By Nicholas Sandoval
“So, I have come down to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8). Everyone seeks to live where they think the grass is greener, and usually it is the right choice. It is human nature to seek out safety and shelter, and immigrating to a place that is easier for a person’s family is always worth the sacrifice. However, gone are the days when packing up and settling were unrestricted. Now there are borders that divide every inch of the land, and those countries’ bureaucracies decide who stays and who goes. Migration throughout the world has always been a deciding factor in the culture of that area. El Paso was a city built by immigration but growing national defense concerns have caused this city to fear migrants.
Although immigration has been defined more recently as leaving one country to reside in another permanently, migration is much more ancient. Migration is studied constantly in our natural world. Birds have astonished scientists for years with their innate abilities to voyage the earth always on schedule and always with precision. Scientists have documented the monarch butterfly’s migration pattern so intensely that Mexico and America have national protection programs to help conserve their numbers. Human migration is very different, however. The evolution of human migration is as complex and old as humans themselves. The earliest believed migration of humans is the homo erectus leaving Africa. Early humans populated the most hospitable parts of ancient Africa and soon expanded to lower areas of the Eurasian continent. It is impossible to know how many died in the harsh and treacherous conditions of the primitive wild. Migrating to a different area has always been risky. However, even long before entry denials and deportation, all immigrants shared one common hope: where they are going must be better than where they were before. Since the dawn of time, human migration was never easy but necessary. The driving force behind migration has remained constant, a life safer and better than a person can have where they come from.
Image caption: Mexican Workers Waiting for US Work Permits (Courtesy of State of the Union History, Wikimedia Commons)
El Paso’s location makes it feel destined to have been a city of immigration, but that is just hindsight. The land that El Paso now resides on has been a place for humans to visit since they first came here. There is evidence that hunter-gatherer tribes stayed near the Hueco Tanks area by the city. However, the first people to migrate and make this land their own were Native American maize farmers. The land was very desirable due to the river and the space, food was plentiful, and the weather in El Paso was relatively tame. It took tens of thousands of years for them to reach this land. Generations of people had died in search of a land where they were safer and happier. It is impossible to understand what they went through completely. For millennia people had lived expanding across the globe. Through nothing besides sheer luck and resilience, humans had found a home in every place in the world. It took generational sacrifices that led to the very backbone of modern culture in El Paso. The culture in El Paso has always mirrored Mexico, which began with one of the last tribes of El Paso, The Tigua.
The Tiguan reside a few miles outside modern-day El Paso and are a part of the Native American Pueblo tribes. The term Pueblo Indians was given to them by the first immigrants to the El Paso area, the Spanish. The Spanish came to the area of New Mexico around 1660 and found pueblos (villages) with adobe houses stacked on top of each other and built into bustling communities. They had built agricultural communities and managed to defy the harsh desert environment. Eventually, however, the Spanish decided that the natives no longer needed their land. Despite efforts such as the “Pueblo Revolt” to fight for the land they had grown and loved, the Spanish immigrants’ advanced technologies led to a fight the natives had no chance to win. The Spanish forced the Tiguas out of New Mexico in their colonization and to the now outskirts of El Paso in 1692. Now, El Paso had its first government-documented and regulated inhabitants. The tribe is on the outskirts of El Paso. They are one of the three federally recognized tribes in Texas.
Although El Paso is in Texas, Texas is not in El Paso. El Paso has always had a different relationship with Texas than other Texas cities. Some Texas cities make their whole personality a Texas stereotype, and El Paso completely rejects that idea. El Paso happily embraces every single culture that has stepped foot on it. Even when the Spanish owned Texas, other Texan cities were focused on leaving our native tribe to mostly fend for itself in the instability of the destroyed Native American political landscape. The Rio Grande also experienced an avulsion, which means the river changed route, and the cities of Ysleta, San Elizario, and Socorro now resided in Texas.
Nevertheless, even at the start of the Texas Revolution, El Paso still had no identity. El Paso itself was composed of tribes intermingled so much with the Spanish that they were just Hispanic and were too far from the vital part of Texas to have influence in the war. However, one new type of immigrant would come to live here and even intermarry with our natives often—the Americans. America and Mexico both cut off their colonizers and were now independent countries.
America had already established itself as a country looking to expand and was well on its way to exploring the West. Like everyone who has seen this land, visitors from these new countries decided to immigrate to El Paso. And although no one looked out for the little city of El Paso, the collection of villages that occupied it managed to build a self-sustaining government that had evaded any significant impacts from the Texas Revolution with Mexico. That was until it faced the most significant consequence of leaving Mexico; the United States had annexed Texas and New Mexico.
The United States annexed Texas in 1845. Thanks to the distance from the core Texas cities, El Paso was not recognized as an official Texas city until 1848. Texas fought for it in the battle of El Brazito. The Texas government then made El Paso a county, which was all they needed to claim as theirs in the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise of 1850 determined these borders. The city, which shared more history, ancestors, culture, and soul from Mexico and New Mexico, was stolen by Texas. The annexation caused a significant influx of American immigrants to flood the area. The people of El Paso did not know it then, but the combination of Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and American mutt cultures was the backbone of this beautiful city.
