<\/p>\n

Ulloa\u2019s book has earned strong reviews, including from Julia Preston, one of the most authoritative American writers on immigration. In The New York Review<\/a>, Preston called the book<\/a> \u201ca panoramic, abundantly detailed history of a century of turmoil and restless migratory movements gravitating around El Paso.\u201d<\/p>\n

I spoke with Ulloa, now a national immigration reporter at the New York Times, about the book, how it\u2019s been received, and why El Paso keeps resurfacing in the news without the history to explain it. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

In the book, you write about how the country never fully contextualized the El Paso Walmart shooting. Do Americans understand what happened any better now?<\/p>\n

Sadly, I don\u2019t think we\u2019ve fully contextualized that shooting. That was part of what I was trying to do with the book: resurface it and study it from a much longer lens of time.<\/p>\n

The shooter\u2019s manifesto used the word \u201cinvasion.\u201d That language has become almost standard in political rhetoric. What\u2019s it like watching words that incited a mass shooting in your hometown become so normalized?<\/p>\n

When I was reporting on the book, that language was already becoming a common refrain, not only in political speeches out on the campaign trail, but in the halls of Congress and in state legislatures. I wanted to understand the origins of that rhetoric. Historians reminded me that this type of nativism has been central to how we\u2019ve shaped immigration policy. Historian Erika Lee\u2019s work in particular has been instrumental in bringing that history to light. <\/p>\n

What strikes me isn\u2019t just how normalized this language has become in everyday political speech, it\u2019s how far back it stems. I found newspaper clippings of politicians decrying an \u201cinvasion\u201d as far back as the late nineteenth century, when the US was excluding Chinese laborers under the first law in this country explicitly based on race.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the one piece of history you wish every reader would carry out of the book?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been struck by how little people know about the repatriations of the 1930s, which were the first mass removals of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the US. One chapter that I think illustrates how nativism has been integral to immigration policy goes back even earlier, to the 1920s, when border stations were retrofitted to delouse Mexican laborers. They were forced to strip down and sprayed with chemicals because they were seen as dirty, unclean, as disease carriers.<\/p>\n

Why do you think the national immigration story is so durably attached to Ellis Island, and not to the border, specifically El Paso?<\/p>\n

El Paso is the American city that most tells us about our nation\u2019s immigration battles today. But it\u2019s also become a political backdrop to those battles. We\u2019ve had this distortion of the border for so long: if you see the border as a scary, dystopian place, it\u2019s easier to ignore the waves of blue-collar workers, many of them Mexican and Latino, who\u2019ve crossed for generations and helped build this country and forge the American Southwest as we know it. <\/p>\n

You\u2019re a former Boston Globe intern and reporter. What did working in Boston teach you about El Paso, and vice versa?<\/p>\n

Boston is itself a hub of American immigration history \u2014 whether it\u2019s the waves of Irish, Italian, Russian and Jewish immigration, and now Latin American immigration. During the George Floyd protests there was a lot of debate happening there about how we tell stories and who gets to tell them. That got me thinking about how I was telling the history of the border, and it encouraged me to explore my own blind spots, because we tend to think of the border only as Latino history, or Mexican history, and we overlook the diversity within that Mexicanness: its Mexican, Spanish and Indigenous origins, and its Chinese origins too.<\/p>\n

You self-identify as a fronteriza \u2014 a word that doesn\u2019t really translate into English. What does it mean beyond the literal, and what are we missing without an English word for that identity?<\/p>\n

I think it describes a person who grows up between two worlds, two languages, two cultures; someone who can move back and forth easily and blend and coexist within both. Not having a word for that in English contributes to erasure, and it contributes to the lack of understanding we have about that part of the country \u2014 that we don\u2019t see our southern borderlands as what they\u2019ve always been: a rich, multiracial, multiethnic stomping ground where forces of white supremacy and resistance have always been at odds, and where identities can collide and collapse into each other and form new kinds of culture.<\/p>\n

This is an excerpt from \u00a1Mira!, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Marcela Garc\u00eda. Sign up to get \u00a1Mira! in your inbox each week<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Marcela Garc\u00eda is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at marcela.garcia@globe.com<\/a>. Follow her on X @marcela_elisa<\/a> and on Instagram @marcela_elisa<\/a>.<\/p>\n