El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory - Hardcover

Ulloa, Jazmine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593471865 ISBN 13: 9780593471869

Verlag: Dutton, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

From New York Times reporter Jazmine Ulloa, a sweeping human history of El Paso, revealing violence, power, and privilege at play in America's most famous border town.

El Paso has been called the “Ellis Island” of America’s southern border, a mountain pass cum border town cum bifurcated metropolis where past meets future, and disadvantage meets opportunity, or so the promise goes.

El Paso is an extraordinary, can’t-look-away reported history; it uses deep research and dozens of new interviews to blow away the myth of this place, where Mexico’s Juarez and America’s El Paso intertwine. It charts the history of El Paso through five families. From the Mexican Revolution and the Mexican Repatriation, to the shifting immigration laws under Reagan and Trump and the violence and bloodshed brought on by the drug war, El Paso captures a place often misunderstood or forgotten by the rest of the country, and the world.

El Paso is a brave new work of narrative nonfiction that gives new voice and perspective to history that has long been checked at the border, or told through the lens of white men alone. Ulloa draws upon meticulous research and reporting and stunning historical detail to craft the intimate narratives of an unforgettable cast of characters.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter for The New York Times. She previously reported for The Boston Globe, where she was part of a team that won the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, and the Los Angeles Times. A native of El Paso, she started out as a journalist in Texas, where she worked for newspapers in Brownsville, San Antonio, and Austin. She has made appearances on MSNBC, CNN, and CBS, as well as in Al Jazeera’s documentary television program Fault Lines.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Amazing Grace

El Paso and Ciudad Juárez sit at the foot of the mountains. The two cities remain so bound together by land and fate that they almost seem to blend, all rust and amber hues, stretching on either side of a narrow, shallow river that Juarenses call the Rio Bravo, and El Pasoans the Rio Grande. International bridges connect them like arteries. People ebb and flow through them like blood.

On the Mexican side, a giant Mexican flag and a red sculpture in the form of an X, a symbol of country pride and identity, towers over a highway and the thirty-foot-tall steel bars of the border wall. On the American end, a small cluster of downtown skyscrapers rise far above the urban sprawl, flat redbrick offices and old churches, strip malls and restaurants and spaghetti soups of roadways, grids and grids of terra-cotta, Prairie-style, and stucco homes set against the creosote and the yucca.

Interstate 10 cuts through on its way to more exciting destinations like Los Angeles, from metro areas that Americans tend to associate more with Texas like San Antonio, Houston, and Austin. But it is El Paso that is the gateway to the American Southwest-a place of rugged beauty, where from up above as you fly in, the sun reflects off glistening pools and rivulets, where after the blistering heat breaks, before the city lights glimmer, the brownness of the desert is cloaked in gold. A place in between two nations, fixed, depending on your perspective, at their center or at their margins. A place that no matter where else I've lived, or how long I've been away, I call home.


On August 3, 2019, I was nearly 2,000 miles away, in Washington, D.C., where I worked as a national political reporter in the bureau of The Boston Globe. It was a Saturday, and I was in a movie theater when my phone lit up with calls and messages. Friends and family in El Paso were checking in on each other and letting me know they were safe: There had been a mass shooting at a Walmart near the most popular shopping mall in town. Photos and videos from the scene showed bloody victims wheeled out in shopping carts, customers murmuring prayers amid the gun blasts.

The nation had scarcely processed what had unfolded when another mass shooting wracked Dayton, Ohio, thirteen hours later. We jumped into covering the twin tragedies from afar, another deadly day in a politically divided nation replete with guns. But I could not help but feel we were missing the story in the place where I was from. Unlike the killings in Ohio, where authorities had found no political or racial motive, federal enforcement officials were calling the El Paso rampage an act of homegrown terrorism and one of the deadliest attacks on Latinos in the United States. The massacre, as one federal prosecutor would later say, had "spared no one-no one, not the old, not the young, not men, not women, not white, not black, and certainly not brown." Yet a police detective who filed a report from the scene on that day said the man had stated his target as simply "Mexicans."

