Notes from the Beautiful Periphery

An Introduction and Welcome

It was July 4, and I was tired and fighting off some throat infection. My kids begged me to drive them up to Rim Road to watch fireworks before we went to bed. Reluctantly, I piled them in the car and found a space along the ridge that was already full of people in folding chairs, drinking beer and laughing. It was almost dark, and their tiny silhouettes bobbed near the edge with the excitement of little boys. They jumped and pointed when they would hear an explosion.

I thought back to past Julys at Music Under the Stars, free concerts sponsored by the City of El Paso, where up to 10,000 people would gather at the Chamizal Park and we’d dance, drink and stretch out on blankets each Sunday evening in the summers. I looked toward the Chamizal and my kids also noticed fireworks going off in Juarez, echoing our celebration.

I had this realization that many of the key events in my life had occurred within this three-mile radius I was looking down into, between the mountain and Juarez, between Cotton and the University of Texas at El Paso. My first day of school at age four, my first kiss, my first apartment, my first serious job (all my jobs in this city), my marriage, the births of my children, graduate school, countless parties and dinners in friends’ houses and apartments… and I had this intense feeling of place and love for that place and centering. I could feel the sand and prickles through my tire-soled huaraches, and it brought with it a feeling of goodwill not just to those I love, but towards everyone I was looking out onto. I knew then and know now that this is a special place.

My husband and I don’t really consider El Paso peripheral. Our city is in the very middle of the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border. It was a critical stop two thirds of the way up the Camino Real between Mexico City and Santa Fe. We have a particular spot in our back yard, on the grass outside my back room with the Hammond organ in it, that we cheekily labeled “the center of the universe.” We have drunk tequila out there with journalists from around the world, laid on the ground and looked at stars through the strings of light and Queen Anne’s lace. Our kids will ask to go sit out there in the spring when the grass is littered purple with the flowers that have blown off our Texas Mountain Laurel tree. We feel that we live in the very heart of El Paso, nestled between the Franklin Mountains and downtown, and we feel a deep sense of home and grounding.

If many people from El Paso feel similarly, not a lot of people outside of the city see El Paso this way. El Paso, and its twin city Ciudad Juárez are geographically distant, as well as culturally distinct from political centers of power, being Austin, Washington DC, Chihuahua, and Mexico City. And much of what I have seen in my lifetime is a dismantling of the city I have known and loved.

Desert landscapes are seen as empty, places to fill with Amazon fulfillment centers and data centers, places to launch rockets from, large territory for military training with fake Iraqi villages to boot. Wealthy landowners have scooped up enormous tracts of West Texas ranchland, even without water, to park their capital. Our river has been forced into a cement canal, with walls erected and adorned with razor wire. El Paso and Juarez have been severed and militarization has been normalized, accepted. National rhetoric about the U.S.-Mexico border emphasizes a place of lawlessness, danger and chaos.

I witness the exhaustion of my neighbors, in this poor city, where people do hard labor for a pittance, often in the hot sun, and then don’t have enough money to go to the doctor or to pay the hospital when they are sick. I witness migrants on both sides of this border, who have been through so many trials and manage to retain hope. And the political nerves of our city are frayed, just like elsewhere in the country. The divisions have split families, friends, and have even killed, as when a white supremacist murdered 23 people at a Wal-Mart in 2019.

So how do we reimagine a place that is so thickly layered, that encompasses both hope and despair? How do we convince others that change and the free movement (of people) can be good, and even possible? How can we resuscitate our river, and once again equate water, clean water, with life? How can we elevate voices that have been silenced, and how can we retell our past in all its messy convolution?

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When I think of this region, I think of magic, and I think of welcome. I think of the enslaved Apache who followed the moon from Mexico City back to the Rio Grande, walking only at night, to escape back to her mountain home. I think of all the creatures that live in the soil, that are hidden in day but come out at night to prowl. I think of the Spaniards who channeled the river into long acequias and cultivated the best wines and brandies from the prized fruits of this valley. I think of the tunnel to Cloudcroft that magically transports you from desert to forest.

Every time I read a historic description of my city, it is described as “hospitable.” If you have made it through the desert, we must welcome you, whether from a day’s drive or a trudge through seven countries. If we are hospitable, it is because this place is not.

Many people have been in this desert before me. This is not the terra nullis of Henry Miller’s America, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. This is not Cormac McCarthy’s world of hardscrabble men and irredeemable violence.

If you splashed a stone into the pond of our city, the ripples would encompass the beautiful forests, lava fields and gypsum sands of New Mexico, the wastelands of West Texas, much of Northern Mexico. This land has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years. Startling evidence emerged from this region in 2021 that challenged long-held Clovis First beliefs that the first peoples in the Americas crossed the Bering Strait. In an article published in the journal Science, researchers uncovered human tracks within White Sands that were alongside animals long extinct, like the giant sloth. Radiocarbon dating of nearby seeds showed the footprints were between 21,000 and 23,000 old.

More recently, The Mogollon people lived for centuries near Three Rivers area, dwelling in semi-subterranean pithouses. More than a millennium ago, Pueblo peoples were measuring the sun. There was advanced astronomic knowledge in disparate groups; all history that I was never taught as a child and have spent the past decade tried to recover.

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It was nearly two years into the pandemic, and I had to pry my children out of the house… we went for the day to dig in the desert. A friend thought he had found a mastodon femur. We already placed a jawbone in the sun, bleached and dirt-caked after millennia underground. The bone was a delicate white and we chipped away for a few hours, until it became obvious that it was actually a piece of petrified wood. Based on the dimensions and size, likely palmwood, dating back to two million years old, give or take 10,000 years (according to another geologist friend). We hoisted it out and it split in two – since I volunteered to carry out a piece, I put one half in my front yard, a bit of ancient forest unearthed, under the mesquite tree where I buried my younger son’s placenta. The wood was surprisingly heavy, almost like carrying a small child.

We were on the mesa near La Union, across the valley from the Franklin Mountains, this rift valley lined with volcanoes that could have split and welcomed in the ocean. I imagined a large river with verdant riverbanks flowing through the middle of El Paso. From Sunset Heights you could walk downhill less than half a mile and have a picnic, put in a raft or canoe, listen to the birds and insects. The river near downtown El Paso would be a place of gathering, where there were parks on both sides and it was full of dancers, children, vendors, waterfowl. I imagined it as a life-giving force that drew us to the center of one great city, and we celebrated the free movement and exchange of people – not just goods and money.

The essays I will present in this space are both reflections of my city’s place in the world, and a personal attempt to understand my place in the city. There will be others’ voices, places and reflections. These essays are also about edges, about borders, these beautiful places where things blend or sometimes come to an abrupt halt. But ideally, borders are something we can face, and then dismantle. Borders warp our minds and place so many practical inconveniences. But borders are also essentially porous; it is part of their attraction.

Time is on my side; one day, this border will fall and will be a blip in the history of this land. The question is how we live our life, how we care for others, how we treat the earth, and how we raise our children in the meantime. I invite you to come along on this journey of reimagining.

February 2025