Sunset over Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, from UTEP parking lot, El Paso, Texas. July 2017.
July 2017.
One of the things I love about El Paso is its abundance of scenic views. Of mountains, plains, the two cities, the moon, stacking afternoon clouds ....
Sunset over Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, from UTEP parking lot, El Paso, Texas. July 2017.
A UTEP parking lots serves up a delicious sunset over Juárez.
Sunset over Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, from UTEP parking lot, El Paso, Texas. July 2017.
Look at that fingernail moon hanging there so daintily.
Sunset over Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, from UTEP parking lot, El Paso, Texas. July 2017.
I like to think about driving up that wide road in Juárez.
Sunset over Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, from UTEP parking lot, El Paso, Texas. July 2017.
Sunset over Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, from UTEP parking lot, El Paso, Texas. July 2017.
What's on the other side of that pass?
Sunset over Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, from UTEP parking lot, El Paso, Texas. July 2017.
Sunset over Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, from UTEP parking lot, El Paso, Texas. July 2017.
And, look, you can even see Cristo Rey:
Sunset over Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, from UTEP parking lot, El Paso, Texas. July 2017.
Here's the famous song about Adelita, performed in Spanish but with English subtitles:
But below are two soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution, more tied to reality, photographed by Agustin Victor Casasola.
Soldaderas, Mexican Revolution. Photo by: Agustin Victor Casasola.
Shep Lenchek wrote an instructive piece about women soldiers in Mexico, not only during the Mexican Revolution, but during the Spanish Conquest, in Soldaderas - Mexican Women at War. An excerpt:
While there may be some lingering doubt about the exact role of women in the Conquest, their participation in the Mexican revolution is well documented. However, now they were oft times classified simply as camp followers or prostitutes. Perhaps here too male chauvinism played a part in denying or minimizing the truth that female Soldaderas often stood shoulder to shoulder with male soldiers and fought to the death. ....
.... While it is true that the vast majority of the Mexican women who were involved with the military were non-combatants, it is also factual that thousands of these women lost their lives while performing their very necessary tasks [in the front lines]. Because many of them did become involved sexually with the soldiers they served, either for love or for money, it has become too easy to dismiss all of them as simply prostitutes or else simply ignore their existence.
Mr. Lenchek introduces his readers to a book that examine the real soldaderas in Mexico:Soldaderas in the Mexican Military, by Elizabeth Salas.
Movie poster of 1958 movie Si Adelita se fuera con otro. Source: Stanford University.
This article gives me an excuse to post - again - this painting by Carlos Flores:
Fried chapulines - grasshoppers - Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. February 2017.
This visit to Juarez was my time for adventurous eating. Chapulines and tacos de ubre.
As soon as I saw the shiny buckets of grasshoppers - crickets? - I knew I had to have some.
Fried chapulines - grasshoppers - Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. February 2017.
Fried chapulines - grasshoppers - Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. February 2017.
They cost 35 pesos, or about $1.50 USD, for about 2/3 cup.
Fried chapulines - grasshoppers - Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. February 2017.
Fried chapulines - grasshoppers - Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. February 2017.
You can have 'em with lime or with hot sauce. Or both, I guess. I chose lime, but I soon set that aside just to munch on the crispy crickets alone. Tasty.
Some more shots of the chapulines at the bottom of this post. And some info here and here and here on the delectables. It doesn't seem that chapulines are actually in season right now, so I don't know the story on these that I saw in February. Could be from last year's crop; could be some grasshopper species outside the traditional chapulin.
For lunch, I had four diminutive tacos. With the help of another customer, I noted my filling options included tripe (tripa), liver (hígado), steak (bistec), cow udder (ubre), and some other choices.
I went with liver and cow udder. The liver tasted like liver and the cow udder was surprisingly flavorful.
Ubre tacos (on left) and hígado (liver) tacos on right, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. February 2017.
Lunch cost 28 pesos - 18 pesos for the tacos and 10 pesos for the bottle of Coke Light. 28 pesos is about $2.50 USD.
Apparently, cooked cow udders used to be quite commonplace in Great Britain a couple of generations ago. Here's someone who really went to town with cow udder. Here's a roasted cow udder recipe.
Municipal Palace, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. January 2017.
On the Friday after New Year's Day, Juarez going in and coming out was much speedier than pre-holidays.
Municipal Palace, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. January 2017.
The sun shined, but a brisk breeze blew. I wore my black hoodie jacket and gloves, but I wished I'd brought my wide black-and-gray winter scarf.
Municipal Palace, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. January 2017.
On this visit, I covered some of the territory I've walked before. The photos above are of the Municipal Palace, the front exterior and the interior courtyard. On my first two visits to the city, the horses in front used to be on Calle 16 de Septiembre, near the Abrazo Monument.
Statue of Vicente Guerrero on Calle Francisco Villa, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. January 2017.
Each time I go into Juarez, I try to explore new territory. So far, I've only entered the city by walking over the bridge on El Paso Street, but there are three other ways to Juarez from the El Paso metro area.
House-and-tree at 175 Amado Nervo Street, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. January 2017.
At 175 Amado Nervo Street is this unlikely marriage between an elderly house and tree. One wonders which is supporting the other? I think it must be a mutual partnership.
House-and-tree at 175 Amado Nervo Street, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. January 2017.
From Amado Nervo, I turned left onto Calle Miguel Ahumada. There's something about the lucha libre that charms me.
