El Paso draws strength from its deep Mexican-American history

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August 8, 2019

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El Paso draws strength from its deep Mexican-American history

Source: AP | 00:00 UTC+8 August 8, 2019 |

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The massacre that killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso struck the US city that has long been the cradle of Mexican-American culture and immigration and suffered through bloody episodes of racial violence in the past.

The white gunman apparently wrote an anti-Hispanic rant before opening fire with an AK-47-style rifle on Walmart shoppers — many of them Latino — rattling a city that has helped shape Mexican-American life across the US for generations.

Many Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado and beyond can trace their families’ roots to El Paso, sometimes called the “Ellis Island” of the border. The city served as a port of entry where immigrants from the interior of Mexico had to come to gain entry into the US before World War II.

Mexican Revolutionary leader Pancho Villa visited the city. Country artist Marty Robbins famously sang in 1959 about falling “in love with a Mexican girl” here. It is the birthplace of civil rights lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta, journalist Ruben Salazar and poet Pat Mora.

“El Paso has a deeper history than what you see on the news,” said Sergio Troncoso, an El Paso-born novelist who now lives in New York City. “That manifesto shows that white nationalists continue to reduce El Paso to immigration and a place of foreigners. It’s so much more than that.”

In the last year, El Paso has garnered attention because of the rapid rise of migrants from Central America coming to seek asylum. The city also has been a testing ground for immigration enforcement, with the government spending millions of dollars on agents, barriers and border-security technology and equipment.

US President Donald Trump, who visited the city yesterday, has cited El Paso’s crime rate as proof for why his border wall is needed , despite FBI statistics that show the city routinely has a violent crime rate below the national average.

Why the alleged shooter chose El Paso as his target remains a mystery. But the online rant investigators have attributed to him speaks of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Local Anthony Medrano said he wished the shooter had paused and thought before hurting people shopping in the predominantly Mexican-American city of 700,000. "We would have shown him what a great place this is ... where you can walk out at night and not get mugged," Medrano said.

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El Paso draws strength from its deep Mexican-American history

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