El Paso sits in a verdant opening between arid mountains at the westernmost tip of Texas, at a place where the Rio Grande often runs shallow enough to wade across from Ciudad Juárez, its twin city in Mexico. Since the lands north of the river were taken over by the United States in 1848 as the spoils of the Mexican-American War, the pass has been a crossing point, in both directions, for Mexican immigrants, laborers, and traders; for soldiers and smugglers, politicos and revolutionaries; for cowboys, Native people, Black people; for families bifurcated by the boundary.
The journalist Jazmine Ulloa grew up in the city, and in the course of her work over the past decade she came to feel that her hometown had been wrongly marginalized in the story Americans tell about the origins and development of their country. In El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory, she sets out to restore the city “to its rightful position” as a place of entry and connection as consequential as Ellis Island to the east and Angel Island to the west, and more enduring than either. Her book is a panoramic, abundantly detailed history of a century of turmoil and restless migratory movements gravitating around El Paso. Challenging the persistent calumny of Mexicans as menacing outsiders, Ulloa shows how resilient immigrants and Mexican Americans have contributed to the economic progress of the borderlands and their continuously evolving multiethnic mix, despite the United States’ efforts, generation after generation, to build walls and jails to thwart the flow of people.
Ulloa’s determination to elevate El Paso was spurred by a horrific event. As a reporter for The Boston Globe,she returned to El Paso to cover the aftermath of a mass shooting by Patrick Crusius, a young white supremacist armed with an AK-47-style rifle and one thousand rounds of ammunition, at a local Walmart on August 3, 2019. He killed twenty-three people, among them both the mother and the father of an infant. Minutes before the attack, Crusius had posted a manifesto online in which he decried “the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and said, “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement.” At the time, President Donald Trump was routinely vilifying Mexicans as criminal predators stampeding over the border. Crusius amplified to an extreme the fear of Mexicans that had long permeated the Southwest and was spreading, fanned by Trump’s rhetoric, across the country.
Ulloa begins her history by reminding readers of an event that should be prominent in any account of the consolidation of the United States as a nation. At the end of the Mexican-American War, with the signing of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, perhaps the most spectacular real estate deal in American history, the United States obliged Mexico to accept $15 million for 55 percent of its territory, including modern-day California, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. Mexico, in defeat, also relinquished its claim to Texas and recognized the Rio Grande as the border, making El Paso “a passageway between two uneasy nations,” as Ulloa puts it.
Her history then picks up in the late nineteenth century. In the later years of the dictatorship of President Porfirio Díaz, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez became hotbeds of revolutionary ferment where Mexican intellectuals, journalists, workers, and insurgents, on the run or in exile across the border in the United States, plotted their rebellions. The newspaper editor Lauro Aguirre, the anarchist brothers Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón, and the opposition politician Francisco Madero, who eventually led the bloody nationwide uprising against the dictator in 1910, all conspired in the insurgency from the border cities. Illustrating the perennial diversity of immigration in the region, Ulloa grounds these chapters in the story of Herlinda Wong Chew, the Mexican-born daughter of a prosperous Chinese hotelier. Wong Chew helped to sell food to hungry Mexican revolutionary soldiers, and once was photographed in the pose of a rebel soldadera, with ammo belts slung across her chest. But as the Mexican Revolution churned on through seven years of tumult, her entrepreneurial husband, a Chinese immigrant to Mexico, founded a grocery store and soon a chain of burgeoning businesses in Ciudad Juárez. Wong Chew became a cultural intermediary and a protectress of Chinese laborers as they shuttled back and forth across the border, navigating violent surges of anti-Chinese xenophobia in both Mexico and the United States. Eventually the Chews themselves were forced to move for safety to El Paso, where they opened more grocery stores.
