For generations, Ellis Island has been America’s great symbol of immigration. But another gateway has shaped the nation just as profoundly: El Paso, Texas. We trace one hundred years of migration, violence and memory along the U.S.–Mexico border.

Guests

Jazmine Ulloa, National reporter for The New York Times. She covers immigration. A native of El Paso, Texas. Author of “El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory.”

Book Excerpt

From El Paso by Jazmine Ulloa. Copyright © 2026 by the author, and reprinted with permission of Dutton.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: In 1911, the Mexican Revolution swept up 15-year-old Miguel Martinez. He was an orphan living with his uncles on a ranch west of Guadalajara. He got recruited into the army of Pancho Villa, a guerrilla leader who commanded a powerful rebel force against Mexico’s government and land-owning elite.

When a captain approached Miguel, his family warned him that refusing to join could be even more dangerous than heading into battle. So Miguel said “Yes,” teaching himself to ride horses as he rode with troops through Mexico’s northern states. By 1915, Miguel had reached Ciudad Juarez. The city was devastated by war, hunger, and disease.

But across the Rio Grande was El Paso, Texas, where people said there was food and work. Miguel never felt particularly loyal to Pancho Villa, and so he decided to escape. He waded across the river in the dark to the United States. Exhausted, he collapsed beneath a mesquite tree, and he woke up to a rancher who was standing over him.

The man gave him food and hired him to watch cattle. Well, that was Miguel’s introduction to America. He eventually settled just east of El Paso, married another survivor of the Mexican Revolution, Victoria, and they raised their children in a railway boxcar. But then the Great Depression hit, and Mexican workers who had once been recruited were blamed for taking American jobs.

So Miguel and Victoria, who were legal residents of the United States, but with work disappearing and racial hostility rising, well, they felt they had no choice but to leave. In 1931, the family packed its belongings into a Ford and returned to Mexico. Years later, when the United States once again needed Mexican labor, the family came back to the border and eventually settled in El Paso Well, Miguel’s story comes to us in Jazmine Ulloa’s new book, “El Paso: Five Families and 100 Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory.”

Jazmine is an immigration reporter for The New York Times, and in her book, she writes that El Paso, her hometown, is as essential to the American immigration story as Ellis Island, New York. Both have always been gateways to possibility and racial and political tension. But unlike Ellis Island, now a static national monument, El Paso is still here, a living, vibrant city that is both the economic beating heart of the border and an epicenter of the modern version of that same duality of possibility and political torma- turmoil.

And as such, El Paso continues to shape the American story. And Jazmine joins us now. Welcome to On Point.

JAZMINE ULLOA: Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: It’s so great to have you, and the book is such a rich exploration of El Paso history through these, these five families that you chronicle. I was wondering if we could stick with Miguel a little bit more.

Tell us more about what you know about his sort of earliest life and why you chose him and his family as one of the, the Martinezes, as sort of one of the families to profile in the book.

ULLOA: So, I felt like the Martinez family was really emblematic of this migration through the southern border, and that’s what I was really looking for when I went out in search of these families.

He was from a campesino family in the middle of Guadalajara. All around him, people had been losing their land, their communal land during, during the Revolution, and so many of them were being forced to migrate north, first to higher-paying jobs in northern Mexico, and then in the United States.

And they were really the braceros, the traqueros, the mineros who helped build the American Southwest. And that, that’s the, the story that I was trying to show, right? I was trying to capture how we tend to see El Paso as part of this border, this dividing line, right? We tend to think of the border of just this dividing line between U.S. and Mexico, and the borderland doesn’t really stop there, and the influence of Mexican culture, Hispanic culture, Latino culture doesn’t stop there.

CHAKRABARTI: Tell us more about Miguel’s story. I mean, what happened to him between the time he got basically forcibly conscripted into Pancho Villa’s group to when he arrived in Juarez? Do we know a lot about what happened to him?

ULLOA: It’s very difficult to piece together what happened in those years, and that’s why I really worked with his grandson, Raul Reyes Martinez, who helped me actually unearth that story about his grandfather.

Even the little that we know comes from actually a recording that his, one of his nephews did with one of his uncles. And so I was trying to piece together through the last remaining records. We have some of his border crossings. I interviewed as many people in the family, as many living relatives as I could about the stories that they had heard.

