El Paso / Ciudad Juarez 2014 …
It’s been at least ten years since I was in this alternate-reality part of the world. We’re deep in a desert. There’s sparse plant life. Lots of rocks. Stark, dry, hills and mesas — and a big blue sky. There’s a unique human spirit here that’s informed with the lyrical, mysterious, sound of Spanish, and bent by the unrelenting sun.
And I’ve always loved this place — or found it fascinating, more like.
I first remember passing through El Paso when a Greyhound bus I was taking from Temple, Texas to Riverside, California, stopped here at dawn for a two-hour breakfast break on a fall day in 1975. I took a walk and watched the city rise. I knew I was someplace exotic.
In the early part of this century — 2001 to 2004 — I’d come down here to visit the US Consulate in Juarez to get visas for my clients. It was on those trips that I got to know the place a little.
Those were three-day trips, two days for work and then a day to chill out before flying back to Seattle. I’ve walked a good bit of Ciudad Juarez in the past and I walked some of it again today. I can see the scars in this city.
The spot just across the border’s tiny little “Rio Grande” — the place where Juarez begins for most Americans — was never upscale. The place was a carnival. Now it seems almost abandoned — decayed and long gone from the circus that I remember.
On this Saturday afternoon at 5pm … I saw no one who was plainly American on the Juarez side during my two-hour mini-trek.
About a third of a mile into Ciudad Juarez, there used to be a bakery. If you cross at the Paso del Norte Bridge, go straight down Benito Juarez Avenue until that street ends at Avenida 16 de Septiembre, that’s where you’d find it.
It had white and pink walls and a nice big painted sign with a picture of a brown muffin, hanging outside. I had coffee there a few times back in 2003–2004. I became friends with the young owner, a pretty girl named Rosa. We exchanged emails from Seattle to Ciudad Juarez for a time, but fell off after a while. That bakery was her dream. She wasn’t from a rich family and she had scraped everything she could together, to make her business. She and her sister and brother-in-law were partners in the bakery. I suspect that each month was a worry for them financially. But they had a dream and a plan.
Then the troubles hit Juarez. It had been a violent place throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but things got really bad 4–5 years ago. Random cartel violence in the streets. The assassination of US Consulate workers. Rosa was a careful soul with a wary eye. That was something that I noticed about her immediately. I thought it was a good trait to have in Juarez — at the juncture of Benito Juarez Avenue and Avenida 16 de Septiembre.
When I read about Juarez in the news a few years ago I thought of Rosa. I worried for her and felt sad that someone so noble was surrounded by something so evil.
Her bakery’s not there now. I’m not sure if that space is an electronics store, or a currency exchange outlet. It’s been ten years and I can’t be sure which space was hers. But there’s no trace of her pink and white walls.
Maybe she’s moved up. Maybe there’s a new and better location for her bakery. Maybe she’s gotten married and is a mother. Maybe she and her sister and brother-in-law lost their dream when the trickle of American tourists quit altogether. Maybe some criminal stole her business. Maybe she was killed in random violence. Maybe …
I do know that she and her family made good cookies and coffee. And that ten years ago in Juarez they were chasing “the American dream,” just a few blocks from America itself. But those are a long few blocks.
If anyone ever deserves to succeed, Rosa does. It’s easy for me to say, but don’t give up Rosa. I remember you and you inspire me.
El Paso, Tejas … 23 August 2014
