El Paso
Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory
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- £9.49
Publisher Description
From New York Times reporter Jazmine Ulloa, a sweeping human history of El Paso, revealing violence, power, and privilege at play in America's most famous border town.
El Paso has been called the “Ellis Island” of America’s southern border, a mountain pass cum border town cum bifurcated metropolis where past meets future, and disadvantage meets opportunity, or so the promise goes.
El Paso is an extraordinary, can’t-look-away reported history; it uses deep research and dozens of new interviews to blow away the myth of this place, where Mexico’s Juarez and America’s El Paso intertwine. It charts the history of El Paso through five families. From the Mexican Revolution and the Mexican Repatriation, to the shifting immigration laws under Reagan and Trump and the violence and bloodshed brought on by the drug war, El Paso captures a place often misunderstood or forgotten by the rest of the country, and the world.
El Paso is a brave new work of narrative nonfiction that gives new voice and perspective to history that has long been checked at the border, or told through the lens of white men alone. Ulloa draws upon meticulous research and reporting and stunning historical detail to craft the intimate narratives of an unforgettable cast of characters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times reporter Ulloa debuts with a meticulously researched, at times gut-wrenching study of El Paso that explores how the political and racial tensions of the past have affected the city's present day. Ulloa tells her story through the trajectories on five families of disparate ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, while periodically returning to a 2019 mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart, where the killer espoused a white supremacist ideology. Along the way, she probes outside influences on the city, including political unrest and authoritarianism in Guatemala that led to a rise in migrants seeking a better life to the north and an uptick in cartel-linked violence in Mexico at the turn of the 21st century, including the infamous femicides of Juárez, the Mexican city across the border from El Paso. In a narrative with a scope grand enough to chronicle Pancho Villa's larger-than-life presence but also detailed enough to describe the quotidian lives of Mexicans of Chinese descent in the late 19th century, Ulloa manages to weave a fascinating tapestry of evolving race and class relationships in a richly layered but often overlooked corner of America. The result is an expansive view of a complex crossroads town.