But that’s the part of the issue with why so much of this history has been overlooked or lost is because laborers like him, he crossed over and was a laborer for a while, we know that. We know that he was working on in this quarry in, in South Texas.

He crossed through El Paso and then ended up in, in Sierra Blanca, and he was working in this quarry when he, he injured his hand and, and actually lost a couple fingers. And so, all those pieces of history that I was able to capture came from these oral histories of that I was accumulating through spending time with the family.

And a lot of that oral history just hasn’t really been taken into account for much of academia, even Chicano historians, Latino historians that I’ve been working with. They’ve been working since the ’70s and ’80s trying to compile these, these very large repositories because, again, these were blue-collar workers, mainly blue-collar workers, Mexicanos, Latinos who were crossing over.

And they didn’t have much when they came, and they were often forced to leave many of their belongings when they were forced out of the United States during these very nativist periods.

CHAKRABARTI: I want to talk with you about that in just a minute, sort of what happened to Miguel and Victoria after they, they came to the United States.

But just even the story of Miguel when he, when he left Pancho Villa’s, group, it, it was really harrowing actually Jazmine. You talk about how it was clear to not just Miguel, but many other people and families that there were better opportunities in El Paso and they were starving also at the time.

And so can you just relay to us the story about how he and another family decided they were going to leave and try to, to cross into the United States?

ULLOA: Yes. So, I believe you, you mentioned in the beginning that he didn’t even know how to — this army came through this little, his little pueblo in outside of Guadalajara in the state of in, in the state of Jalisco, right, which is off of the Pacific Coast in Mexico.

And so they, they picked him up, and he didn’t even know how to ride a horse. But his uncle told him, “You better leave with them because the men, the young men that don’t end up hanging from the trees around here.” And he didn’t even know how to ride a horse, but he eventually learned along the way.

So he traveled for three years almost roughly to get  up north and through El Paso and to Ciudad Juárez. And when he arrived in Ciudad Juárez, the city is in shambles. And we must remember that the Mexican Revolution started with these big ideals, right?

It was a cross-section of society. Middle class, upper class, the lower classes of Mexico were all very frustrated with this authoritarian regime of Porfirio Díaz.  and it had just, it had just festered, and there were these big liberal ideas that people were gonna take their land back from these foreigners and imperialists who had come in from the United States and from Europe and who had been taking over this communal land in Mexico.

And they were going to turn it back over to the campesinos, to the people like Miguel and Miguel’s family who had been working the land. But of course the facts  the realities of war begin o come to fruition, right? These different factions break, these different coalitions broke off intovdifferent rebel factions.

And so Miguel’s kind of caught between, as you said in the opening, he wasn’t really loyal to Pancho Villa. He was just trying to stay alive. And he’s stranded now at the border. There’re so many armies that are now stranded out now at the border. It’s the Year of Hunger as we know as we know the year 1915 is called. And he begins to see that people are crossing over the river. He’s marching along the, the river on the Mexican side of the border with, with his with other soldiers, and he begins to see that many are crossing. And so that’s when he decides to cross over and see if there’s a better life for him on the other side.

CHAKRABARTI: But he doesn’t just cross over on his own, right? I mean, you, you write about how there was another family on the day or the night that they decided to cross over, but the family’s son was actually marching at the head or near the front of the column. And so Miguel says, “Well, I’ll bring him,” right?

Because the parents left earlier. And, the other boy, the other teen, when Miguel gets to him at the front of the column and says, “It’s time for us to go,” is so starving that he can’t really walk himself, right? And so Miguel picks him up and carries him.

ULLOA: Exactly, and walks all night until he reaches until he’s reunited with his parents, and they rejoice on the other side of the border.

But he’s so tired by then that he lets them continue their journey, and he falls asleep under a mesquite tree, and that’s when the, the rancher comes up to him and offers him his first job in America.

CHAKRABARTI: And we have about 30 seconds before our first break,  Jazmine. I think a lot of people listening to this might say, “Well, he, Miguel maybe should have stayed on the Mexican side of the border and tried to make the best life for himself.”