Throughout the book Ulloa portrays the United States’ fickle cycles of luring and then callously rejecting Mexican laborers. Miguel Martinez was a fifteen-year-old farm boy in 1911 when he was recruited by the roving army of the rebel commander Pancho Villa. Lacking revolutionary zeal, Martinez eventually defected, wading across the Rio Grande, then an open border, and trudging through the desert until he collapsed from thirst under a mesquite. He awoke to see an American rancher staring down at him, saying words that American employers have said to Mexicans countless times since: “Do you want to work for me? I have plenty here.” He remained in Texas for nearly fifteen years, during a period of brisk economic expansion in the West after the end of World War I. He lived with his family in a boxcar and worked steadily, although he never entirely recovered after losing three fingers in an accident at a stone quarry.
In the 1920s Congress, driven by racist suspicions supported by the pseudoscientific bigotry of eugenics, extended existing bans on Chinese immigration to exclude most immigrants from Asia, while also enacting the first official controls at the Mexican border. In 1924 Congress formally established the Border Patrol, with the intent of keeping an eye on Mexican laborers without necessarily keeping them out. Then the devastation of the Great Depression struck, and President Herbert Hoover promised “American jobs for real Americans.” Brutal, illegal raids erupted as local police carried out the exhortations of federal authorities that Mexicans had to go. The wave of forced expulsions even swept up many Mexican American citizens. Although Martinez had obtained legal papers, he felt the hostility and in 1931 he decided his family needed to leave. As for the Chews, the Depression, as well as the harsh US restrictions on Chinese immigration, squeezed their businesses and left them struggling financially in their later years in the 1930s.
Another person who endured the demeaning pull and push of US policy was Sabino Rubio, a young Mexican who joined millions of his compatriots as they returned to the United States after 1942, when the cycle swung around again during World War II and their labor was in high demand. Mexicans were allowed in as farmworkers under the Bracero Program, and Rubio came with the last annual cohort, in 1964. He was sprayed down with anti-lice insecticide to prevent him from spreading disease and dispatched to grueling days of picking cotton across Texas. The formal program ended in December of that year, but Rubio, like many others, kept coming back without legal work documents. He found his way to construction jobs, building highway bridges and parts of Interstate 10, an economic lifeline of the Texas borderlands. In 1976 he moved with his Mexican wife to a town near Houston, and one of his children, a daughter, was born in Texas, a US citizen.
By the 1970s the Border Patrol was expanding its deportation operations, hunting for undocumented immigrants deeper into the interior. El Paso became a revolving door through which thousands of Mexicans were expelled, only for them to turn around and cross right back into the United States. Rubio made the mistake of thinking that his years of work might have earned him a place in Texas society. When he showed up with his kids at the annual Texas Rice Festival, la migra was on watch and spotted them in the white crowd. Rubio was deported together with his whole family.
Ulloa chronicles the terrible losses, of lives and progress, that followed when the legal commerce generated by the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 coincided with a swelling illicit trade that supplied the vast market for cocaine and other narcotics in the United States. Over time El Paso was transformed into a bustling commercial hub, while criminal traffickers unleashed a plague of murderous violence just over the river in Ciudad Juárez, widening what proved to be lasting disparities in wealth and public security between the two cities. In Juárez American companies opened tariff-exempt assembly plants, or maquiladoras, which attracted a workforce largely made up of young women from all over Mexico. Soon women’s bodies were showing up shot, stabbed, and sexually assaulted; other women just disappeared. The Juárez femicides were notorious far beyond Mexico, revealing the vicious machismo lurking in the country’s slowly modernizing society and the collusion of the police and some Juárez politicians with the criminal organizations suspected of committing and covering up the crimes. Before long, dark alliances between corrupt officials, venal law enforcement, and heavily armed drug cartels became entrenched across Mexico, crippling its democratic development.
In the 1990s El Paso was also an early testing ground for what would become the Border Patrol’s dominant strategy, as it shifted from rounding up migrants after they had crossed the border to setting up concentrated, aggressive deployments at certain, mainly urban, points along the boundary line, in order to deter unlawful crossings. The Border Patrol took these deterrence measures to San Diego and other border cities, with the effect of pushing undocumented crossers out into scorching deserts and craggy mountains, leading to a steady rise in migrant deaths along the line.
