El Paso and the American Story: Placing the Border City at the Center of Our National Identity
Ellis Island is America's most famous historical entry point and helped define the American story. But the story of the border city of El Paso is perhaps more informative for our current moment. El Paso native Jasmine Ulloa explains why we "need to restore El Paso to its rightful position: at the center, rather than at the margins of our American story."
You must know about the boys. There were six, clean‑cut and baby‑faced. At least, that is how I always envisioned them when my mother told their story. Juan de la Barrera, Juan Escutia, and Francisco Márquez. Agustín Melgar, Fernando Montes de Oca, and Vicente Suárez. They were Mexican military cadets, ages thirteen to nineteen, in polished black boots and uniforms of deep blue, when the United States under President James K. Polk invaded Mexico, part of a two‑year war to alter its borders. Polk called it Manifest Destiny. Others saw it for what it was: a land grab.
On a cold, hazy morning in September 1847, before the sun had risen on the rural western edges of Mexico City, the boys rushed to arms. About 7,000 American Army soldiers and marines were descending on Chapultepec, the run‑down castle that served as the Mexican military academy. The Americans fought back lines of Mexican defenses. Their mortars thumped and cannons blasted. Their bayonets cut through thick swirls of smoke. El Castillo de Chapultepec sat on an inactive volcano that the Aztecs had once held sacred. The Americans climbed the rocky hill, past cypresses and laurels, past the spring where the Aztec leader Montezuma was believed to have once sipped from crystal waters. At the top, with shells flying overhead, against soaring views, they used ladders to scale the castle’s stone walls and flooded the corridors, spilling blood on ramps and stairwells.
Inside, they expected to face down more Mexican soldiers. They found some 140 military cadets instead. A garrison commander gave the youngest combatants, dozens of teenagers, orders to fall back. But as the Mexican lore goes, six of the young men, los Niños Héroes, did not retreat. They disobeyed and fought for their country to the death. What would come next would change everything for Mexico, for the United States, for the place that would become a gateway at their dividing line.
The Battle of Chapultepec led to the capture of Mexico City, which essentially ended the war. Five months later, on February 2, 1848, Mexico and the United States signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The peace deal carved a jagged new border between the two nations, spanning almost 2,000 miles from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific Ocean. Along the Rio Grande, in the West Texas borderlands, where I am from, it split a place deep in the heart of Mexican territory into two: what would, in time, become El Paso to the north and Ciudad Juárez to the south. The mountain valley, long a trade outpost for Indigenous Mexicans and Spanish colonizers, would become a portal to the American Southwest as Mexico was forced to relinquish all of its claims to Texas and cede 55 percent of its territory to the United States—including what is now California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, most of Arizona and Colorado, as well as parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.
Historians and scholars all identify their own centers of gravity for when the modern‑day concept of the southern border emerged and the fear of the Mexican took hold. But one point of origin is here in El Paso and the Splitting, in the severing of a large Native American and Mexican and Spanish region into a thin strip of land onto which Americans would project their basest fears of the outsider. The invaders now wary of invasion.
My new book, El Paso, is a narrative history of the city as told through the stories of those who have crossed it. It traces the lives of five families—the Chews, the Martinezes, the Holguins, the Rubios, and the Mura’ls—whose members have passed through the Pass or made it their home, as well as some of the legendary figures who have shaped the city and, in so doing, shaped America, too. Part One centers on Herlinda and Antonio Chew and Victoria and Miguel Martinez, Chinos Mexicanos and Mexicanos, respectively, navigating changing physical and personal borders through the foundational period of the U.S. immigration system. Part Two follows the Rubio sisters and the Holguin brothers—Mexicans soon to be Americans—as they grow up and rise as politicians and entrepreneurs during wars against drugs and terror that help expand that system into a detention and deportation machine. Part Three then captures the journey of Kaxh Mura’l, a Maya Ixil activist, who flees Guatemala as one hundred years of fights over race, labor, and immigration have escalated into an all‑out assault on migrants and the fabric of the United States itself. Each family is emblematic of a critical turn in the history of the U.S.‑Mexico border and its enforcement. I have thought a lot about this history as I have covered the immigration debates that have been central to recent American elections, the battles over democracy, and the aftermath of a rampage instigated by a self‑proclaimed white supremacist who drove into the city to shoot down Mexicans, decrying the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The more I traveled across the country interviewing Americans, the more I realized that El Paso, my hometown, had not been given its due place in the founding mythos of our country.
It might be Ellis Island that we see and remember as integral to our American story, the bustling ocean port of entry where the nation first sorted immigrants, in what historians like Vincent J. Cannato have described as a timeless tension between its ideals and nativist fears. Ellis Island was an American place where others arrived. But El Paso, fronterizo historians David Dorado Romo and Yolanda Chávez Leyva remind us, was a crucial mountain pass into the land that would become the United States long before the first impoverished European ever set foot in New York. And it has been in El Paso, the gateway to the American Southwest, that the United States has since incubated some of its harshest tactics to inspect, surveil, and criminalize the immigrants—once Chinese, Jewish, and Slavic, more recently Venezuelan, Guatemalan, Congolese, and Haitian, always Mexican—it relies on for labor to this day.
I believe we need to restore El Paso to its rightful position: at the center, rather than at the margins of our American story. Only in studying this lasting gateway in the desert—and the treatment of the people who cross it—can we begin to understand the tenuous relationship that Mexican Americans, and Latinos more generally, have had with the United States. It is in its memory that we also see, as historians such as Julian Lim have found, that our southern borderland has long been a rich multiracial, multiethnic stomping ground where Native, Black, Asian, Anglo, and Hispanic identities have been drawn and redrawn, where connections have been forged despite violent divides, where Americans have fought and negotiated over race, power, and privilege for generations. Without knowing El Paso, we do not know our nation. We do not understand that there is no invasion of Texas or of the United States by Mexicans, Hispanics, or “others”: Mexican and Mexican American culture and history have always been a part of who we are as Americans because the United States was formed on land that was Native before it was Spanish, and Spanish before it was Mexican, and Mexican before it was American.