Well, actually, you know what? We’re actually right at the break, Jazmine. I don’t want to make you rush into an answer, so I’ll finish this up when we come back.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Before the break, I was gonna ask you to talk about sort of what the, what Miguel Martinez’s choice to cross the border and then being forced, back from from Texas into Mexico later in life, what that sort of signifies. But let me just shift here a little, because I think we should actually talk about the existence of the border in that location itself, between modern-day El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.

Can you tell us the story of why the border is there?

ULLOA: Yes. So the, the border is there because the United States and Mexico went to war in the 1840s, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 cut a new jagged line between between these two countries after Mexico lost the war. And Mexico was forced to cede more than half of its territory, including what is almost the entirety of the Southwest.

And so it cut this jagged line going all the way from Texas to California, and it was a line, it was a U.S. boundary that was as quickly contested as it was drawn, the United States would seek to push itself southward, and Mexico northward, and one side was always fearing invasion from the other.

And then so with that struggle is when this is the era, this is the place that I’m really,  writing about, right? That this is where the Mexicans become more Mexican and the Americans become more American. But there’s always this liminal space in between where Mexican-Americans are caught between this formation of these two nations, these two national identities, and whether they’re at the center or at the margin depends on where you’re standing.

CHAKARBARTI: And you talk about how in the book that basically by 1917 just as the United States is turning its attention to its participation in the First World War, you write that by that time the militarization of the border  near near El Paso had already been well established.

Talk about that for a little bit.

ULLOA: Yes. So because of the Mexican Revolution, and this is another theme that I try to really draw out and dwell on in the book, is that El Paso and Ciudad Juárez were really had what David Dorado Romo has called and has written extensively about, the historian David Dorado Romo, is this ringside seat to the Mexican Revolution.

So a lot of these intellectuals and liberals and activists  and organizers who were who were fleeing Mexican President Porfirio Díaz’s authoritarian regime were passing through El Paso, and the city had become this  liberal hub for a lot of this for a lot of this activity, and it also became a lot of a hub for rebel activity and revolutionary activity.

So you had these infamous guerrilleros like Pancho Villa that really made the area their stomping ground. And at the same time, they’re fleeing both Mexican authorities, federal authorities and U.S. authorities  on both sides of the border that are seeing them as criminals and bad men before these liberal ideas.

And then at the same time, you do have this illegal trade of guns and drugs that are still flowing as early, as in that early period, and a lot of those weapons are going to feed these armies to fuel these armies that are fighting the revolution.

You can really see the origins of how we got a lot of the rhetoric today. And so that’s what I was really trying to explore in the book.

CHAKRABARTI: I had no idea that General Pershing, whose storied participation in the First World War I knew of, I had no idea that he was at the border before he went into Europe, and was part of the U.S. military forces there.

ULLOA: Yes. So Pershing is then set off. Pancho Villa attacks this small town in New Mexico with, with his group. He’s doing poorly in the revolution. His army as we’ve discussed,  it’s the year of the hunger.

People are starving. It’s well into the war. He’s losing. The morale is down. He’s losing weapons. So  he makes this attack on this garrison in New Mexico in hopes of replenishing. It’s very debated why he did it, but he’s also trying to replenish his army, and it ends in  this very, very violent attack  and the deaths of Americans.

And so it sparks the ire of the United States and leads this general to actually go south in search of him, and  in this search is really when we begin to see the earliest, the militarization of the border because already you have these incursions by the federal government and by federal soldiers from the American government into Mexico as they search for Pancho Villa.

CHAKRABARTI: That brings us back to Miguel Martinez, and I was going to ask you,  what should we make of his his choice to cross the border not legally at the time? But then it suddenly occurred to me that what’s even more interesting is that Miguel Martinez struggles across the border, is virtually starving to death, collapses underneath a mesquite tree, and when he wakes up, the first person he sees is an American rancher.

I think maybe even more compelling or more provocative is that rancher doesn’t say… He asks him in your book,  “Are you from Mexico?” And Miguel’s like, “Yes.” And he, the rancher doesn’t say, “Go back.” He says, “I can give you a job.” Now, what does that tell us?

ULLOA: It’s so emblematic of this force that begins this powerful political force that begins to build in Texas and across the Southwest with, which is this agricultural industry, right?

Agricultural leaders who begin to clamor for the need for more workers, more Mexican laborers, because they know how crucial they are in the field. Soon, Texas would enter its own revolution, right? But it would be farming revolution and industry, how that industry looked like in Texas really began to change with bigger corporations coming in and employing more and more workers, needing more and more labor, men, men like Miguel.

