Growing up, stories of El Paso were often the topics of road trips as my father drove us from Georgia to Texas to visit my family in Dallas/Forth Worth. My father attended the University of Texas, El Paso for a time, so stories of Juarez, the desert, and the big skies of west Texas were spoken fondly of as I sat and listened in childlike awe of a place I had never seen until much later on in life. Perhaps some of the details of life in a border town during the 70’s were omitted, but I can just imagine the shenanigans he got into. I wish I could go back and speak to him as an adult (RIP Pops) and hear the more mature versions of these stories. Hell, maybe they’d be the same stories and I’ve had this idea of what it could have been like in my head and it’s nothing more than that. Maybe it was far wilder than I imagine it was. Either way, the lure of El Paso has been in my head from a very young age despite not ever really spending much time there.
Walking through the city hearing stories of El Segundo Barrio, the Chicano movement and seeing the crossroads of American and Mexican culture, it’s easy to feel the deep sense of history and the melding of the two cultures. While many other cities across the states have fallen into the pitfalls of homogenization, El Paso, at least to an outsider, still retains many of its charm through small independent businesses and preservation of historical buildings and neighborhoods despite some pushes towards gentrification. Hand painted signs, small businesses, and local eateries give El Paso its own special feel. Popping in for menudo in a restaurant that has been in business since 1927, strolling through neighborhoods with deep Hispanic roots, the ties to the past are still obvious. All the while, new little stores and businesses have popped up showing modernity without falling victim to the big box plague that has turned so many cities into carbon copies of themselves. This isn’t to say that isn’t around because it is, but it hasn’t permeated every block of the city like many other places I’ve been. Here are just a few images that spoke to me about this place that has danced in my head since childhood.