In the years when free trade optimism was still fresh, Alfredo Holguin and his brothers started a bus company in Juárez that carried people around in the city’s sprawl. Their family enterprise thrived. But drug cartels started to compete for plazas,or turf, at transit points like El Paso. Around 2008 local cartel henchmen began demanding derecho de piso,a protection fee, from the Holguins. For a while they paid, until another group of gang members, possibly a rival cartel, wanted its payments as well. One Holguin brother later recalled “the deep inner terror that became part of their everyday lives” as the death threats multiplied and Juárez descended into lawlessness. In 2009 Alfredo’s twenty-three-year-old son was gunned down while out with a friend at a bar. With that the Holguin clan fled to El Paso—all of them except Alfredo, whose border crossing document had been revoked.
By Ulloa’s account, the Holguins never felt entirely settled on the American side of the river. They founded an organization called Mexicanos en Exilio that helped Mexicans gain legal status, including through the relatively novel approach of requesting asylum. Before that time the legal route of asylum had not been much used by Mexicans, because it was difficult for them to show in immigration court that they were not economic migrants but victims of persecution. Despite the proliferating violence in Mexico, asylum generally remained unavailable to them. With enforcement intensifying and border walls rising, the divide between immigrants with US documents and those without became starkly significant. Alfredo Holguin eventually joined his family in El Paso, but he died of Covid in 2020 without ever achieving the affirming safeguard of asylum status.
This saga of strife and bloodshed is tempered by a strikingly different view from the author herself as she returns home to El Paso for family visits and research. She summons affectionate memories of her high school years in the city that locals call El Chuco, a nickname whose origins remain in dispute. Ulloa was a wayward teenager, a vaga, frustrated by how little trendy Latina clothing she could purchase owing to her divorced mother’s meager resources. Her social group, largely untouched by the mayhem on all sides, moved easily across the border and was differentiated by a precise taxonomy of race, class, and geography:
We called ourselves Mexicanos and México Americanos and Hispanics and Latinos. Afro-Latinos and Blaxicans. Gringos and gabachos and coconuts if we looked Mexican but acted white. Fresas and juniors if we had a little money. Mexas and Frontchis if we came in from Ciudad Juárez or looked like it.
(The latter was a reference to Mexican license plates marked “FRONT” for frontera, or border, and “CHIH” for the Mexican state of Chihuahua.) There were “nerdy Latinos and punk Latinos and later emo Latinos,” she recalls. “There were Latinos who were rich and Latinos who were poor. Latinos who were all shades of black, brown, and beige.” By her account they all got along, with little judgment: “My hometown afforded me the privilege to be all parts of myself—as much Mexican as American, as much from here as from there.”
Surrounding Ulloa’s stories of the migrating families is a sweeping review of the many histories that converged at El Paso over the century. The book races through the Mexican Revolution; through decades of US immigration expansion and contraction; through the growth of the Border Patrol and the interior enforcement police; through the inexorable rise of drug cartel power in Mexico and the failing US and Mexican drug wars; through feckless efforts in Washington at immigration reform; and much more. It is colorful and informative, if at times dizzying.
The last person she focuses on is Kaxh Mura’l, a Mayan activist forced to flee in 2019 from right-wing hit squads in the highlands of Guatemala. He represents the most recent generation of migrants through El Paso, coming from Central America and farther south. Like Mura’l, many hundreds of thousands of them came to the US border and asked for asylum, initiating legal cases that have overloaded the already dysfunctional immigration court system to the point of foundering. In telling the story of Mura’l, Ulloa haphazardly condenses centuries of foreign domination and often bloody race and class conflict in Guatemala. She suggests a direct causal connection between the US interventions of the cold war—especially the CIA-engineered coup in 1954—and migration streams more than sixty years later. (At one point she refers to a second “CIA-backed coup” in Guatemala, said to have been in 1982 and “authorized by President Ronald Reagan,” but provides no sourcing for readers looking to know more about this claim of decisive US participation in those events.) The 1954 coup was a catastrophe from which Guatemalan democracy and society have never fully recovered, and the genocidal slaughter by the Guatemalan military in the Mayan highlands in the early 1980s, a legacy of the coup, has been conclusively documented. But Washington lost strategic interest in Guatemala after the UN-brokered peace accords between the government and leftist rebels in 1996. Since then US administrations have modestly funded programs to fortify democracy and combat organized crime, and provided military aid to counter narcotics traffickers, with limited success. Ulloa does not elucidate more contemporary causes of the exodus of indigenous Guatemalans. She does portray the dystopian dangers Mura’l encountered at the US border while he waited for more than a year in Juárez, dodging extortionist drug gangs, for his asylum claim to be processed in a system that Trump, during his first term, tried hard to close down.