CHAKRABARTI: I think one of the most eye-opening aspects of your book, Jazmine, is not just how the story of these five families really tell us a different but much needed version of the struggle for this diverse American identity, but that also, at the same time, there was a struggle for Mexican identity on the other side of the border.

Not just through the Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution, but even sort of to define sort of what Mexicanness is. And the critical role that Chinese families played in that I had no idea. So can you tell us a little bit about another family that you profile in the book?

Again, the book is called “El Paso: Five Families and 100 Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory.” I’m talking about the Chus, of course. Tell us a little bit about them.

ULLOA: Yes. So Antonio and Herlinda Chu were Chinese Mexicans who lived in Ciudad Juárez, and actually, I came across Herlinda’s photo as I was doing research on the revolution, I was actually trying to track down the Magonistas, right, who were these Mexican rebels who were spreading a lot of these liberal ideas, and those liberal ideas were about Mexicans shouldn’t be discriminated in the United States, Mexican laborers shouldn’t be discriminated in the United States, that they should have fair wages, they should have fair work hours. They had been pursued by the government. At the same time, they were also planning this armed revolt against the United States. And so FBI and authorities on both sides of the border had been pursuing them.

And so I went to this national center in Fort Worth, the archive center in Fort Worth, and I was trying to track down the search warrants for these Magonistas, and I end up coming across all these photos of Chinese laborers who had, who were also caught up in the courts among in these cases, right?

Because they were also seen as criminals. The Chinese Exclusion Act had kept was keeping Mexican was keeping Chinese laborers out of the United States, and so many of them were ending up in Ciudad Juárez or were trying to cross in these really circuitous routes through, through Mexico.

I was seeing these, I was seeing these search warrants for all these rebels who were running guns, I was also seeing these Chinese laborers who were getting caught up men who were saying, “I was born in San Francisco, I was born in Chicago but now I’m here branded an alien fighting for my freedom.”

And so I began, I started getting very curious about it. Well, I had no idea either, and I am from El Paso. I lived there. I knew there was an Asian American history. I knew there was Asian American history there, but I didn’t realize it was so integral to the crossing itself or, I usually thought about Asian migration through Angel Island, through San Francisco. And so I started digging more into that, and I came across Herlinda’s photo, right? So Antonio came from, China and or Erlinda’s grandfather, I’m sorry, came from China and had worked all over Latin America.

And bringing in Chinese laborers to work on the railroad. And then once the Chinese Exclusion Act passed, and it just became harder and harder for the Chinese in the United States, he ends up in Guadalajara in Mexico, enjoys it there, starts building a very prominent business, hotel chains and gives birth to his daughter, Erlinda.

And he goes down to El Paso a lot for business, and so he brings his daughter over. And so she’s coming to El Paso for the first time in the midst of the Mexican Revolution, as it’s just getting started. And at the time, as it’s getting started, there’s all these tourists and photographers and there’s rebels and there’s spies from all different types of country from all, all different types of nations in, in the Unit in El Paso as this revolution, there’s word out that this revolt is about to break out. And so there’s tourists actually taking pictures with rebels right on the U Mexico border, and she’s one of these tourists. And she was captured in this photo. And but she’s often identified as this Yaqui Indigenous woman, right? Because she’s dressed as a soldadera.

That’s what tourists would do at the time. They would take pictures in the bandoliers the munition belts, across the chest and the big sombreros,  and so she was there. She was misidentified by some in some captions. And when I realized she’s a China Mexicana, and her descendants had become prominent immigration lawyers in the city, I thought, “Wow, this, this family is again, so it capsulates everything I’m trying to capture about this region, about how rich and multicultural and, this rich multicultural, multiethnic stomping ground that the border has always been that type of place.”

CHAKRABARTI: And what was so interesting to me is that, as you said part of the growth of the Chinese immigrant community in Mexico at the time came because of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States, right? So the sort of racist act to keep people, a certain group of people out of the United States leads to more Chinese immigrants going to Mexico and creating really kind of a vibrant community there.

And Erlinda herself, if memory serves in your book, she plays this really important role right at the border as well. At one time she’s called the refugee boss. Do I remember that correctly?

