The Wound of the Border Cannot be “Unseen”: Reflections a Year After La Matanza in El Paso-Juárez
On August 3, 2019, a 21-year-old man filled with hatred walked into a Wal-Mart at Cielo Vista in El Paso, Texas. He came with the explicit intent to murder, hurt, and traumatize Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. He killed 23 people and wounded 25 more. If the average American had not heard of Juárez in 2008 when the Drug War erupted, or of El Paso during Beto O’Rourke’s Senate and Presidential runs, or of the entire region as the President continues to use it as Ground Zero for locking kids up in cages, the massacre or la matanza as it is known changed that. My hometown, the border town of El Paso, Texas across the bridge from Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, is now known as the site of the deadliest anti-Latino massacre in the country’s recent history.
I am writing this reflection as someone who grew up in El Paso-Juárez, but also as someone who has since left to study. Like my friends and family who still live there, I carry with me a great grief today. The El Paso-Juárez region is a densely populated area with more than 2 million inhabitants (800,000 in El Paso and almost 1.5 million in Juárez.) Yet, those 23 deaths felt deeply familial, deeply personal. It is not enough to explain why by saying that I knew people who were in the store and in the neighboring mall or that one of those killed was the wife of my father’s colleague at the Autonomous University in Ciudad Juárez. While this gave me a proximity to the grief, knowing people by name before they decided to go shopping that day or go into work was not what made it personal. Instead, the massacre was a personal attack in its very nature and was intended as such. It was an outburst of violence against a way of life and an act of brutal racism. It was a moment of climactic tragedy for a community who, throughout its 300-year history, has partaken in its own share of ills.
My hometown, the border town of El Paso, Texas across the bridge from Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, is now known as the site of the deadliest anti-Latino massacre in the country’s recent history.
As Msgr. Arturo Bañuelas put it in a fiery speech after the massacre and again in a recent Commonweal podcast, when the shooter traveled the ten hours, he brought with him the President of the United States, White Supremacists, the NRA, and Fox News. As Bañuelas told the stories of people he knew, you can hear both the prophetic message and the deep sorrow in his voice. He is a clergy member of the Church and has been a parish priest in the area for longer than I have been alive, but he is also a native of El Paso. You can hear in his voice that this is, for him, deeply personal. Bishop Mark Seitz wrote a profound pastoral letter titled “Night Will Be No More.” In it, he expands some on the experience of racism on the Border. He, too, argues that the shooter’s actions were a product of structural racism. The Church was anything but silent in the face of this injustice. The Church took an attack on immigrants and people of color, personally.
The community responded to the arrival of this hatred by memorializing their dead and repeatedly calling on the intercession of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. This refusal to engage with evil by more evil models what theologian Walter Wink refers to as “Jesus’ Third Way.” Jesus, Wink explains, does not argue for a passive acceptance of oppression nor a violent countering, but rather an active resistance (the Greek word antistenai used in Mt. 5:39 means literally to “stand against.”) His teaching to “turn the other” cheek, in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, is not, as European commentators have remarked for many centuries, about nonresistance. Wink points out how, in fact, silly it is to make this conclusion since Jesus continually resists evil and stands against wrongdoing. He performs miracles for the marginalized, the sick, the hungry. This teaching instead calls for those receiving brutal treatment from an authority figure to turn their heads in such a way that interrupts the perpetrator’s ability to continue to hit them. It undermines the power structure that oppresses and diminishes power over the oppressed. This Third Way — resistance on our own terms — is exactly what the El Paso-Juárez region has always been about. It is this way of standing against The Powers That Be by not playing the rules of the game that causes Bañuelas to speak of Hispanic Theology as being “subversive and passionate.”
This Third Way — resistance on our own terms — is exactly what the El Paso-Juárez region has always been about.
While it is only more recently the center of much attention, for many of us, the Borderlands have always been a center, our center. As Mayor Dee Margo recently pointed out, the Paso del Norte region was established 100 years before even the founding of the United States. Starting in the 1980s, Catholic theologians like Virglio Elizondo and Arturo Bañuelas called attention to the particularities of the Borderland region. Using the term mestizaje, they described both the natural and forced blend of cultures on the Border. They wrote, because they knew it to be true, that the Borderlands were a locus theologicus, a place where Theology is found. Elizondo argued in his doctoral dissertation for the Galilean Principle: “What human beings reject, God chooses as his very own.” He was referring to the people of the Borderlands who are, as Gloria Anzaldúa and many others have put it, ni de aquí, ni de allá — neither from here, nor from there. Bañuelas, as a first-hand observer and practitioner, continues to write about the popular religion in the land as an act of resistance to the people’s double conquest, once by the Spanish and in 1846 by the American government. This has made them a people between Latin America and the United States, but never fully in either.
For El Paso-Juárez, the massacre is another form of this historical rejection.
For El Paso-Juárez, the massacre is another form of this historical rejection. The shooter pulled the trigger, but the gun that killed those 23 people that day was loaded by the rhetoric of a racist president, the normalization of brown kids in cages, the valuing of gun lobbying money over lives of innocent people.
A year later, El Paso-Juárez continues to be in the national spotlight in a way it never has been before. As someone who has been gone from the region for many years now, I see it in the changed responses from people as they learn where I am from. For better or for worse, people know El Paso-Juárez. For many, the first time they saw El Paso-Juárez was in the news coverage. They saw the El Paso-Juárez community for what it was. They saw the memorial in the Wal-Mart parking lot, the desert landscape was rolled in between shots, they saw the pictures of heroes on the front covers of newspapers, they saw the detention centers in Tornillo. El Paso-Juárez, in this way, is only more recently a place that is seen.
The thing is, once you see it, it is impossible to “unsee” it; it becomes impossible to ignore El Paso-Juárez.
The thing is, once you see it, it is impossible to “unsee” it; it becomes impossible to ignore El Paso-Juárez. The cry of the mestizo people who reside in the Borderlands, becomes too loud to drown out. The open wound, as Anzaldúa describes it, of the border is too obvious to glance over. It throbs, bleeds, it hurts. El Paso-Juárez becomes a point of conversion, as Pope Francis might refer to such a moment, in which one hears, sees, feels the cry of the poor pierce their heart deeper and more profoundly than before. The region and its people have long embraced their status as a place to pass through, a paso or path. In this same way, El Paso-Juárez acts as a step in understanding the ills of the world more broadly so that not only those of the Borderland, but all those suffering, may be liberated.
This ability to convert is because El Paso-Juárez has always been a place of revelation for God, a place where people rejected by other humans were chosen by God. As the larger Church looks to “learn, unlearn, and relearn” habits that promote and sustain a decolonized Church, as well as actively fight against neocolonialist tendencies, it ought to look right above and below the Rio Grande River. There, the people have been learning from Jesus, on how to actively resist marginalization and oppression, on our own terms.
