Trouble In El Paso

This thought-provoking book examines gang history in the region encompassing West Texas, Southern New Mexico, and Northern Chihuahua, Mexico. Known as the El Paso–Juárez borderland region, the area contains more than three million people spanning 130 miles from east to west. From the badlands—the historically notorious eastern Valle de Juárez—to the Puerto Palomas port of entry at Columbus, New Mexico, this area has become more militarized and politicized than ever before. Mike Tapia examines this region by exploring a century of historical developments through a criminological lens and by studying the diverse subcultures on both sides of the law. Tapia looks extensively at the role of history and geography on criminal subculture formation in the binational urban setting of El Paso–Juárez, demonstrating the region’s unique context for criminogenic processes. He provides a poignant case study of Homeland Security and the apparent lack of drug-war spillover in communities on the US-Mexico border.

To understand border enforcement and the shape it has taken, it is imperative to examine a groundbreaking Border Patrol operation begun in 1993 in El Paso, Texas, "Operation Blockade." The El Paso Border Patrol designed and implemented this radical new strategy, posting 400 agents directly on the banks of the Rio Grande in highly visible positions to deter unauthorized border crossings into the urban areas of El Paso from neighboring Ciudad Juárez—a marked departure from the traditional strategy of apprehending unauthorized crossers after entry. This approach, of "prevention through deterrence," became the foundation of the 1994 and 2004 National Border Patrol Strategies for the Southern Border. Politically popular overall, it has rendered unauthorized border crossing far less visible in many key urban areas. However, the real effectiveness of the strategy is debatable, at best. Its implementation has also led to a sharp rise in the number of deaths of unauthorized border crossers. Here, Dunn examines the paradigm-changing Operation Blockade and related border enforcement efforts in the El Paso region in great detail, as well as the local social and political situation that spawned the approach and has shaped it since. Dunn particularly spotlights the human rights abuses and enforcement excesses inflicted on local Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants as well as the challenges to those abuses. Throughout the book, Dunn filters his research and fieldwork through two competing lenses, human rights versus the rights of national sovereignty and citizenship.

A grounded and instructive analysis of the ways globalization affects a border city. Every marker of social difference can be easily interpreted in the fashionable language of "borderlands"--and if so, as Victor M. Ortiz-Gonzalez reveals, the practical reality of the border region is often grossly misrepresented and its people woefully served. He argues that amid the tantalizing abstractions generated by the sweeping reconfigurations of globalization, people in cities like El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, on the U.S.-Mexican border, are actually living the gritty realities of a new world order. With descriptions of grassroots initiatives to confront the challenges and opportunities that NAFTA represents for the city, El Paso challenges us to acknowledge and address the conceptual and sociopolitical tasks of a world in which abstract representations and nonlocal interests override concrete situations. Ortiz-Gonzalez also provides an indepth analysis of groups such as La Mujer Obrera, Unite El Paso, and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and their attempts to give local residents and workers more autonomy and power. Balancing ethnographic detail with precise theoretical insights, El Paso offers a compelling case study and a stirring call to understand both the conceptual challenge and the social urgency of the effects of globalization in local settings.

This long-overdue biography restores this overlooked writer to the forefront of western history and journalism.

Just after the Civil War ended, Reverend John Williams was called to take over a church in El Paso, Texas. He enlists Deputy Sheriff Elijah Adams to protect him on his journey, which begins at Chattanooga, Tennessee. Along the way, they face many trials, but with the power of the Holy Spirit to guide their path, lives are saved and lost. A spiritual battle has begun. They are led on a mission they never expected to take. Elijah Adams was a former soldier in the Confederate Army and sheriff in El Paso, Texas. He embarks on this adventure with two different goals in mind: first, to protect the reverend at all cost and, second, to find out why his parents' letters from El Paso stopped coming a few months ago. When the journey becomes filled with prejudice and hatred, a battle begins in Elijah's heart and mind. Does he continue to live the way he was taught as a child, or will he listen to the reverend when he shows him the Bible teaches all people are in the family of God and everyone bleeds the same? With the enemy always on their heels, children being kidnapped, and families on the run, causing lives to be changed, will Elijah be able to protect the reverend and make it to El Paso? Will he find peace for his troubled soul? Or will all he find is blood covering the El Paso trail?