ULLOA: Yes, that’s correct. She becomes very adept at navigating immigration laws, and  she meets Antonio there during this time, and Antonio has opened up his own store. He has his own grocery store and food supply eventually food supplier. But she herself starts helping Chinese immigrants learn English and learn how to navigate the citizenship process or, the immigration process into the United States.

She has her own little office that she works out of her home. And, and because  she was very  charismatic, very much like her father. And because she befriends the immigration agents on both sides of the border and helps with translations she becomes known as someone you can go to in the neighborhood for help with these types of issues.

CHAKRABARTI: There’s a, a line in the book that really stayed with me, that there comes a period of time where as Anglo-Americans turned on Los Mexi- Mexicanos, and then the Los Mexi-Mexicanos turned on Los Chin-Chinos in the book. That’s how you, that’s how you write it, what was happening that raised the sort of anti-Chinese sentiment in Mexico?

ULLOA: That’s an ongoing theme in the book as well, right? It’s not only people and, and goods that are crossing, but it’s these ideas, and ideas can be liberal or they can be nativist. And so as more Mexi-Mexicanos are ending up in northern Mexico and their numbers are growing, Mexicanos, working-class Mexicanos, especially Mexicanas who are stuck at home trying to make ends meet while their men are off at war, are becoming angry and angrier that these people are, the, as they, in quote, in quotes are invading as well.

And there the propaganda begins to fill the airwaves, that the Chinese are advancing much, much quicker. They’re reaching upward mobility much quicker, taking jobs. So it becomes very similar to what we hear about Mexicans on the other side of the border, what white Americans are hearing about Mexicans on the other side of the border.

The tensions really begin to rise. And then there’s already, in the air, there’s already this very anti-foreign sentiments again, this vitriol or I should say this, this hatred against foreigners because,  they see Mexicanos, they see these foreigners, foreign empresarios coming in and taking their land.

And so Pancho Villa himself has a very racist streak against the Chinese. He’s killing all kinds of foreigners, but he’s particularly going after the Chinese. And so, Erlinda becomes this person, this leader who helps actually 200 Chinese Mexicanos flee into the United States for, because she has such connections at at the border.

She helps them flee into the United States as one of these rebel groups from Pancho Villa is about to descend on the city, and they begin to get tips that they might be in danger.

CHAKRABARTI: The reason why I was so captivated by this part of the book is that it really shows us Jazmine, I think you effectively show us how this question of identity, and who belongs, and who has the right to the land, is like a continental story that’s just distilled into its most, I don’t want to say purest form, but its most energetic form, where we place these borders.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Jazmine, in reading the book and sort of preparing for our conversation today, I was looking up sort of facts about the importance of El Paso today on a daily basis in the American story.

And for folks who don’t know, it is a truly remarkable place. The El Paso itself, the metro area around El Paso, is home to about 880,000 people, and as many as 60,000 people every single day legally cross the border in El Paso, and that’s just the sort of flux of people going back and forth that keep the border economy really, really going.

And then when it comes to the amount of goods that pass just through El Paso, I mean, it’s remarkable that something like $290 million worth of goods are crossing in and out of the United States just in El Paso. I think the Texas comptroller at one point in time even said it that one place is the source of 20% of the value of goods that comes in and out of the United States.

So it’s so massive even today just economically in the story of America. I’m wondering, it’s your hometown. When living there, do you get the sense of that, that feel on a daily basis of El Paso’s centrality to the broader American story?

ULLOA: I think subconsciously or unconsciously, yes. Growing up, and this is why I wanted, this is what drove me to write this book, right? When growing up as a teenager there, growing up in El Paso, I always felt like any other teenager, right? My hometown’s too small. It’s boring here. This place is so isolated.

It feels it’s so far west. It’s at the far, far more western tip of Texas. It’s closer to, to Phoenix than it is the capital of Austin. So it felt like the rest of the state forgot it. It felt like the like the rest of the state misunderstood it. Then I leave, and I go to college in Austin.

I go to UT, and I think that that’s when I begin to realize, “wow, I’m from a really a special place.” It’s a place that’s allowed me to be as Mexican, as American to speak English and Spanish. As you were saying I had friends who would cross over to go to school every day.

