When I was growing up, El Paso was the place stories came from. Stories of my dad and his cousins sneaking across the border to Juárez, Mexico, to watch bullfights; the one about my great-aunt Luz, who sawed the cast off her broken leg so she could attend a high school dance; the bit about the flooded yard and the plague of rashes. These stories had a biblical quality and a bigness to them, with brave characters, dramatic punishments, and outrageous gestures. I imagined them happening in a setting defined by the heat of the summer, the clear light of winter, the bare granite of the mountains, and the endless desert.
All of this was different from where I lived as a kid in Salinas, California, a temperate place where morning fog settled over the valley, and a brisk ocean wind blew through in the afternoon. The landscape and weather couldn’t have been more different from El Paso. I was blind to the beauty of where I lived, always imagining that adventures only happened elsewhere. When my dad told stories, that somewhere else was El Paso.
His stories felt precious, like family heirlooms that would eventually be mine. I was greedy for them, wanting to be part of them, a character in my own El Paso story.
Every summer, we took a trip to visit my grandparents and other relatives in El Paso, and even getting ready for the trip felt like we were preparing for an expedition. From the garage, my dad hauled out the green camping cooler. My mom filled it with bags of ice, juice boxes, salami sandwiches in baggies, apples, and little individually wrapped wedges of white cheese with a cow logo on the wrapper. This was in the early 1980s, when not all cars had air conditioning. Our blue Datsun station wagon certainly didn’t. This was fine in coastal California, but the trip to El Paso took two days and passed through three deserts.
On the first day of the trip, we drove to Needles, California, which got to about 100 degrees. The next morning, we met up with Interstate 10 at Blythe, baking the whole way, the fans pumping out air that might as well have come from the heater. Sometimes we rolled down the windows. This made it too loud to talk and no less hot. My brother and I fished out pieces of ice from the cooler, sliding the shards around on our bellies.
When my aunt and uncle lived in Houston during the same era, they had a rule that they weren’t allowed to talk while driving because every conversation led to a fight. We should have had the same rule. My brother and I waged bitter battles over the space between us in the backseat, while my parents had tense discussions about the map.
I think kids ask their parents “Are we there yet?” because they’re existentially afraid the car has become the new reality, that the trip has no end. It’s a human failing, the fear that whatever we’re going through in the moment is the state we’ll remain in forever. That’s what it felt like in that car—that we would never get to El Paso. That we might as well not have left home. That I would never become the brave kid I yearned to be.
To pass the time, my dad told his stories. Like how he got into fistfights almost every day during second grade. Or how his dad once found him smoking a cigarette. “You want to smoke? Smoke,” his father said, handing him a cigar. My dad lit it, took a few drags, and then threw up. One time, my dad’s cousin was working at his father’s service station in Las Cruces, New Mexico, just across the state border from El Paso. His father caught him spitting in front of customers. As punishment for showing disrespect, my cousin had to sit behind the garage out of sight and spit until he couldn’t spit anymore. I could imagine how dry his throat and tongue must have felt.
Another time, my grandfather had enough of my Uncle Albert slamming the door, so Albert was ordered to close the door quietly 10 times. On the tenth time, he slammed the door as hard as he could.
Riding in the car, I was fascinated by this category of stories: kids acting out. My dad was a lawyer. When he went to court in the ’80s, he wore a three-piece suit. He didn’t smoke or drink, and he attended Mass every Sunday. It was hard to picture him as a bad kid. I wondered how he got from then to now, and what that meant for my own future.
I pestered my dad to tell me the details of how, when he was about 8 years old, he grew so obsessed with the Tiwa of the Ysleta reservation that he used the sewing machine to make a tunic out of flour sacks, using a burlap potato sack for the fringe. I had so many questions. How did he learn to use the sewing machine? Grandma Tommie. Where had he worn the outfit? He was a Cub Scout, fixated on being self-reliant in the desert. What did Grandma Tommie think about him dressing up like that? She taught her children to go after what they wanted.
