Wednesday, March 21, 2007

El Paso: English first, Español primera.


When we first drove around El Paso, I immediately thought of my seventh grade Texas history class. In the course we learned about the different regions across our vast state. So, before this trip I knew that El Paso was located in the “mountains and basins” region, but for some reason I always viewed this border town as dry, flat and uneventful. I never imagined El Paso to look like this.

This city is anything but flat. It’s full of life, a hybrid cross of American and Mexican culture, as if there’s a tug-o-war competition between three borders: Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. I also didn’t realize how close El Paso is located to Ciudad Juarez. Both expanding cities run directly adjacent to each other. There’s no wide gap of desert to separate the two. Just a couple of fences, an ironically narrow Rio Grande and a few green and white border patrol cars. Looking out at both cities from the mountainous UTEP campus, it’s hard to distinguish where one ends and the other begins.

Yesterday I went down to El Centro de los Trabajadores Agricolas Fronterizos (The Border Farmworker Center). The Centro is a safe haven, an education facility, a community center and a recruiting ground all in one. I’ve learned that some workers choose to stay at the Centro because they can’t afford a home in El Paso or Ciudad Juarez. Every day, farm owners in Southern New Mexico and the Texas valleys send buses around 3 a.m. requesting a certain amount of workers. So every day, workers arrive to the center at 2 a.m. to prepare for their commute. Most now are traveling to Deming, NM, an hour and a half drive away. They are paid servants to the fields and once their day is complete they ride home, arriving back to the Centro as late as 6 or 7 p.m.

Walking around the Centro, waiting to talk to an employee, I began to understand just how important it is to know the Spanish language. Sure, we’ve heard it time and again: English first, Spanish second. The El Paso culture suggests something different. English and Spanish here go hand in hand. Here, the distinction between the U.S. and Mexico is blurred. El Paso relies on Ciudad Juarez and Ciudad Juarez relies on El Paso.

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