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The Loss of Juárez
How Has the Violence in Juárez Changed Border Culture?
Sergio Troncoso
Recently I returned home to El Paso, and as we drove back to Ysleta
on the Border Highway a sense of sadness overtook me. My kids,
Aaron and Isaac, have for two years been clamoring to go to Mexico.
They have studied Spanish in New York City, where we live, and their
classroom walls are covered with posters from Latin America and
Spain. When we return to Ysleta to visit their abuelitos, that is the
opportunity to transform the Spanish language and Mexico to more
than just academic subjects, to eat an enchilada or an asadero, rather
than just to lick your lips at pictures.
But my wife and I have said no, because of the rampant violence
in Juárez. On this day we settled for stopping on the shoulder of the
freeway, just after the Bridge of the Americas and on top of the Yarbrough
overpass. My sons took photographs of Mexico and the infamous
border fence they have studied in school. “It looks like the wall
of a rusty prison,” one said. My niños smiled at me, as good sons do,
but theirs weren’t really smiles. They were obedient, and acquiesced.
Perhaps Aaron and Isaac silently questioned whether their parents
were overly protective, or just old and narrow-minded.
I do want them to know the Juárez I knew as a child. But the current
violence and the wall have separated us. It is no compensation
to look at Juárez from afar, and I felt as disappointed as my children.
What I know, what I want them to know, I can’t show them, because
I will never willingly put them in harm’s way.
What many who have not lived on the border may not understand
is how close El Paso and Juárez were, and are, even today.
Close culturally. Many with families in both cities. Close in so many
ways. When I was in high school in El Paso, my family always–and I
mean every Sunday–had a family dinner in Juárez at one of my parents’
favorite restaurants: Villa Del Mar, La Fogata, La Central, Tortas
Nico, and Taqueria La Pila.
It was going back in time, to the city where my father and mother
met and were married. But it was also to experience another set of
rules and values, to a mysterious country with more bookstores than
I ever saw in El Paso, to tortas and open-air mercados, to primos who
would drop everything to show me their horses, and even to my first
funeral–the open casket after all these years has remained vivid in my
mind. A young boy, the son of a friend of my parents, had been run
over by a car. Juárez for me was primal and powerful; it was my history.
I thought I understood it instinctually, even spiritually, and that
is just when it baffled me the most. After graduating from Harvard,
I spent a year in Mexico City, a Chicano Chilango, in order to decide
whether I belonged in the United States, or en el otro lado.
On Monday just before we left for El Paso, I was trying to explain
this to friends in Boston, at a Passover Seder. How Juárez was closer
to El Paso, than New York City was to New Jersey. How people went
to lunch in Juárez and were able to return to the United States in a
couple of hours. How we used to go to Waterfil over the Zaragoza
International Bridge (on the eastern outskirts of Juárez) for Easter picnics,
clinking cases of Fantas, Sangrias and Cocas, for jarampiñados,
pan dulce and pan francesito, and my personal favorite, homemade
Mexican fireworks. All of what we could not find in Ysleta. Yes, it was
that close, in the most trivial and profound ways.
I tried to explain to these Red Sox fans how when I went to
Juárez as a child and as an adult in El Paso, it was more than just for
food and tchotchkes. It was going to another possibility of being.
The buildings were older than those in El Paso, and the streets more
congested. The cobblestones and curbs were well-worn and shiny.
The shoe shine boys snapped their red rags on shoes waiting atop
hand-carved shoe-shine kits. I marveled at the men who fixed flats in
Waterfil, their hands a deep brown, working quickly to snap a tire out
of its rim with a few perfectly placed strikes of a tire iron.
Returning to Juárez was returning to the elemental, to a living
history, to discovering an innate intelligence and workmanship that
comes to be when you have to make do. Returning to Juárez was
gaining an understanding of my father and mother. Despite backbreaking
hardships, no money, and eking out a living in the desert of
Ysleta, on weekends they would crank up their old stereo to listen to
Javier Solis and Los Panchos. On their porch in Ysleta, in front of my
mother’s rose bushes, the sun setting behind the Franklin Mountains
to the west, they were happy and in love. But their indomitable spirit
had been nurtured not in America but on the other side.
So Juárez was never a joke for me, as it was for some of my
Anglo friends and not a few of my Chicano friends from El Paso. It
was a portal to another world that felt at once deeply familiar and
strangely fascinating.
On the other hand, El Paso was littered for miles with fast food
chain stores and perfectly built highways where a human being walking
seemed an oddity. In grade school, I once went to an event honoring
the famous Mexican-American golfer Lee Trevino, and my parents
bought me a t-shirt that declared in bright green letters, ‘I’m one of
Lee’s fleas!’ But what I most remember about that day was a burly
Anglo man strolling by with his wife and sniggering, “That’s one fat
flea.” My pride turned to shame. In El Paso as in Juárez, I also fit in and
did not fit in, but too often in Texas the ambiguity of this existence
was laced with hurt.
Three years ago the Juárez I knew changed. An unprecedented
orgy of drug violence exploded in Juárez. The government against
drug cartels. Soldiers on Avenidas 16 de Septiembre and López Mateos,
with machine guns anchored atop jeeps. Dozens of murders
per week. Sometimes dozens of murders in one weekend. The breakdown
of society, with hundreds of thousands fleeing the violence.
Three years ago, we lost Juárez, as a place to show our kids where
their abuelitos came from, and in so many other ways. My parents
have not returned to their hometown in three years. This past that
has shaped them, even though it is less than a few kilometers
away, is now a forbidden, forsaken territory. It is
a deeply felt loss for many of us in El Paso.
I am tired of pointing out that the billion-dollar
drug habits of the United States and the millions of dollars
of American guns illegally exported to Mexico are
root causes of the drug violence. How often can you
point out American hypocrisy and myopia on the drug
violence in Mexico before you realize that you cannot
force a people to understand what they do not want to
see. I am tired of witnessing a corrupt local police force
in Mexico, and an ineffective national government,
which has failed to provide for the basic security of its
citizens. For the moment, the hypocrisy, the idiocy, and
the cheapness of life are too much to bear.
Thousands of lives have been lost. Neighborhoods
have been abandoned. On the American side of the border,
we hear precious few enlightened words from politicians,
a reach even under the best of circumstances.
Instead, electioneering demagogues have jumped at the
opportunity to target the powerless, the dark-skinned,
the other.
I just miss Juárez. I miss it as a place to show my
children how their abuelitos began in this world. I miss
Juárez as a place to appreciate another way to be. When
will this nightmare end?
My only hope is how Juárez has, in part, come to
El Paso. In relocated people, with Green Cards, who
have fled the violence. In new restaurants and other
businesses in El Paso, which once thrived in Juárez.
Here, on this side, they wait for the darkness to pass.
But even when a peaceful Juárez returns –and I know
one day it will– it will not return to what it was. In the
memories of those who survive will be what was lost
for a few years, and perhaps forever.
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