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I’m gonna step back from here for a bit, but before I do I’d like to share something about El Paso-Juarez. Having spent a lot of time there over the last 6 years, I love it dearly. And this attack is not only on El Paso-Juarez, but on the true greatness America aspires to
I love this city. This ENTIRE city of El Paso Juarez. Part of it is personal: friends there have become family; strangers have taken me in on Christmas Eve there, and their families welcomed me as one of their own.
On a night I lost one of the kindest souls I’ve known to suicide, she opened her arms to me. Strangers gave me comfort and strength. For no other reason than because it was right.
But it’s much more than that. El Paso-Juarez is the embodiment of America, and encompasses both our promise and our failures. It is literally a single city, cleaved in 2 by the hubris of Manifest Destiny and “American Exceptionalism.”
It is at once the safest place and most dangerous place to be. It is in equal measures vibrant and sleepy, old and new. A place where white, Mexican, Arab, and Asian families have risen to power, legal and otherwise.
While Hollywood and some writers have made it out to be a an inherently dark, insane landscape upon which white men work out their existential worries, it is none of those things.
El Paso-Juarez is full of life and music and food and hope. It’s a place where a black man and a white woman, raised in Segundo Barrio and madly in love, can make the giant gringo’s jaw drop when they speak better Spanish than English while watching ball at The Tap.
It’s a place where street artists flock to write their dreams and frustrations and obsessions on any surface they can find. Where priests and nuns and atheists and righteously angry law students band together to protect the least of us.
And is strip malls and big box stores and backyard pools, long stretches of chain restaurants and taco shops, medical device stores and tire shops. Of vast colonias and brightly painted buses, of McMansions and gated communities.
El Paso-Juarez is America in all its beautiful promise and peril, straddling an imaginary line in the dessert. An oasis that welcomes one and all, without regard to color or religion or legal condition. It is us, and yet better than we are, for now.