Ulloa is not a historian; she is a journalist on a voyage of discovery through the history of her city. She names the historians and other scholars whose research she draws on and credits them in her bibliography. But some passages need more careful attribution. She writes, for example, that El Paso sits “at the center of three border wars, not one: a war against drugs, a war against migrants, and a war against terror on the American homeland.” This flourish would seem to call for a more explicit nod to the scholar Tony Payan, whose book, published in 2006, was titled The Three US-Mexico Border Wars: Drugs, Immigration, and Homeland Security.
El Paso closes with the advent of Trump 2.0, as the president revives the specter of an alien invasion to justify a mass deportation blitz. Yet the outcomes for Ulloa’s families are mostly positive, proving her point about borderland social mobility. Raúl Reyes, the grandson of Miguel Martinez, is a historian in El Paso dedicated to recovering the past of his and many other Texas families. The judge who arraigned the Walmart shooter in an El Paso courtroom was a descendant of the Chews. Blanca and Susan Rubio, the daughters of Sabino, were elected to seats in the California state legislature.
“We are those bad Mexicans that he talks about,” Blanca Rubio said, referring to Trump, in a newspaper interview not long after Susan was sworn in. “We were undocumented, and then we fought hard, we got an education, and now we’re sitting here.”
In his State of the Union address this February, President Trump revived the tropes of Manifest Destiny to express his view of the nation’s origins. Americans, he said, had “carved pass through an unforgiving wilderness, settled a boundless frontier, and tamed the beautiful but very, very dangerous wild west. From empty marshes and wide-open plains, we raised up the world’s greatest cities.” Ulloa comprehensively refutes this version of events. In the Texas borderlands, the marshes were never empty nor were the plains wide open. The story Ulloa tells also makes clear that the unfettered nativism of Trump’s second term is not new in American history—not the poisonous invective depicting Venezuelans and other immigrants as gangsters and thieves, not the cruel removals of people who provide essential labor in American workplaces, not the roundups that ensnare noncitizens and citizens alike.
The border at El Paso is quieter now than it has been in decades, as Trump has made good on at least one of his campaign promises, to impose control by blocking illegal crossings and eliminating access to asylum along the boundary line. By the end of Trump’s first year back in the White House, Border Patrol encounters with migrants at the Mexican border had plummeted to the lowest numbers since 1970, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.
Yet, consistent with Ulloa’s argument, El Paso is still an epicenter of the United States’ system of social engineering through immigration. Despite the calm at the border, the city has not been spared Trump’s deportation campaign. The Catholic bishop of El Paso, Mark J. Seitz, in a pastoral message shared in parishes throughout the diocese on March 15, described its impacts. “Neighbors are being snatched as they walk out of immigration court proceedings downtown,” the bishop reported.
Workers are being taken from construction sites across the city…. Young women are languishing in mental torture for months in private detention centers, even when, coerced by the conditions of their imprisonment, they beg to be deported…. So many people are once again being made to feel like they are less than American.
In the first half of 2025, El Paso was second in the country in the number of deportation arrests of immigrants after hearings at the city’s immigration courts, surpassed only by arrests at the courts in New York City, according to a study by the mathematician Joseph Gunther.
