Aaah, viva la Mexico. I really thought I was moving to an American city. Granted, an American city on la frontera (the border), but an American city nonetheless. For all its Applebees, Targets, Walmarts and Albertsons, El Paso is just about as submersed in American culture as Zihuatanejo is, which is not really at all.
My first clue in this was house-hunting, where some of the rentals I looked at were shown to me by lovely El Pasoans who spoke no English at all. My second clue was at Goodwill, where I picked up a Yellow Pages out of a free stack of extras, only to bring it home and find it was completely in Spanish. Later clues included English-free playground and grocery store experiences. The final experience that left me feeling very grounded in my new homeland was eating at a busy local eatery, where the food was incredibly delicious, but the next 48 hours was a churning disaster for my digestive tract.
So where I am that I find myself so separated from the sweet mountain culture that I know and love? Apparently I have landed in El Paseo del Norte, a land of two cities, one culture, four states and two nations. There are 3 million people living here on both sides of the border, and from what I gather, that border is a very fluid membrane separating two nations, but allowing the same cultures, the same families and the same religions to pass freely through to el otro lado.
These murals were recently painted in downtown El Paso, underneath a spaghetti bowl of the interstate and highway. We are blessed to have a native El Pasoan studying at the birth center right now, and she's been schooling us in the cultural sensitivities we need to be aware of. She took us around to these murals to deepen our awareness and appreciation for the tragedy, beauty and depth of traditions and myths in the culture that surrounds us.
I can't emphasize enough the changes that have occurred here in the last ten years, since 9-11 (when the border got harder to cross) and also as the drug wars have escalated. Before those changes, El Paso and Juarez were truly one city of 3 million people. Just as your aunt might live on the other side of town from you, so did these families have relatives living on both sides of this ONE town. The fact that there is an international border running through town was somewhat meaningless. Now however, the border is almost impossible to cross for anyone without a laser visa. And with the violence in Juarez permeating that side of the city, El Pasoans are hesitant to travel to that side of the city. Hispanic cultures put great value on family dependence, much more so than most Americans. All families in this region are left with the hard reality of their families being torn apart by border-crossing difficulties combined with the fear of violence that permeates Juarez. As our student friend put it, El Pasoans are left feeling like one half of a Siamese twin that will die if it's separated from its other half. If the city survives, they're left feeling that they've abandoned their other half. She estimated that approximately 30,000 people have immigrated, illegal or otherwise, to El Paso in the last few years to escape the violence in Juarez.
This final mural is the artist's depiction of a creationist myth from one of the local indigenous tribes. The myth states that when babies die, they go back to the spirit world, which is a sort of tree that sustains these babies until another mother is ready for them. During birth, the new mother will pull her baby from the tree like you might pull a ripe apple from an apple tree. This mural depicts that spirit baby tree and all the little infants waiting to be born, with the story of the tree told in words as well. Needless to say, the words are all in Spanish.
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