We’d cross the border to go to doctors’ and dentists’ appointments, and quinceañeras, and birthday parties on the other side. And so I feel like I took that, that binationality, that rich binationality for granted until I stepped out, out of El Paso. And so that’s what I was really trying to capture in the book.

Not only  the binational culture, the richness of culture and exchange between Mexico and the United States, but also I became a national political reporter and started to see El Paso really become this backdrop to these larger political battles over immigration, over who was crossing and why I started to realize that these transnational trends, these transnational currents that have passed through the city.

And so that’s what I was really trying to capture in the book. How that rich binational culture came to be, but also how these transnational trends have always been part of who we are as well.

CHAKRABARTI: that’s the, the thing that I was thinking of is that reading the stories of the Martinezes, the Chus, the Rubios. There’s five families overall that you write about. It seemed to me, and I hope that this doesn’t sound too simplistic, but it seemed to me that the way the current debate issues, tensions whatever you want to call it, over immigration, especially along the southern border, the way they’re playing out, the way they’re being talked about the way it’s being politicized, it’s actually not all that different from what it was, a century ago in the time period that you focus on in the book.Am I wrong about that?

ULLOA: No, I mean, there’s rhetoric about the border, about the dangerous people that are crossing, the quote-unquote invaders who are crossing, I mean, that’s been with us since the 1880s when the Exclusion Act was first passed.

To me it’s just this ebb and flow, very much like the migration through the border itself, through, through that crossing itself.

CHAKRABARTI: Can you tell me more about that? Because this gets into, your beat covering immigration for The New York Times, and that as you were writing the book and continuing your daily reporting, did it change the way that you saw how the president talks about the border or how even sort of the reality along the border is being experienced every day?

ULLOA: In the book, I’m really trying to show the foundations of the immigration system, the detention and deportation apparatus that we have today, its expansion, and then its culmination right under the most recent administrations, right?

This culmination of forces whether it’s nativist rhetoric it’s this massive detention system that we have now. Everything’s kind of hit it its peak. And that, all of that has been constructed through both Republican and Democratic administrations.

So to me, it was very much about showing howit’s been built over the last 100 years, and that who is echoing this  nativist rhetoric changes at any point in time, but the rhetoric remains the same. Some the most liberal, progressive laborer activists in Herlinda’s time weren’t defending the Chinese, weren’t rushing to defend the Chinese. They also saw the Chinese as invaders. And so I was trying to show, and this is what other historians have, like Julian Lim, Evelyn Hu-DeHart have said before, is that this this nativist, this xenophobia isn’t exceptional. It’s central to how Americans have viewed American policy and regulated it in the United States.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, that gets me to thinking of the other similarities in that sort of how when tensions over immigration really peak, there’s a strong tendency not just to racialize, but we’ve even  heard President Trump say this about keeping people out because they’re dirty or diseased, et cetera.

And in the book, you talk about something I had never heard of, the Bath Riots of 1917. Can you tell us about that?

ULLOA: Yes. So as, again, we’re in the middle of the Mexican Revolution still. It’s a few years after the hunger, but conditions are still very dire in Mexico, and there’s these typhus, these epidemics of typhus that are washing over Mexico, and there’s a lot of fear about this really virulent disease.

And the American officials in the United States become concerned that these Mexican laborers are bringing or might be able to bring or will bring typhus over and other diseases. But it becomes conflated with all the other anti-immigrant and anti-German and anti-Mexican sentiments that are floating, and anti-Chinese sentiments that are floating out around at the time.

So they begin retrofitting this border crossing this border crossing center in El Paso  making it, expanding it and making it larger and creating these delousing stations where they want to spray every Mexican laborer who comes through with these noxious gases, and they begin planning these inspections,  these more thorough inspections where Mexicans are going to have to, take off all their clothes and in the nude, walk into these showers, and then get deloused, right? Get checked for lice and sprayed with chemicals. And so these domestic workers, who clean houses in the United States and have for wealthy people in, in El Paso, they cross every day from Ciudad Juárez to clean the homes of wealthier households in the United States, are very taken aback that they themselves are going to be subjected to these baths.

And so one of these young women a couple days after  the quarantines officially start, and they’re trying to get these processes going. She gets up and refuses to go through the process and rallies other Mexicanas to join her, and it becomes a crowd of 200 women that are basically rioting on the border for three days and are trying to stop  these practices from happening.

