thomas leverett weblog

El Paso

Since El Paso is just down the road from here, and the Cielo Vista WalMart is one I might go to at any time, I thought I'd weigh in on the shooting there even before I know all the facts.

One reality today is that we are armed to the teeth. Some angry young white guy on a racial rampage has no trouble getting the arms he needs to attack an entire store full of Hispanic Americans whom he considers the "enemy." And this is entirely for racial reasons. He's white; they're not; they are happy and prosperous; he's not. Shooting up a place is how you do it these days.

One way to see this is that some people are itching for a race war, quick while the white folks are still better armed than the rest (you don't see black folks, or Mexican-Americans, advocating for race wars). A random killing of twenty people will stir things up, for sure. It will probably make people vote, and then Trump will lose, and then the excretory material will really hit the ventilating device.

We go to El Paso to use the airport, and the Costco, which is halfway between the airport road and the Patriot Freeway back to Alamogordo. To us, El Paso is the big city: it has busy freeways, with new cars going eighty or ninety; it has a lot to see even as you try to keep your eyes on the road. It's sun-baked, compared to the mountains, always twenty or thirty degrees hotter. You can't leave your windows up when you park your car.

It is, in fact, prosperous, positive, and maybe 85% Mexican American. University of Texas at El Paso is only 7% white. Almost everyone knows Spanish and uses it for at least part of their day. But I, a white person, almost never hear it (and this is too bad, because I'd actually like to try mine out, though it is the Spanish of a viejo, fifty years ago). It seems to be comfortable with its bicultural nature.

We went to a Chihuahuas (minor league baseball) game one weekend a while ago. I'd gone down to Costco for my hearing aids adjustment but we made a weekend of it. To my sons it was all about food, motel, city. To me, it was about the possibility of walking across the bridge to Mexico. Across the bridge is Juarez, perhaps the most dangerous city in the Americas, sprawling, bigger possibly than El Paso and definitely one of the biggest of the border cities.

People around here all remember the days when people walked across all the time. They'd go over for dinner, or to get drunk, or for whatever, and they'd go back and forth easily. Those days are over. People are afraid to go over these days, and don't. The drug wars have torn the place up, and made it so people who are drunk or just having a good time might be targets. I was afraid to put my boys in that position; I would consider it impossible. Yet I also want them to see another country; it's important to me. To just set foot in another country, speak another language, look back at the USA, I value all of those things, and wanted to do it.

But I woke up the morning we would have done it, and there it was on the news: an incident on the bridge. The Border Patrol was out there rounding people up and arresting them. Not today, I said to the boys; I loaded them up, and brought them home, the hundred ten miles or so of searing desert, back to the base of the mountains.

In isolation, I think of Spanish puns. Namely this one: We all know that "El Paso" refers to "the pass," the place at the mountains, where the mountains leave a place to cross, a place between the mountains where it's easy to travel. But, with the accent on the final o, El Paso' means "it happened," or "he passed;" actually, it could mean a number of things. Couldn't it? Something to think about, I guess.

So this kid was alt-right, fascist, whatever. I have a problem with this. One is that we, New Mexicans, El Pasoans, locals, have known and worked with Mexican-Americans every day for many years. They are our neighbors, our environment, our friends, our colleagues. We can't go anywhere without doing business with friendly, polite, Mexican-Americans who have been here in some cases for generations. It is their city too, as it was held out to them as a promise: you move up here, you live here, you pay your taxes, you join the army, you fight overseas, you become a citizen with all the rights we all have. The idea that this was a white nation was never true out here, as the Spanish were here long before we were, and agreed to be part of the US with the understanding that they could keep their culture and language indefinitely. And it was going fine in that respect, except in Arizona, where whites started acting like they owned the place and started putting people in 110-degree tent camps. In New Mexico, whites were all the minority, and they always knew it. We were the minority, we still are, and the governmental and cultural things we imposed on the area were in some cases well accepted, and in some, well, life went on as usual.

I taught in the Alamogordo schools for a while. Alamogordo is a town about 100 miles north of El Paso, where a lot of people are related to people from El Paso. Among my students were scores of Hispanic names; maybe eighty or ninety percent. But there were people with Anglo names that clearly looked Hispanic, and people with Hispanic names that looked very Anglo. There were was one very white kid who didn't have a word of English; he was from Juarez. There were people who had been in that town for four, five, six generations, with lots of mixing. Anglos had married Hispanics, and then their kids had married each other, and it went on, so that racially they were totally mixed, or in any case I couldn't tell. There were a good twenty or thirty percent of them that I wouldn't want to identify as one race or another; I simply couldn't tell.

And now you want to have a race war? And split up these families, and force them onto one side or another? And why, because white folks are feeling outnumbered, like the other races are gaining ground? Or because some people feel like this country should be white?

I get the idea that it's all about white uprising. There is no doubt, white anxiety is what made it possible for a shill man, a rapist thief, to win the presidency. He represents to them, in his code, the anger that has been building up over the loss of white dominance and privilege. So he activates the mentally unstable forces that play this out. This young kid plays out the role that the race-baiters want him to play, and goes out and kills twenty of my neighbors. It's not easy for a country to keep its cool, and keep from falling apart into racial division and hatred as these people would like. To them, instability leads to war, and war is good. To me, war is never good. And, these are my neighbors.

Enough. I am staying off the highways, staying out of the city. It happened, that's all I can say. It's like 9-11; it's possible for nineteen boys to bring down the empire. How? By spreading permanent racial hatred and making people feel that our tribe is permanently threatened by some other tribe. And in the race to waste all our resources fighting, and increasing security, we all lose. Yes, we're secure. We're locked in, to a hateful country, with the culture that our race has assigned us to. I thought we were better than that, but, I was wrong.

posted by tom @ 8:00 PM