FRIDAY, MAY 10
Dear Elena,
It was raining this morning in El
Paso and the clouds hung heavy over
the Franklin Mountains, so much so
that we couldn’t see the peaks and
where the rest of the sky began. The
weather needed to clear up before
my friend Joel could take pictures.
We parked next to a conveniencestore in El Segundo Barrio, a
historic part of the city where so
many immigrants from Mexico used
to pass through in the 1800s, some of
them getting here at the same time
that immigrants from Europe were
arriving in New York City. When it
stopped drizzling, we stepped out
of the car, and a few minutes later a
bearded man came hobbling down
the street. He used a wooden cane
to walk, but when he stopped to
say good morning, he began to tip
from his left foot to his right, back
and forth, over and over, like he’d
forgotten which one was his good
leg and so he had to try them both
out. He was from El Segundo Barrio,
in case anybody wanted to know.
But all his life he had also crossed
back and forth to Juárez, he told us.
Then he continued hobbling along in
the same direction he was heading
before stopping to ask what Joel
was doing in the middle of the street
taking pictures. It wasn’t too much
later that the sun fi nally came out.
Love, DadSATURDAY, MAY 11
Hi Elena,
It took us four hours to drive from El
Paso to a little town called Presidio.
On the way, Joel and I talked about
the people we’d met so far. I told
him that at a panadería yesterday
one of the bakers reminded me of
my tío Hector. Something about
the man’s eyes. The baker was from
Juárez, and it made me wonder
whether everyone has a twin version
of themselves somewhere. And
then Joel told me about a woman
he’d photographed in El Paso a
couple days earlier, a singer who
sometimes performs as a woman
and sometimes performs as a man.
Her name is Amalia, but when she
dresses and sings as a man, his
name is Tereso. She sings in English
and Spanish, and is great in both
languages. She performs across
the river too, in Juárez. Unless you
already know Amalia, it is hard to
tell it’s her when she’s pretending
to be Tereso, who even wears a fake
mustache and makeup so it looks
like he needs a good shave. She doesOPENING SPREAD, FROM LEFT: Mauricio Aguilar, ten,
poses for his first communion portrait in Laredo,
where his family operates a ranch; a family playing
in the Rio Grande between Presidio and Ojinaga.
OPPOSITE PAGE, CLOCKWISE: Carlos Ramirez, 64,
a lifelong resident of El Paso’s El Segundo Barrio,
“the other Ellis Island”; a composite photo of the
singer Amalia Mondragón and her alter ego, Tereso
Contreras; the city’s historic Concordia Cemetery,
the resting place of 60,000 people, including
thousands of Chinese immigrants who worked on the
Transcontinental Railroad.He was a young boy, kidnapped by Indians in northern Mexico and then aban-
doned on the north side of the Rio Grande, near Hidalgo. Later, more of our fam-
ily migrated from Mexico, all of them settling in the same area of the upper Rio
Grande Valley. We farmed on the U.S. side, but legend has it that one year, in the
early 1900s, the river fl ooded and changed course and suddenly we had land on
both sides. My father was the fi rst to move to Brownsville, in 1944. He worked for
the U.S. Department of Agriculture, patrolling remote stretches of the Rio Grande
on horseback to make sure livestock weren’t crossing over and possibly bring-
ing fever ticks into the U.S. Although I moved away to Austin for college, in 1985,
and eventually settled there, these and other stories of the border stayed with
me. I’ve written a collection of short fi ction, two novels, and more than a dozen
essays dealing with my family’s time in Brownsville. ¶ When I became a father,
I wanted my children to know something about the place we came from. They
were just babies when I took them to visit their grandparents. Over the years, I
took them to family reunions so they could meet all their cousins who still live on
the border. I even took them to see the little house where I grew up. So far, they’ve
indulged me by not complaining too much about the six-hour drive from Austin
to Brownsville, but lately my ten-year-old, Elena, has begun to wonder why I’m
so “obsessed with talking about the border.” ¶ If this is an obsession, then it has
to do with what I see as an incomplete story being told about the region, which
is constantly in the news and often comes up at the dinner table. It’s a topic that
my two kids, Elena and Adrian, who just turned twelve, are bound to hear about.
They are, whether I like it or not, getting only part of the story. Because just as
there are two sides of the Texas-Mexico border, there are also two narratives of
the place. ¶ One version tells us the border is a lawless land, a region in constant
crisis, overrun with crime, unauthorized immigration, asylum camps, kids locked
in cages, drug smuggling, cartel violence, armed militias. You know this story. In
this telling, the border is the place where Texas ends and Mexico begins. ¶ The
other version reveals a region that’s home to parents and tíos and abuelas, of co-
madres and primos, of people raising their families, of people enduring, of people
falling in and out of love, of people dreaming their own dreams. This is the border
of my youth. ¶ In May, I fl ew to El Paso to meet up with Joel Salcido, a good friend
and talented photographer who grew up there. Together we set out on a weeklong
journey, driving the length of the Rio Grande. In talking to and photographing
people on the streets, in the plazas and cafes, and along the bridges that cross over
into Mexico, we attempted to uncover that other narrative of the border. To fi nd
some way of sharing with Elena the story that she, and the rest of us, need to hear.THE STORY I TELL MY KIDS
IS THAT THEIR GREAT-GREAT-
GRANDFATHER REACHED
THE TEXAS BORDER IN 183 7.
76 TEXAS MONTHLY