Lucha libre poster, Calle Miguel Ahumada, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. January 2017.
On Calle Miguel Ahumado, a number of motels intrigued me. Their upstairs flats with wrought-ironed balconies seemed a distant cousin of a New Orleans esthetic. Which is, of course, a derivative of its ancestral settlers' own designs from back home in Spain, the Canary Islands, the Caribbean, coastal Africa ... .
Calle Miguel Ahumada, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. January 2017.
Calle Miguel Ahumada, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. January 2017.
I captured a Juarense sidewalk tourist trap for my collection:
Tourist trap, Calle Miguel Ahumada, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. January 2017.
When I came across a pocket park, I took a sharp right onto Nicolas Bravo.
An apartment perched on the top of a corner building waved at me with her tattered black veil.
The music, sidewalk menu, and a red parking meter added flavor to the moment.
Juarez has a fascinating highway system that seems to live under the city. On my second visit to Juarez, in the Plaza de Armas, I heard a rapid whistling-rumbling noise. I looked all around me to catch where the sound came from. I asked a nearby man what it was, maybe a train? He said, no, and pointed to a raised cement platform with a grille over it. It was a highway.
The highway beneath Plaza de Armas, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. January 2017.
I stepped on top of the platform and peered through the grille. Well, hot damn, cars charging through on a two-lane highway tunnel below. Here's the video:
I'm trying to visualize how this all hangs together in Juarez.
As I ambled up Calle Santos Degollado (I think), a sorbet-and-white wall, shedding its skin, a-peeling:
Calle Santos Degollado, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. January 2017.
Unfortunately, an inebriated fellow chose that moment to try and shake me down for some change, and I pushed on without striving for a better shot. Maybe another day.
From this approach to the park that I think is called La Gran Plaza, I enjoyed a happy view of the lucha libre mural I'd seen on my first visit.
Murals on Calle Ignacio Mariscal, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. January 2017.
Two minutely different takes on the same scene. Just can't decide which I like better.
Murals on Calle Ignacio Mariscal, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. January 2017.
It looked so grand against the backdrop of that dramatic sky.
Here, I explained you've got to have two quarters to enter Juárez and then one quarter to return to El Paso.
You've also got to have a passport or other documentation that will let you back into the United States.
I just realized that when you walk in to Juárez from El Paso, no one stops you to see if you're American versus, say, Canadian, Nigerian, Romanian, or Korean. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I never saw it happen.
Benjamin Alire Saenz, my literary cultural interpreter for El Paso, wrote about the fluidity between El Paso and Juárez.
From Carry Me Like Water (1995):
Driving down Interstate 10, Jake took the Juárez exit. He took his eyes off the road for a moment and stared down at Concordia Cemetery, the dead disturbed now by a freeway the locals called the spaghetti bowl. As the freeway curbed around, Juárez was straight ahead. It was so easy to get there, just get in the car, take an exit - Mexico - so easy, he thought.
... He remembered how, sick as he was in his last days, Joaquin had been obsessed with denouncing the only two countries he'd ever known, ever lived in. "I hate Mexico," he mumbled. "I hate the United States. I hate - " "What?" Eddie asked Jake. "Nothing, I was just talking to myself ... It's funny to live in a town where the other half of it is in another country."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[Luz] thought of moving to El Paso - she could move there any time she wanted - it was her home, her country. Her mother had chosen her nationality for her. She had waited until she was about to deliver, then walked into a clinic. She had been born a U.S. citizen in an ambulance on the way to the county hospital. She wondered why she had to choose between Juárez and El Paso ... She could not relinquish her Juárez because her family had lived in this ragged city for generations; it was her blood, her history, her inheritance; but she could not relinquish El Paso because it was the piece of dirt her mother had bequeathed to her; it, too, was her blood; it, too, was her history ... she knew what everyone in Juárez knew, knew that El Paso belonged to them, belonged to the border, would never be like the rest of America because their faces were printed on its land as if it were a page in a book that could never be ton out by any known power, not by God, not by the Border Patrol, not by the president of either country, not by the purists who wanted to define Americans as something organic, as if they were indigenous plants ... Luz laughed. El Paso was hers and ... she would not relinquish it to any gringo or any Chicana - who was not intelligent enough to acknowledge that she was entitled to it poverty and its riches.
When I crossed back over to El Paso from Juárez on my first foray into Mexico, the United States greeted me with: a rainbow, twists of barbed wire, and two plastic trash bags.
Mural in Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. November 2016.
On my way back to the border crossing, I passed through a vast, largely empty plaza. It had the look of a place that had been razed and that was in the process - currently suspended - of being formed into a park.
On one side were what I presumed to be the remains of the old neighborhood, bedraggled but still standing, and on the other side, the back walls of businesses that fronted Avenida Benito Juárez. On those walls were loud, splashy, wowza murals. A feast.
Mural in Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. November 2016.
Mural in Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. November 2016.
Mural in Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. November 2016.
Mural in Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. November 2016.
Mural in Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. November 2016.
Mural in Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. November 2016.
Within a parking lot and in another niche were other murals, grittier and darker.
Mural in Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. November 2016.
I wonder about that empty overall hung up on the barbed wire barrier in the mural above. Is that just a fateful place and position where an abandoned garment got thrown or blown? Or is it an intentional artistic statement of a struggle? Whether chance or deliberate, it speaks.
Mural in Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. November 2016.
And with the above mural - an empty-eyed skull capped by an empty-eyed hull of a structure.
