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Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory
by Jazmine Ulloa
Book Reviewed by: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.
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 ...
Ulloa explains that although El Paso sits at the heart of US immigration debates and has played a crucial role in American history, it is often overlooked in these contexts. Her goal is to place the city at the center of national attention and highlight its importance by exploring how it fits into the intertwined histories of the US and Mexico, and its relationship with major historical events and the lives of people who have settled there or passed through. To achieve the above, she traces more than a century of the city's history, beginning in the mid-1800s and moving to the present day. The first part focuses on Herlinda and Antonio Chew, and Victoria and Miguel Martinez, whose lives were impacted by early US immigration laws and shifting borders. Through the experiences of Herlinda and others like her, the book makes clear the actual effects immigration laws, racism, and border changes have on everyday people...continued
Full Review
(678 words)
(Reviewed by Sofia Chatzistefanou).
Beth Macy, author of Dopesick and Paper Girl
A richly-told, eye-opening book that offers truths that all of us should know, about immigration, the border, and ourselves. Brilliantly reported and full of people you will never forget, this is the real story of America. Héctor Tobar, author of Deep Down Dark and Our Migrant Souls
El Paso is the magical and tragic crossroads at the center of North America. And in Jazmine Ulloa's beautiful and impactful storytelling, we see it evolve from a frontier town to a fraught urban center, its streets and alleys the setting of epic historical encounters and culture-defining social movements. At last, that great border city in the desert has the book it deserves.
The Bracero Program, a joint US–Mexico labor agreement, began during World War II and ran from 1942 to 1964. It was created to address severe farm labor shortages in the United States due to the war draft, while also providing jobs for unemployed Mexican farm workers. It was formally established by the 1942 Farm Labor Agreement, and contracted many braceros (manual laborers) as temporary agricultural (and railroad) workers throughout the US. During its 22-year span, about 4.5 million detailed government-negotiated contracts were issued, covering wages, housing, and other conditions. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican men participated in the program, with many returning for multiple contracts. The later, large-scale migration of the ...
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