Tag Archives: El Paso
Eye on Texas: Border Tuner
In November, a massive public art project lit up the sky over El Paso and Juárez, prompting conversations both funny and serious, political and personal.
I met Argeenis, a 23-year-old drag queen from Ciudad Juárez, on my fifth day of documenting El Paso’s Border Tuner art project. The multimedia installation b...Read More
An Incendiary New Book Reveals How Politics in El Paso Are Rigged
Who Rules El Paso? shows how a coterie of rich, primarily white Republicans control local government.
Written by El Paso social justice activists including an attorney, two emeritus professors, and a former county employee, Who Rules El Paso? is the most oblique...Read More
He May Not Be a Candidate, but Beto O’Rourke is Rebuilding His Texas Organizing Machine for 2020
O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate campaign was fueled by an organizing network of 20,000 volunteers. Can he harness that energy again without being on the ticket?
Beto O’Rourke began 2019 as a political phenom, but ended it as an also-ran. The much-hyped former U.S. representative from El Paso initially rode a wave of o...Read More
Strangest State: 18-Hole Hog, Spike the Poodle’s Big Adventure, and Fowl News
Weird news from far-flung Texas.
SAN ANTONIO // A 400-pound feral hog roamed free on a South San Antonio golf course—until management called in the big guns. Wyatt Walton is co-owner of Lone ...Read More
Artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer on the Importance of Telling Complex, Nuanced Border Stories
A massive public art project lit up the sky over El Paso and Juárez this month, prompting conversations both funny and serious, political and personal.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer hates searchlights. They evoke surveillance and fear, and in the El Paso-Juárez borderlands, where his most recent artwork debuted this mo...Read More
Editorial: Reckoning with El Paso
People like to believe things are getting better—but what happened in El Paso underscores just how little has changed.
As I write this editorial, I’m exactly three months into my tenure at the Texas Observer. In that time, I’ve had the good fortune to hear readers express ge...Read More
‘El Paso Will Never Heal’: Three Months Later, the Border Town Still Reels
El Pasoans share the deep and expansive trauma that the Walmart massacre has inflicted, and they’re urging lawmakers to take action.
Faded American, Mexican, Texas, and German flags ripple in the wind and a single wind chime softly clinks at a makeshift memorial at the Walmart in El Paso whe...Read More
Sergio Troncoso’s New Book Is a Beautiful Meditation on the Borderlands
A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son reminds readers that the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, so frequently flattened and stereotyped, are as personal as they are political.
In the opening lines of Sergio Troncoso’s new collection of linked short stories, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son, our narrator, David, stands in front o...Read More
Up From the Desert
As a child, I hunted for fossils in the Chihuahuan Desert beyond my backyard. Those afternoons shaped the way I think about my fronteriza identity today.
I spent many childhood afternoons searching for sea fossils in the Chihuahuan Desert, finding geologic history strewn throughout the brown and dusty land. My ne...Read More