On the way to El Paso, I frightened myself by thinking about my grandmother’s sister Luz’s fingernails, long and blood red, coming at my brother and me to pinch our cheeks. We weren’t afraid of Luz herself—she was amusing, quick with a joke, and willing to poke fun at my buttoned-up grandmother, which scandalized and thrilled us. Like Luz, her children were always getting into scrapes. Her son Chuck was famous for his escapades, like the time he was cruising on Scenic Drive, the road that runs along the side of the Franklin Mountains. Chuck leaned over to switch the radio station and lost control of his Impala, miraculously landing on the low granite wall that separated the edge of the road from the sheer cliff below. Even as a kid, some of these stories seemed more folklore than fact.
At the end of the trip, we arrived in El Paso hot and grimy. I-10 runs through the city, serving as its east-west axis. One of the first things we’d passed was the ASARCO smokestack, an over-800-foot-tall tower for the smelting plant, visible from almost every place in the city. I probably have the geography wrong, but I also remember driving past the refinery, where flares of open flame licked the sky. When we got to my grandparents’ street, Buena Vista, I was always relieved and excited.
Entering the house was like a leap through time. The price for this passage was the car trip. But once we were in El Paso, once my grandmother and grandfather hugged me, the journey was forgotten instantly, and there was this new reality, strange and wonderful.
We ate in the dining room with dark furniture, heavy drapes keeping out the sun. On the sideboard sat a collection of stoneware beer steins displaying the names and seals of the colleges my dad and his siblings had attended. We ate the food my dad ate as a kid: beef stewed with tomatoes and a salad of grated carrots, raisins, and mayonnaise. My grandfather insisted we break bread—he’d hold one end of a bolillo and we’d each tear off a piece. Dessert was Jell-O with fruit cocktail suspended in the gelatin.
It wasn’t just that the food was different from what I was used to in California. My dad changed, too. He called his father “sir.” If he spoke in Spanish with his parents, he used the formal address, not tú, slipping back to the other side of the border between adulthood and childhood.
My grandparents’ house was a block and a half from the Rio Grande, though separated from the river by the fence and highway that marked the United States-Mexico border. The border was there, but it was porous. It was easy to travel to Mexico and back, especially then, so we would go to Juárez to shop at the market and then have lunch. We were waved back across when an adult said, “American citizen.”
The line between here and there, then and now, seemed both sharper and more fluid in El Paso. My brother and I played in the same backyard where my dad and his siblings grew up. We had epic water gun fights, we picked cicada carcasses off the elm tree, we explored the shed at the back of the yard that had once held a single pony in a stall. Part of the fun of playing in that yard was trying to match up my dad’s stories with what was in front of me, conducting a kind of archeology. Where was he when he smoked the cigar?
When I was 5 years old, my grandfather suffered a stroke. My dad wanted to return to El Paso to care for his father, so he found a job at a nonprofit law firm, and we moved to Texas. For the first three months, we lived with my grandparents in the house on Buena Vista while my parents had a passive solar adobe house built on what was then the far northwestern boundary of the city. The house sat on the edge of a mesa. Passive solar meant there weren’t solar panels. But the walls were thick, keeping out the heat of the summer, conserving heat in the winter. One exterior wall was painted black and encased in glass so that in the winter the interior wall felt warm no matter how cold it was outside. This warm wall was in my bedroom, and I was proud that it was mine, the beginning of my own El Paso story.
At the end of the street was the desert, the sand dunes. Beyond those, the rocky crags of the mountains. When the school year began, I walked the two blocks down the hill to Polk Elementary School. The building was as brand new as our house. I remember a lot about that year, that school. I was supposed to have Mrs. Bean as my teacher, but she went on maternity leave the second day. Lunches were served in a cafeteria with trays and real dishes. At recess, dust storms sometimes raked the blacktop of the playground. The other kids and I made our fists into binoculars, covering our eyes to keep out the sand. On weekends, my dad crossed the street with my brother and me to run up and down the sand dunes, playing in the desert like he had as a child.
In another life, I would have grown up in that house, but at the end of the school year, we moved back to California. I missed our special house, and I missed my relatives in El Paso, where everyone seemed to either be a cousin or married to one. I had imagined that moving to El Paso was a moving back, a homecoming that couldn’t be undone.
For the rest of my childhood and young adulthood, we continued to visit El Paso, but as my world expanded, El Paso took up less and less space in my imagination. It’s with a kind of grief that I think about this shift. It feels like I betrayed El Paso and my family.