Before the United States and Mexico went to war, before there ever was a Mexico or a United States, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez were not two cities on either side of an international border but one lush, green valley in the chasm of two great mountain ranges. They were an oasis in a place of extreme temperatures and stark desert terrain, with a river that poured into a lake and followed its own whims, mostly flowing gently, at times drying up, raging, or changing course, invariably giving life.
The earliest peoples to cross El Paso knew it as the “pass through the mountains.” Most were nomads. Some lived in rancherías, small villages of one hundred people or so, spread out across the Chihuahuan Desert. They traded turquoise, furs, and shells with pueblos as far as what are now the states of New Mexico and Arizona to the north and Sonora and Chihuahua to the south. We call some of these Indigenous tribes the Suma, Manso, an Jumano, though their real names we will never truly know, as these are the ones given to them by outsiders: Spanish, English, and French explorers, priests, and colonizers, whom Natives would try to stave off as they sought to defend their ways of hunting and careful farming.
The Spaniards who first passed through the Pass in the early 1500s were lured by a mythic empire awash with gold, sapphires, and rubies, but an expedition gone awry deterred the Spanish crown’s interest in the deserts north of Mexico City for almost half a century. The Europeans did not return to the El Paso region until 1581, when three Franciscan friars, Agustín Rodríguez, Francisco López, and Juan de Santa María, followed the Indigenous paths of commerce in a quest for missionary work. They ambled across the mountains, opening the way for the Spanish to enter New Mexico and the rest of the Southwest. Don Juan de Oñate, the Spanish conquistador and explorer, named the gateway Paso del Norte in 1598 when he took formal possession of the land for a Spanish king in a ceremony known as la Toma: the Taking. The Spanish would set up missions along the river, and El Paso and Juárez would become a thriving trade outpost then on the historic Camino Real, or Royal Highway, running from Ciudad Chihuahua to Santa Fe. In 1680, they would serve as a refuge for Spaniards and Tigua people escaping the Pueblo Revolt against Spanish colonizers to the north.
After the United States and Mexico each fought for their independence and won, and the Spanish were gone, Anglo settlers pushed into the land that would become Texas from the east, driving out Native Americans and Mexicanos in a push for white dominance and American democracy and capitalism known as Manifest Destiny. Native Americans escaping the brutality of the Anglos in the plains moved in from the north, often holding on to the prejudicial and racist views of their oppressors and looking down on the enslaved Black people coming in from the Deep South. All the while, Mexican mestizo colonists marched in northward, wiping out Mexico’s Indigenous peoples.
El Paso lay too far west to be included in the initial bounds of Texas, which Anglo Texan settlers first drew in 1836 as they revolted from Mexico in the name of “liberty” and fought to sanction slavery. But Paso del Norte became a prime target in the American pursuit of Manifest Destiny during the war between Mexico and the United States. Colonel Alexander Doniphan and his soldiers occupied its valley, flourishing with tall cottonwoods and vineyards of grapes, figs, and ripe peaches, the year before American troops stormed the military academy at the Castle of Chapultepec.
After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, days after gold was discovered in California, the settlements to the south remained Paso del Norte. And those to the north became known as Magoffin or Franklin, after the wealthy Anglo businessmen who helped develop them, as more Americans rushed through on wagon trains and buggies in hopes of striking it rich out west. In time, Franklin was renamed El Paso and Paso del Norte became Ciudad Juárez.
Some historians see the Splitting, essentially, as a real estate transaction: The United States paid $15 million and gained a bounty of land, plus all of California’s gold and Texas’s oil. But Gloria Anzaldúa, a writer from South Texas, saw the treaty of 1848 as an instrument that cut an open wound in the land—“una herida abierta,” she wrote—one that has never fully healed. I used to imagine the break as cracks in the desert, a rumbling, the underground shifting of hot tectonic plates, such as those that had formed the volcano under Chapultepec. The reality was far less dramatic, though no less seismic: A troupe of American men with notebooks in hand traversed rugged country and, with sticks and stones, demarcated the new border that would separate El Paso from its Mexican sister. America’s new landholdings would transform the slavery debate there, with white Southern enslavers pushing to expand the trade across the country’s new territories and abolitionists resisting it, a fight that would culminate in the Civil War. And even here, historian Laura E. Gómez has written, the influence of the war between Mexico and the United States would persist as U.S.‑Mexico war veterans rose to become its top generals and commanders, including both General Ulysses Grant and General Robert Lee.
With time, El Paso would become a place that, like the rest of the United States, would be caught in a perpetual battle over its story, forever asking if it will be defined by its borders or its bridges. The vigilantes and minutemen, the walls of steel, of officers, of cameras and razor wire and shipping containers, the political stunts and fierce debates over immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees, would all follow. Through this gateway, families like the Chews, the Martinezes, the Holguins, the Rubios, and the Mura’ls would cross the dividing line, from the past to the future, from hardship to opportunity, always calling on the other side, no matter how elusive it sometimes turned out to be in the end.
Adapted from El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory, published by Dutton. Copyright © 2026 by Jazmine Ulloa. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Jazmine Ulloa is a national politics 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. She has made appearances on MSNBC, CNN, and CBS, as well as in Al Jazeera’s documentary television program “Fault Lines,” and HBO’s docuseries “God Save Texas.”
