on which it was dependent until 1823, when the area was added to the state of Chihuahua. In 1824, the Congress of that Mexican state made the name Paso del Norte official.
Because of its strategic location, the region—and, in particular, the Santa Fe trail in New Mexico—was key to commercial trade between the cities of Chihuahua and San Luis Missouri. El Paso de Norte sits exactly at the point where the states of New Mexico and Texas meet on the Mexican border. This factor compelled a group of foreign merchants to settle in the region on the northern shores of the Río Bravo, which after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo would fall into the hands of the United States.
Shortly thereafter, the county of El Paso was formed in Texas. The settlement to the north of the border was called Franklin, while the area on the Mexican side was still known as Paso del Norte, until September 16, 1888, when it was renamed Ciudad Juárez in memory of President Benito Juárez, who had been forced temporarily by the invasion of French troops to relocate the seat of government there between 1865 and 1866. Franklin, which was home to a powerful, striving Anglo-American elite, then changed its name to El Paso.
In the coming years, the border area, with El Paso on the U.S. side and Juárez in Mexico, took on a practical character. It was a place of exile for dissidents, of whom the brothers Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón were perhaps the most well-known, protesting dictator Porfirio Díaz’s regime from 1876 to 1911. It was a natural arms market before, during, and after the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. Aside from creating a rupture in relations between the United States and Mexico, that conflict generated a U.S. concept of the border charged with classism and racism. Militarization after 1915 brought increased alcohol consumption and prostitution to the zone, and the region became synonymous with immorality and disease in the collective imagination. For the rest of the decade and into the 1920s, the city could not establish security and stability.
The border between Mexico and the United States as we know it today began to take shape at a time when both countries were going through critical, defining stages. Once internal U.S. cohesion was consolidated, the nation began to test the limits and reach of its transnational power. For its part, Mexico constructed a post-revolutionary identity with Mexico City as its epicenter, some 1,100 miles to the south of El Paso–Juárez. Even though several leaders of the new regime were originally from the northern Mexican states (Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Sonora), the border area was rugged, desolate terrain that functioned more as a distancing buffer than a link.
Paso del Norte became a testing ground for the border’s identity and its broad implications. There began to be a differentiation of conduct and popular culture “to make it clear to Mexicans on both sides that this point was a haven for civilization and Western democracy,” writes González Herrera, “which they clearly were not a part of.” He emphasizes that “the legal framework, international treaties, and the body of regulations that the United States established to distinguish the alien-other-foreigner” were in no way “internalized within the consciousness of actual citizens on the ground.”
The professor’s description reminded me of an episode that took place on the El Paso–Juárez border around the time of the Migrant March, shortly before a conversation I had with John Cook, mayor of El Paso from 2005 to 2013. In February 2007, when Mexican president Felipe Calderón had recently assumed office and no one could yet foresee the consequences of his war on narcotrafficking, Cook—who before being the mayor had been a professor, a businessman, an army intelligence agent, and a city councilman—led a group of twelve mayors of border cities in Texas and Mexico to Washington, D.C., to meet with legislators and Secretary of National Security Michael Chertoff, express their opposition to the border wall construction project, and explore alternative solutions. Cook’s motto at the time: “If the federal government has money to build a wall, give it to me and I’ll build a bridge.”
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