The railroad made El Paso the place to be, and the city quickly became a “boomtown” in the southwest. The city had amassed a population of ten thousand by 1890, with more American immigrants making their way down to the Sun City joined by groups of Jewish, Chinese, and Italian immigrants, who formed small communities in El Paso. Despite this country’s naturalization laws in the Constitution, El Paso used to let Mexicans and Americans cross back and forth with no problems. Technically, however, unauthorized immigration into this country was illegal, and in 1882 the United States put its foot down and said no more Chinese people. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 “was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States” (National Archives). With El Paso being one of the largest cities in the southwest, the government knew the perfect place to put an end to Chinese immigrants.
In 1904 Border Patrol had its first mounted guards stationed out of El Paso. However, they were very different from the modern militarized and hyper-trained agencies of the modern era. “The inspectors, usually called Mounted Guards, operated out of El Paso, Texas. Though they never totaled more than seventy-five, they patrolled as far west as California trying to restrict the flow of illegal Chinese immigration” (CBP.gov Origin of the Border Patrol). It did not work, and soon the Chinese were not the only problem. By the late 1910s, most border officials had noticed that Customs violation was no longer the main problem, and the fact that there was no tangible way to tell who was and was not in the country became the main issue. The violence displayed during the Mexican Revolution proved to the United States that border protection was desperately needed. They tried to combat illegal southern border immigration with literacy tests and higher taxes, but it did not work either and led to people entering illegally. El Paso has Mexico in it, and due to it being a stone through to its Mexican sister city, Juarez, which grew with it, it was impossible to separate. El Paso was divided from Mexico, but its culture was inseparable from theirs.
Image caption: Mexican Women at Immigration Station (Courtesy of Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress)
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When prohibition started, it began the first of evolving changes affecting Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The city of El Paso, built on people just showing up and staying, was being cut off. Prohibition in the United States initiated the first extensive reform of the United States entry process. Border patrol and Customs port of entry became official jobs under the Department of Labor by 1924. as well as establishing the first numerical immigration limit and granting permission for border inspections for immigrants and alcohol smuggling. Customs and Border Protection would see a drastic change in the following decades. They established the first Border Patrol Academy in 1934 in El Paso. The program continued to expand during World War II, and all immigration-related services now fell under the Department of Justice. Considerable advancements continued in CBP technologies. Things like X-rays and a much stronger airport presence made the United States safer and culminated in the power that Homeland Security agencies have today. Things were getting safer in America, and things were getting worse everywhere else.
By the 1980s and 90s, Mexico and Central and South American countries reached a level of violence and insecurity that made the only option for people to flee. When asked, Elva Lara, a Mexican immigrant who crossed the border illegally to live in El Paso during this era, said, “There was no hope… every aspect of my life in Mexico felt corrupted. No one was going to help us. Everyone from the politicians to the police had been bought.” Cartels and drug empires had paid off most South American countries’ governments and law enforcement to extort their people. The people of Mexico had nowhere to run to in their home country, so they had to run here. “To bring a level of control to the border, Operation ‘Hold the Line’ was established in 1993 in El Paso and proved an immediate success. Agents and technology were concentrated in specific areas, providing a ‘show of force’ to potential illegal border crossers.” (CBP.gov Today’s Border Patrol). El Paso had unwittingly turned its back on the country that made it. People who, two generations ago, were in the same boat as the undocumented immigrants were now voting and supporting keeping them out. They managed to crack down heavily by 2000, but none of that would soon matter.
On September 11, 2001, the country suffered a terroristic attack that changed law enforcement forever. Homeland Security was now at the forefront of every American’s mind. On November 25, 2002, Homeland Security became a standalone, fully fledged, cabinet-level federal department of the United States. No longer were Customs and Border Patrol agents considered just law enforcement officers. Now every officer was a federal agent. The laws were changed, so the Department of Homeland Security had tremendous power. Customs and Border Patrol have access to funding, training, and continually advancing technologies, and the multiple agencies formed alongside the Department of Homeland Security. The fight against immigration is no longer one group of “Mountain Guards.” It is now a tiny hyperspecialized army of people stopping immigrants.
El Paso is going through a migrant crisis currently. When confronted, a Custom and Border Protection official from the Columbus, New Mexico, port of entry said, “I understand the plight and hardships these families endure, and I understand why they want to be here. However, our priority will always be national security. As nice as it would be to let everyone in, we must protect our country and people foremost.” A harsh yet true reality is that most El Pasoans want them out. A city built on immigrants has turned its back on it. El Paso’s entire history can be defined and told through immigration, and yet now, when El Paso is more capable than ever of helping them, they have turned their back on them. The government is managing the immigrants slowly. Some immigrants take government buses or planes anywhere but El Paso as if they made it to heaven’s gate and must now wait for the elevator. The immigrants that are not that lucky get thrown into a holding center until CBP forces them out because America cannot detain them. The immigrants with nowhere else to go used to be set up by the airport in a tent city; however, now that the numbers are low enough, most are finding places or shelters. Once again, the human drive for safety is stronger than written laws, and they have immigrated somewhere better.
My final interview was with Oma, an Austrian woman who escaped Hitler and the Nazi regime. She explained all the struggles and sacrifices to make it out of there alive. Nevertheless, she also explained how happy she was when she met her husband, an American soldier during World War II, and how happy she was to live in America. She stated her opinion on immigration: “My home in Europe was destroyed. When I had nothing, I came here and had something.” El Paso was built by accepting immigrants, yet this city and the government can no longer just let everyone immigrate to America. The culture of El Paso will always be grateful to the immigrants that helped build it, however El Paso is a modern American city, and the extensive lengths of Homeland Security is to guarantee its safety
