Week Four in El Paso

This is the week where I began to feel almost settled into El Paso. I’m beginning to learn my way around the west side of town and the university area. It was time for me to do a little exploration around the area to get to know it better.

Sunday was a cloudy, cool day, probably the gloomiest day since I arrived in El Paso. It was dreary with the temperature in the mid-50s with a few occasional sprinkles of rain. On Sunday afternoon I drove downtown and explored the area south of downtown. Most of the signs on businesses were in Spanish and the few people I saw walking around were mostly Latino.

Then I continued my driving tour around the UTEP campus. Since it was Sunday, all the gates were open and campus drives that are pedestrian only on weekdays were accessible by car. The campus buildings are nearly all in tan stucco, consistent with the architecture of the area. Because this area is very hilly, the campus is not laid out in a grid, but follows the contour of the land. It is very different from the typical Midwestern campus with large open green spaces and red brick, Georgian architecture.

UTEP has about 25,000 students and is a branch of the University of Texas system. It seems like it has a lot of commuting students because it is in a major metropolitan area and there aren’t a lot of dormitories. Most of the cars in campus parking lots have Texas license plates, although you see some from nearby New Mexico and a few from the Mexican state of Chihuahua, which is right across the border.

The big event Monday was the arrival of the President for a campaign rally at the El Paso Coliseum, which is in the eastern part of the city. At the same time, former Congressman Beto O’Rourke, who nearly defeated Sen. Ted Cruz in last November’s election, held a rally and spoke at a recreation complex in the same area. In the days before the event, the local TV stations warned of road closings in the area of the rally.

Both of the classes that day were very interesting. In the Borderlands history class, the professor showed a video that called this area “Mex-America” and portrayed how the US and Latino cultures had been intertwined in this area for the last couple of centuries or more.

According to the documentary, Mex-America includes the western two-thirds of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Southern Colorado, Southern California and two northern states of Mexico, Chihuahua and Sonora. Most of this area had once been part of Mexico until the influx of US settlers in the mid-19^th century led to a series of conflicts that resulted in the US taking control of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

In the second class on Monday, the Anatomy of Law Enforcement, we heard about the various ways drugs are smuggled into the US from Mexico and other Central and South American countries. According to the instructor, a 30-year veteran of the DEA, nearly all of these drugs are coming through the Ports of Entry, the checkpoints on the border between the US and Mexico. Drugs are hidden in cars and trucks crossing the border.

In one chilling scenario, he mentioned that in most towns or cities on the Mexican side of the border, there are multiple pharmacies, medical and dental clinics. The prices at these health care businesses are much less than in the U.S. and many Americans patronize them. The drug dealers hire Mexican teenagers to note the make, color and license number of U.S. cars that regularly visit these businesses.

Once a pattern established, drug dealer employee copies the VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) of an American’s car while the driver is inside. The VIN is usually visible through the windshield on the top of the dashboard on the driver’s side. With the VIN, a duplicate copy of that car’s remote key is made. The next time the American visits the medical office or pharmacy, the drug dealer puts a shipment of illegal drugs in the trunk of the car while the driver is inside

Because thousands of cars pass through the El Paso Port of Entry everyday, only a small percentage receive more that a cursory examination by the Border Patrol. Once a car carrying the “shipment” is waved through the border, another drug cartel employee will follow the car until it is parked and the driver goes inside. At that point, the “shipment” is removed from the car trunk for distribution to customers in the US.

Later, I visited a bookstore and bought a copy of Chrissie Hynde’s autobiography “Reckless.” In the early chapters, she details growing up in the Akron area and makes a lot of references to interesting local places. She said her family once lived in a house on 8^th Street in Cuyahoga Falls when she was about three or four years of age. The first house Pam and I bought in 1976 was on that same street. Interesting.

My final excursion of the week was to Ft. Hancock, Texas, about an hour east of El Paso. I hadn’t really explored that area yet and drove out there on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Once out of El Paso, the landscape is desert and there was a lot of dust was in the air on this windy day.

It’s a small village of about 2,000 people with mostly stucco, one-story houses or manufactured homes.  According to Wikipedia, there had once been a US Army fort there that housed several hundred troops. During World War I, these soldiers guarded the U.S. border against anticipated attacks by Mexican mercenaries funded by the German government.

The highlight of my visit was an excellent Mexican lunch of chicken tacos, rice and beans and a small, non-descript truck stop called Angie’s on the outskirts of town. It was really delicious.

Stay tuned for more next week.