Back in the 1930s, my great-grandfather, who’d been a successful tailor and landlord with properties in Juárez, was killed while collecting rent. My great-grandmother, married at 14, had to raise their daughters by herself, finding a job as a cook in a restaurant. She told her daughters they could be anything they wanted except for maids. My grandmother’s first job was in the office at Hotel Cortez on San Jacinto Plaza when there were still alligators living in the pond at the center of the square. There wasn’t money for her to go to college, even though she was awarded a scholarship to Southern Methodist University. She was married right before World War II, and she had six kids. My grandmother and her sisters lived large in the world that constrained them. They also told their children they could do whatever they wanted. My dad and all five of his siblings left El Paso.
Years after her children were scattered across the country, working as lawyers, engineers, and teachers, my grandmother joked that she wished they’d become truck drivers. That way they could see the world for a few weeks at a time and then come home to El Paso, to her. But I understand why my dad and his siblings left. I left home too, making a life for myself in New York. Home is such a complicated word, a place and an idea, a refuge and a quandary. When my dad told stories about El Paso, he wasn’t just telling the stories to entertain my brother and me. He was telling them for himself.
After my grandmother died when I was 25 years old, 15 years passed before I returned. I came back because I was writing a novel set in El Paso and needed to research the city. But it is just as accurate to say I was writing a novel about El Paso because I missed it and my family who lived there. It wasn’t nostalgia; it was something urgent. I’d abandoned my legacy, and if I didn’t claim it, it might be gone forever.
On the first trip back, I was surprised to see that though the city had grown, spreading out to the east and west, much still felt familiar. I drove in my rental car, seeing El Paso as an adult. Everywhere I went, I imagined family stories mapped onto the landscape. When I was young, I’d looked for adventure. Now I wanted connection to the relatives who lived there, like my aunts who had moved back and my dad’s cousins who had never left. I started to pick at the edges of those stories, curious about the facts behind the legends.
On a subsequent trip a few years ago, the widow of my great-aunt Luz’s son Chuck showed me the clipping from the El Paso Times she carries in her purse. The photo looks staged: a car improbably balanced on the wall. If this story was true, then others could be as well.
Like the story about the flood water in my grandparents’ backyard. On the day after they bought their house on Buena Vista, the irrigation ditches at the back of the property were filled with water from the Rio Grande, then let into the yards of the neighborhood. The water was deep enough for my dad and his siblings to splash around in, if not swim. My grandmother freaked out when the kids came inside, covered in rashes. She called the former homeowner, a doctor, who assured her it was not serious. Even as a kid, I had so many questions about this story. But there was no denying that the ditches still existed, with metal gates at the intersections. I remember playing in them, jumping in and out, but I never saw water running through them.
I thought it odd that there was an irrigation system that was intended to flood the yards of houses in an urban neighborhood. Then, I learned that the land was a cotton farm until Josephine Clardy Fox, an El Paso native, turned her family’s property into a residential area. She became rich enough that she started to collect Old Master oil paintings, falling under the influence of a pair of so-called counts from Eastern Europe who sold her fake Watteaus, Gainsboroughs, and Velázquezes—which makes for an even better story than if the paintings were genuine. Her story seems of a piece with many of the El Paso narratives I’m drawn to, about ambition, about being yourself. I wanted to claim these stories as my own. But as I spent time with relatives and friends, I realized I was interested more in the quieter, personal stories that I heard, some for the first time.
An aunt told me that my grandfather would walk into a house and greet the spirits that lived there. One time, he and my grandmother were at the El Paso airport waiting for my aunt Gloria to arrive. Her plane landed, but before she exited the plane, my grandfather touched my grandmother’s arm and said, “Gloria has a baby.” When Gloria appeared, she held a baby in her arms. I was that baby, sent by my parents to surprise my grandparents.
How had I never heard that one before? It’s not something I would have forgotten, since it had everything I wanted in a story: mystery, magic, and family.
These days when I visit El Paso, I don’t drive, I fly. The approach is over yellow earth dotted with shadows of desert plants. When mountains rise out of the desert, I know we’re getting closer, and I’m like a kid again, pushing the window shade all the way up, waiting for my first glimpse of the city. I’m in awe of how big and empty the desert is, feeling like it will never end. Each time I come back to El Paso, I look for more stories, and I make my own.