On Monday morning, with our breaking news deadlines met, I got on a plane to El Paso. When I landed that afternoon, word was still spreading of lost loved ones and close calls. Nearly every passenger around me was scrolling through news stories or whispering, in shock and in grief, about what they had heard or thought they knew. One of my closest childhood friends, Andrea, had texted a group of us to let us know her father was safe, though I did not know yet just how close he had been to the gunfire.

I grabbed my bags and made my way through the terminal, a sense of comfort swelling inside of me at the sight of the old carpet with Southwestern motifs and the mountains beyond the glass windows. It was a familiar routine, the coming and the going. I had been doing it since I had left for college at seventeen. Outside, the desert heat warmed my cold, bare arms. My eyes adjusted to the glare of the brightness. I spotted my uncle Fernando waiting for me in his car by the curb and I hopped in. We drove west through winding highways as we chatted in Spanish about my life in D.C. and where each of us had been when we learned of the shooting. el paso strong signs already decked billboards and businesses. There was a sadness in the air. The city felt apagada-dim and in mourning.

We stopped at the adobe bungalow where Fernando and my aunt Bertha, public-school principals, lived on a hilly street named after a dead president. I said a quick goodbye and moved my luggage into a worn black SUV that they loaned me for reporting. As I pulled out of their driveway, I debated whether to head straight to the crime scene or make one more quick stop to see the rest of my family. We're Mexican American, tight-knit and proud and complicated, and I was sure to answer for it later if I did not. But before I knew it, I found myself taking a detour through the scenic road that curves around the edge of the Franklin Mountains. High above the city, I stopped at the main overlook and sat on one of the stone walls.


Police say the shooter left his home north of Dallas on a warm summer night. He was twenty-one. I picture him as he appeared in his mug shot: pale and disheveled, with dark, matted hair and dull brown eyes. The court records I have read say he could not sleep, that his mind was racing with violent thoughts when he climbed into his car and started driving. On his way out, he passed manicured lawns and shady oak groves, running paths, tennis courts, and affluent homes with tall, pitched roofs and walls of stone veneer-quiet blocks, each one nearly identical to the next, carrying the faraway sounds of grackles and the faint scent of freshly mowed Bermuda grass.

He traveled for at least ten hours. Ten hours to reconsider. To stop. To turn around. But he did not. Suburban roads gave way to open Texas highways, to farms and ranchland where other men had waged other wars. The place he had left behind was one of the many across the United States that had become so diverse in recent years that it reflected what demographers like to describe as the changing face of America. The place where he arrived the next morning had always been that kind of place, the borderland between Mexico and the United States, where life and culture can be fluid and identities often bend, meld, and collapse into one another.

The temperatures in El Paso that Saturday had been hot and quickly getting hotter. Prosecutors say he drove around aimlessly for a while. Delusions in his broken brain. Hate in his heart. It was in those wayward moments when he posted an angry screed to a website known to attract white supremacists and extremists. It ran some 2,300 words and issued a warning against the "Hispanic invasion of Texas." Its ideas reflected a racist doctrine known as the "Great Replacement," which has long circulated in the far-right-wing corners of the internet and holds that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to "replace" and disempower white Americans with Black and Hispanic people. He and his way of life were under attack, the shooter wrote, by foreigners and immigrants, by people who did not look or act or sound like him, and whom he believed were supplanting white people. "If we can get rid of enough people," he said, meaning Mexicans and Hispanics, "then our way of life can be more sustainable."

Seventeen minutes later, court records say, he arrived at a Walmart lot in a commercial center, encompassing big-box stores, a cinema, and a shopping mall frequented by residents on both sides of the border. He had in his trunk a loaded semiautomatic rifle in the mold of an AK-47 and 1,000 rounds of hollow-point bullets that he had bought online. He pulled out the weapon, slung it up against his shoulder, and opened fire. The grounds descended into chaos. Workers and customers, some hurt and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Dutton
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593471865
• ISBN 13: 9780593471869
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland