Some people relax by going to spas or laying on beaches sipping Mai Tais. I go to El Paso because I like being surrounded by optimism, community, and really good food. Not the fancy manufactured kind, but the genuine kind.
I’ve been to El Paso many times before so when I exited the Greyhound from San Antonio, said goodbye to my new friends, I knew where to go, and what I wanted to do.
I marched straight across the street to the Jockey Bar, downed a few Negro Modelos, chatted about the Cowboys with the regulars, including Maria, who retired after thirty years as a hair dresser, then took another bus to a strip mall off of 1-10 to get a bucket of beer and a plate of Camarones Al Ajillo at Señor Fish.
Then I walked the mile to my motel, where I waited to check in behind workmen in dirty orange shirts, Mexican families visiting relatives, and a mob of people clutching red mesh string bags and plastic white Salvation Army bags, holding all their current possessions — immigrants detained and dropped off until an asylum hearing that will determine if they can become Americans, including an entire family, four adults and five kids, from Turkey.
At no time did I hear anyone complaining, see anyone tweaking, or deal with anyone begging. Everyone around me was happy, or at least not unhappy, despite not having very much stuff, because they all had someone who cared for them. Or a goal (being an American) that meant everything to them.
For the next week I did pretty much the same thing and saw pretty much the same thing.
Everyday I got up early, got on a bus to somewhere nearby, and then walked the ten miles into downtown (El Centro). Weaving my way along either the border wall, which hems in El Paso from the south, or along I-10 which cuts through its center, or along the northern border of mountains and Fort Bliss.
These boundaries, natural and man made, makes El Paso a long stretched out city. One filled with a mix of immigrants and military.
It’s a unique working class town. One with functional communities from very different backgrounds, all basking in the glow of having recently realized the American dream. Or at least being on the path to it.
I needed this dose of aspirational happiness after a few days in San Antonio, where I’d gone in hopes of finding that same American dream aura.
While I did find some things to love about San Antonio, I also found a depressing hollowed out downtown living off the fumes of history.
El Paso’s downtown, El Centro, is not hollowed out. At all. It’s a jammed packed cliched vibrant downtown of shoppers, tourists, and locals, all doing that cliched bustling thing.
That’s mostly because it’s literally on the Mexican border, with its main drag ending in a pedestrian bridge vaulting over the border fence. A bridge that’s constantly busy with Mexicans coming into El Paso to shop for clothes, mabye find a little work, visit relatives, or splurge on a mall day, and Americans going into Juarez, for the same reasons, and also to fix up their bodies at prices that won’t send them into debt.
El Centro also benefits from not being encircled and fortressed by a beltway.
El Paso does have its fair share of nasty highway infrastructure, but that’s a few miles off to the northeast. A tangle of intersecting highways lovingly (or mockingly) called the Spaghetti Bowl.
The Spaghetti Bowl somehow even manages to have its charms. Beneath its overhang of arched interstates is a shaded space of heavily muraled parks, which are usually busy with pick up games and families picnicking, but on this trip was being renovated, and the only people I saw were a single group playing soccer and a low-rider preparing for Halloween.
Making the best of a bad situation is the underlying ethos of El Paso. Elevate the mundane through hard work, the right attitude, and bright colors.
My favorite walk is along Alameda Avenue, from its eastern fringes to El Centro. It’s a lower end commercial strip that every American town has. One with strip malls, auto body shops, tire stores, bars, payday shops, pawn shops, restaurants, motels, hospitals, trailer parks, and then more of that.
Alameda is different than most commercial strips in two very important ways though. The biggest difference is it doesn’t just have national chains. Many of the stores and restaurants are locally owned. So instead of Taco Bell you get Tacos Don Cuco, which aren’t comparable because they’re not the same thing. One is reheated crap cosplaying Mexican food and the other’s quickly prepared genuine Mexican food.
The second difference is colors. Alameda is a blossom of pinks, yellows, blues, oranges, and reds. Even the most utilitarian things are fancied up. So you get yellow and red loading docks, and bright pink used car lots. You get party stores festooned with murals and home made piñatas. You get auto shops with artfully arranged piles of tires against a backdrop of bright blue.
That flamboyancy goes hand in hand with local ownership. The colors and ads aren’t mandated by a far away corporate headquarters so worried about safety, branding, and conformity, that they turn everything into a landscape of dull utilitarian greys.
While being colorful may seem like a trivial thing, it really matters. Especially when contrasted against the dessert landscape. It makes El Paso feel special, because it is special. Not just another sprawling middle income place immersed in the blah. It’s a unique and bright place.
That adds to the overall optimism.
The same is true of the neighborhoods on either side of Alameda. Small collections of well kept homes on dusty streets with lots of dogs. Again. Nothing fancy, but also nothing entirely given over to the practical and functional. Every home has a little flair. A home grotto, or a rock garden of figurines. Places lived in, by people happy to be alive.
But what really makes El Paso my kind of town is the residents.
Over the years I’ve met so many El Paso-ians (?), and almost all are happy. Or at least content. Well beyond what a simple accounting of how much stuff they have says they should be.
From the heavily tattooed Cesar, holding his newborn, rushing to get across to Mexico to visit his in-laws, who when I asked him what the American dream was, said “It’s to make money, raise a family, and to be safe. I was born just 500 yards from here in Juarez. I don’t want my child to face what I had to face. I want the best for him and my wife.”1
To the 70 year old Efren, who while sitting outside of his tiny one room home, invited me in for dinner. Which he changed for, because you can’t have visitors in your house without dressing up. When I asked him why somebody who didn’t have very much seemed so happy, he said, because “I have a roof. I have food. I am safe. I see my family. I am not sure what more you need.”
I could go on and on.
It’s not that everyone in El Paso is constantly running up to tell you how happy they are, it’s that almost nobody runs up to tell you how miserable they are.
Sadly, being confronted by misery, is something I’m used to in the US.
Instead being in El Paso means being surrounded by the perfectly normal, on a colorful stage, and without it being constantly interupted by the immensely sad.
Or that normalcy being juxtaosed jarringly close to absurd levels of wealth and privilege that makes it feel somehow wrong.
It’s a functional normalcy that’s harder and harder to find in the US, where the extremes, on both sides, have taken over.
Where being normal is now abnormal.
My last few nights in El Paso I spent in the Village Inn, a chain restaurant adjacent to my motel. I hung out here because my motel was on the I-10 access road, I didn’t have a car, and the buses stop running after 10 p.m.
It seems an odd choice to hang out in the Village Inn after everything I’ve written. It’s one of those un-colorful chains more at home in the suburban sprawl I went to El Paso to escape.2
But the actors are more important than the stage, and the people inside the Village Inn are a reflection of El Paso itself.
There was my waitress, a young mother who kept apologizing for speaking Spanish to me. She’d moved to El Paso from Florida, originally for the military, but stayed because she liked being close to the border and the mountains. There were the two young men, their white Salvation Army bags next to them, in the Village Inn for the same reasons I was. It was close to the motel. They spent their hours working on English lessons between sips of coffee. There was the Sunday night meeting of “retired business leaders.” One who had owned his own trucking company, another a furniture store, and another who’d sold health insurance to new citizens. Between rounds of gossip, they chatted with the staff, trying to help them fix their life problems.
Basically it was full of people living the American dream, each at a different point in it. Like all of El Paso.
Not a particurarly fancy version of the American dream mind you, but then again it’s the best kind of American dream. Because it’s one almost anyone can achive, has the least ups and downs, and ultimately, comes with the most happiness.
PS: I have way way too many great pictures and things to say about El Paso to fit into one piece. I’ll be writing a few more pieces with travel tips, what the bus system is like, the best food, and so on, about El Paso (and San Antonio).
As usual, paid subscribers have full access to tons of high res pictures they can download (El Paso and San Antonio will be added later this month.)
PSS: A few of the pictures are from prior walking trips to El Paso.
I don’t reguarly ask people I run across what the American Dream is, but in this case, about 10 years ago, I was doing exactly that for a magazine. LOL.
As someone noted when I tweeted a picture of the El Paso Village Inn. It’s one of the few Village Inns with fully working lights.
Walking El Paso
Very late on commenting on this but I just saw your post on walking in Phoenix and went poking around your archive. Pre-covid I used to go to El Paso 4-5 times for work and always had a great time. As you noted, the people of El Paso are great. everyone I encountered was always friendly and welcoming. I was at bar once for lunch and the bartender had lived in my part of Dallas before he came back to El Paso. We chatted for a bit. A couple months later I was back for work, walked in for lunch and the same dude was behind the bar. He looked and me and said "aren't you the guy from Dallas?"
My wife, C and I, we move around based upon "gut feel". We move to places, knowing no one. No Friends, no Family. We find places we love - and we dive in, in to deep end. We recently chose El Paso. We left Florida and moved to El Paso, to pursue a new dream. New life, new culture, fresh vibe. We've only been here a few months now, but everything you say - YES - all true. You nailed it. We feel it too. Special People. Special Place. Love reading your work. So well done. Thank you. Viva El Paso!!!