They do not succeed. The processes continue, and some version, some form of those delousing procedures continue all the way into the ’50s and as part of inspecting who would become Mexican braceros, right? This farm labor program that would later be implemented and would  Mexican men would sign up to work in Texas fields and fields all across the Southwest.

And so every time they would cross, they would be subjected to some version of this delousing.

CHAKRABARTI: The fact that they call them baths is a little disconcerting and, you write about how they used gasoline, kerosene for this, do these delousing procedures. Later on, even Zyklon B, which people might recall was used then a couple of decades later in Nazi concentration camps.

ULLOA: That’s right. These were some of the earliest, this is where we begin to see national security and immigration enforcement really begin, and the militarization of the border really begin to meld into what we’re seeing today and to the system we have today.

CHAKRABARTI: I wonder if going through this hidden history of El Paso and these families, and then going back to the fact that at the same time you a reporter on current day issues around immigration, the cyclical nature of all of this, Jazmine, made me wonder if it makes you think that there can ever be a future in which these same debates or tensions can ever be overcome in the United States?

ULLOA: I’m more of a journalist. I’m not a f-fortune teller.  I can’t make predictions, but I will tell you that I often feel as I’m even reporting, as immigration reporters we’re on the front lines of the harshest detention and deportation campaign this country has seen since World War II.

And often when I’m out in the field, I find myself trying to place myself in time because so much of what we’re seeing, I saw in today. So many of the images we’re seeing today, I’ve seen in the archives. I mean, I just came back from Texas. Yesterday I was, I was helping cover the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in this Houston neighborhood, and it’s a very Latino neighborhood.

And I was with community leaders who had actually started this escuelita for Chicano students, for Mexican American and Latino students in the neighborhood to teach them a lot of this history, right? And so the, one of the founders of this program was taking me through this school, and she’s showing me that it’s an art and history school, and they’re teaching teenagers in high school. And she’s showing me these paintings that they did in response to the raids to process the sweeps in Los Angeles and Chicago last summer. And, she’s showing me these paintings on the wall, and she said they had just, they had learned through about the deportations of Mexican Americans in the 1950s, which is what the current operations today are modeled after.

They had learned about the repatriations of people like the Martinezes in the 1930s. And so you see these elements, in their portraiture and in what they’ve created, in the pieces they’ve created. And she tells me, “Well, actually, we just had a class this last week. Now we were painting about the shooting that had just happened,” and it didn’t just happen in their city, in their hometown, it happened just down the street.

And she said, “So to me, the past is really present. The past is here.” That really stayed with me because that was the thought I kept having all throughout the process of writing this book.

CHAKRABARTI: We’ve just got a couple minutes left Jasmin. I’m gonna circle back to kind of where we started. I’ll admit this shamefully that I hadn’t actually thought of El Paso in the same breath as, Ellis Island or Angel Island, as you said, in story in terms of the story of American immigration history. And I applaud you for putting El Paso in that same place in terms of where we look to find inspiration for the immigration, story of America. But what would you also say that the rest of the country should learn from the living history of El Paso?

ULLOA: Yeah. I think here is where you can clearly see that the border is neither this lawless wasteland nor this seamless utopian melting pot, even as it it does have this rich multicultural, multiethnic heritage, that it’s much more this complex crossroads of power and privilege and survival. It’s really where you can see that Mexican culture and history have always been part of who we are as Americans because El Paso sits on land that was Mexican before it was American and Spanish, and Native before it was Mexican.

It’s really where you can see the influences of all of what makes us Americans today.

CHAKRABARTI: Did it make you fall in love with your hometown all over again?

ULLOA: Yes, definitely. Certainly. There were things I wish I had known sooner growing up.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, we have 30 more seconds. What surprised you the most as you were writing the book?

ULLOA: I didn’t realize that there were so many independent journalists even in downtown El Paso just so far from where not far from where I lived. Even one of them, she was a healer who crossed over and really helped plant the seeds for what would become the Mexican Revolution. She actually lived right next to this apartment complex that I lived in as a child, and I didn’t know that until I was trying to track down some of her records. And I knocked on the door, and I realized, “Oh my gosh, I lived right next door this whole time.”

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.