On Hospitality

Two weeks ago, I deactivated my Airbnb listing for the Book House after nearly thirteen years of continuous hosting. It was time to move on.

The Book House (1892)

But I started hosting way before that... I purchased my first home in 2009 in an unincorporated area of Lincoln County, New Mexico, on the road to a ski area. It had three bedrooms and three bathrooms, and I was single with no children. I immediately rented out two of the bedrooms (and a sofa by the pellet stove to T., who came down from Albuquerque on weekends), so that I could cover my mortgage and pay off the house early. I didn’t have leases – merely oral agreements with ski patrol and ski instructors who needed something seasonal.

When I moved back down to El Paso in 2010, I missed some of that easy camaraderie that came with living with roommates – a pot of coffee already made when you got up or the fire lit when you got home. Privacy was important to me, but within a larger communal setting, in this case one house.

My husband and I moved to Valparaiso, Chile, and lived in a hostel for about four months in 2013, with our oldest son who took his first steps there. I wrote draft profiles of some of the sketchier characters who crossed our paths – Monica from Poland, Sergey from Russia. It was the kind of instability we had chosen. There were language barriers, cultural faux-pas, and some infrastructural inconveniences, such as the water on our hill being cut off for three days.

When we came back from Chile, my husband and I were some of the first people in El Paso to list a bedroom in our homes on the Airbnb platform. Yes, we had a two-year-old. And our home was not in the fanciest area, but it was close to downtown. I was the profile picture/organizer/cleaner. He was the front-of-house, boisterous host who would steer people in the direction of what they were looking for. We went all in.

Casa River, before we redid the floors, now our bedroom.

We made breakfast burritos with the chard and chili from our backyard, and tortillas from the neighborhood store. People started raving about them on the reviews, so if we were out of something, we couldn’t pretend as if it was an amenity we didn’t offer – I was running down to the corner store for eggs at 7:00 am.

I couldn’t believe we were charging $40 a night for 30 minutes of cleaning and a made bed. We don’t have a dryer in our home, so we had two sets of sheets, and I’d line dry them every other day. We were booked solid. We raised our price to $50 a night, thinking we could take a few nights off, but that didn’t happen either.

The guests were great. We put a map up in the back room with pins, and by the time we quit due to COVID, we had hosted guests from 32 countries and most of the U.S. states.

When my oldest son was about five, we got him a rolling suitcase as a gift. One day, our doorbell rang, and he was at the door with his suitcase. He introduced himself as “the guest” and asked to be shown to his room. He appraised everything with a discerning eye and asked for the Wifi code. Playing along, we asked where he was from and what he did. He said, “I’m from Austin, and I work in construction.”

He was our unwitting companion at countless dinners and late-night conversations. We hosted journalists, politicians, people from all over the world who exposed him to far more than most children his age.

You could say that we had trouble with boundaries. We made friends too easily. I could say that there were worse problems. I am still in touch with many of the past guests who stayed with us; a few have become good friends.

The Paso Del Norte region has historically been described as a hospitable place. Even during wartime, opposing forces were fed and housed and let go on their way. The communities of Ysleta and Socorro were formed by refugees of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 — Native Americans and Spaniards fleeing south together. During the French occupation of Mexico, Benito Juárez sought refuge in what is now Ciudad Juárez and later, the Cruz Blanca set up clinics during the Mexican Revolution to treat wounded soldiers from all sides. There’s something about the harshness of the territory that brings out the humanity in all of us.

It’s why I’m particularly distraught by the detention centers and “camps” that infringe on our city and its spirit. I am particularly distraught that some now describe this place not as welcome, but as “torture,” as one Irishman recently did. The fact that there is indefinite detention at a soft-sided tent facility that was only designed to hold people for up to 72 hours. The warehouses outside of El Paso that DHS has acquired are for up to 8,500 people, and they could be held up to 60 days, according to El Paso Matters. A friend of mine recently published this about the camp in the Boston Review - I highly recommend.

The Indo-European root gʰóstis gives us both “guest” and “host.” Embedded in the word itself is reciprocity — the stranger is never one-sided. All major religions recognize hospitality as sacred: the posada in Catholic tradition, the mitzvah of welcoming the stranger in Judaism, the obligation in Islam as an act of obedience to God, the Hindu teaching that the guest is divine. To me, these dictates resonate as some of the most sacred aspects of any religion.

We mostly move through life without considering vulnerability at that level – that you may need a place to stay. Someone may need a hospital, or hostel, or hospice. Or someone may need a shelter from a snowstorm in New York, or a domestic situation. Things that supersede other needs. It’s all the same idea. Let us get you sheltered, fed, healed, clothed, and then we will consider where you go from here.

I don’t miss the late-night doorbell. I miss the chance to open it.