El Paso is also a major juncture in the United States’ punitive immigration infrastructure. Not far from downtown sits Camp East Montana, an enormous tent city constructed in 2025 in a bleak patch on the grounds of Fort Bliss, a US Army base that makes recurring appearances in Ulloa’s account. The camp is the country’s largest immigration detention center, part of an archipelago that the Department of Homeland Security is assembling nationwide to hold as many as 100,000 immigrants. People who were arrested as far away as Chicago and Minneapolis have been sent to Camp East Montana. Under Trump’s rules, immigrants have been denied bond and forced to wait out slow-moving immigration court proceedings in detention, with the evident intent of causing them to despair and leave the United States on their own. To date more than four hundred federal judges and three appeals courts have ruled this policy unlawful and ordered immigrants released; two appeals courts have backed the policy, allowing DHS to continue.
Despite receiving $45 billion for detention in Trump’s big 2025 tax and spending bill, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has demonstrated that it is overwhelmed by the demands of jailing so many people. Almost as soon as it opened, Camp East Montana devolved into a hellhole with inedible food, eating areas flooded with sewage, a lack of basic hygiene, and dangerously inadequate medical care that led to outbreaks of measles and tuberculosis, according to a report in December by the American Civil Liberties Union that was based on interviews with forty-five detainees. The death on January 3 of a Cuban detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, was ruled a homicide by the El Paso County medical examiner. It was the result of a “spontaneous use of force” by guards, ICE admitted in an official incident report. The report states that the guards were trying to prevent Lunas Campos “from harming himself.” But a witness interviewed by the El Paso Times said he heard the man pleading for asthma medication. Lunas Campos is one of three detainees who have died in the camp since December. According to a report published on June 9 by the US Government Accountability Office, another detainee died in January by suicide after being left alone and unattended in a windowless holding room. The GAO report found that some of the teeming dormitories at the camp were cleaned only once a week. No treatment plans were in place for detainees with HIV or diabetes. The conditions posed “serious risks to the safety and security” of detained people and staff, the report found. In March ICE fired the contractor running the facility, but then hired another one instead of closing the camp down.
What is new in Trump’s second term is the scale of the deportation blitz. The whole country is becoming a borderland, as DHS tries to achieve Trump’s goal of deporting one million people this fiscal year. Acting largely on his executive edicts, agents have extended into the country’s interior the race-based stops, strong-arm arrests, disregard for due process, and fast-track removals that have long been the regular practice of the Border Patrol in remote reaches along the line. A Border Patrol chief from California, Gregory Bovino, led Operation Metro Surge, the occupation by more than three thousand agents of Minneapolis and surrounding areas, applying what he called, in an interview with The New York Times, his strategy of “total immigration domination.” After the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, protesters who were US citizens, Trump sensed that the show of force had gone too far. He replaced Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator who is equally hard-line but said in his confirmation hearing that DHS would be less conspicuous: “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.” Bovino retired. But under the command of the “border czar,” Tom Homan, agents are still hunting down immigrants, regardless of whether they have criminal records, in homes, schools, grocery store parking lots, and workplaces, if less noisily. On June 5 the Republican-led Congress voted to provide another $70 billion to ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and other DHS offices for enforcement, detention, and deportation.
Also new is the widespread resistance to Trump’s crackdown. In Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Charlotte, and many other places where ICE arrived—including El Paso—citizens have rallied with whistles and horns to alert immigrants of danger, tracked agents’ movements with phone cameras in hand, provided food for families too scared to leave their homes, and even offered places for them to hide. When ICE has tried to open new detention centers, towns have been fighting back with lawsuits, city council resolutions, environmental restrictions, petition drives, and street protests. Places as distant as Chester, New York, and Oklahoma City have succeeded in stopping ICE’s projects. As with the social blend of El Paso, many immigrant families now include a mix of legal status, with undocumented parents, US-born children (who are by definition citizens), and relatives with other forms of status. Neighbors can see that the kids attend local schools and the parents work in the community. More Americans have become witnesses to the damage left behind when parents are separated from their children, including many who are US citizens, and deported. Polls show that Trump’s assault is losing public support. In a survey in March by the Public Religion Research Institute only 35 percent of Americans rated Trump’s handling of immigration favorably, down from 48 percent in March 2025; 48 percent held very unfavorable views. If Ulloa’s history is any guide, it may be that the country is reaching the nadir of one of its perennial immigration cycles.