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A Border Story: The Lone Couchsurfer of El Paso, Texas

Posted October 7, 2010 by Kevin Reilly

Given that I was born and raised on Long Island, I thought I was more or less inured to the drone of large-scale strip mall sprawl, but El Paso, Texas, caught me off guard. Coming northwest over the dry mountains on I-10, the city of 750,000 inhabitants rolls out beneath a big western sky like a cheerless comment on American comfort: Best Buy, Chili’s, Home Depot, Starbucks, Walmart and the full neon panorama of mascots for chain fast food restaurants, fitness clubs, hotels, and department stores define the skyline and clamor around the highway, spilling up to the Franklin Mountains in the north and down to the Rio Grande in the south as far as the eye can see. The traffic was moving quickly as I made my way downtown, but the surrounding sprawl made the trip feel congested, and part of me wanted to just keep driving.

The Rio Grande was also a peculiar first sight. I had not yet noticed it as I came up to El Paso from Marfa, the artsy West Texas outpost where I’d spent the previous night in a rented teepee, at a hotel of sorts named El Cosmico, so I kept craning my head to the south to find it once I reached the city’s outskirts. Suddenly it was visible in the gaps between billboards: a dark stream meekly slipping between the two cities as if its heart really wasn’t into this whole natural boundary thing. The average middle school outfielder could toss a ball across the river without much effort, and a single glance made it clear how easily a Mexican with minimal pluck could have swum across in the era before the militarization of the border.

Beyond the river is Ciudad Juarez, an immense labyrinth of low concrete buildings spreading out in the valley’s bowl, home to some 1.5 million residents, an estimated 200,000 of whom work in the 339 maquiladoras—factories for the assembly of exported goods with notoriously sketchy work conditions. The maquiladoras have been at the center of the debate about how this city has become, with 2,600 murders, the most dangerous place outside of a known war zone.

I had come to the border because I wanted to make some sense of this violence. This task was of particular interest to me because the Massachusetts boarding school that I teach at had taken an all-school trip to Nicaragua the previous March, which gave a shake to my slumbering awareness of relations between the US and Latin American countries. The time was nigh for me and my students to know more about the complex web of issues – from drugs to migration to the global economy – that made the border a fraught and fascinating place. 

As I took my first turn around El Paso’s downtown, I was still unsure if I had the chutzpa for a quick stroll in Juarez during the three days I planned to stay in the area, but El Paso did not fill me with mortal fear. People were going about their business as in any other city: groups of men sat feeding pigeons by a fountain; families ate at outdoor food stands; teenagers shuffled along holding skateboards. This cursory glance seemed to jibe with the studies that cite El Paso as one of the five safest places to live in the US, with violent crime rates far below other US cities of equivalent size. Its violent crime rate in 2008, for instance, was less than a third of Boston’s. The contrast on the border is pretty stark: only 11 murders have occurred in El Paso over the last two years, compared with almost 5,000 in Juarez. The mayor of Juarez, in fact, lives in El Paso.

El Paso, which sits across the border from what is arguably the most dangerous city in the world. (Photo Credit: Kevin Reilly)

Yet it was a tense time to be visiting. The violence in Mexican border towns brought on by the inception of President Calderon’s war on drugs had been spiraling out of control for years, and, recently, a number of high-profile incidents in El Paso were fodder for the belief that it would soon finally spill over the border. Most notably, two weeks before I arrived, a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot and killed a fifteen-year-old Mexican boy who was standing on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, and had been part of a group of Mexicans throwing rocks at the agent as he made an arrest.

I had given myself ten days to move from Austin to Tucson to see what I could see. As I planned for the trip I felt troubled by what I would actually be doing to get a sense of life in a tumultuous part of the country I’d never visited before. Sure, I could talk to some well-informed people, run my hand along the border wall, linger over a bunch of sodas in a rib shack, stand in the Sonoran desert at noon…but how could an outsider make contact with the reality of the border? A naïve question, but one I couldn’t shuck.

I found part of that answer on Couchsurfing.org, a website that sets travelers up with a place to stay in someone’s home free of charge. Hip young cities like Austin and Seattle seem to have hundreds of people who are game to take part in this venture at any moment. El Paso had only one couch available, that of a twenty-something named Luis. His profile photo showed a burly, unshaven fella in overalls with a tribal tattoo around his bicep and a wide southern grin, like he’d grown up on a catfish farm. I imagined hearing dozens of stories about the mess of trouble his old hound dogs used to get him into. Yet it was intriguing to imagine how this dude ended up as the lone Couchsurfer of El Paso, so I sent him an introductory e-mail and he obligingly agreed to host me.

Luis and I made plans to meet up outside a Barnes and Noble in western El Paso the night I arrived in the city. He got off work around 10pm, so I waited for him as the parking lot emptied out. Around 10:30 a small black car careened into the entrance. I had a feeling it was him, so I rolled down my window.

“Luis?”

“Hey man,” a scratchy voice called out.

“What’s up,” I yelped back.

“Not much, man,” his eyes were outlined with dark circles. “So what do you want to do? You wanna grab some food?”

“Yeah, food, okay, sure.”

“Follow me,” he said, turning his eyes back to the road and immediately speeding off.

I did my best to keep up as we zipped along the glittering strip mall highways, and I told myself it was perfectly understandable to not stay at this man’s house if he turned out crazy. Why else would he be driving like this?

I was nearly panting when we arrived at a pub. Luis bounded out of his car. He was big, over six feet tall with the wide, swaying shoulders of a linebacker, and his eye sockets were very dark, like he’d worked years of graveyard shifts. Half a week’s beard covered his face, and he wore a baseball cap backwards with a loose white polo and a pair of baggy jeans. I would want him on my side in a bar fight.

“This place is pretty good,” he said, adjusting his cap and striding inside.

We grabbed stools at the bar. The place was modest and hip: unobtrusive 1970s rock on the speakers, posters of obscure bands on the walls, and a young crowd sitting out on a patio eating and drinking. Several people waved hello to Luis and he shook hands with a friendly bartender who gave us menus.

“So, you work late,” I ventured. “Are you in the restaurant business?”

“No, man. Sort of, but not really. I’m more like a middle man.”

“What sort of middle man?”

“Not drugs, man!” he laughed. “No, I run a food delivery service called Restaurant Express. I’ve got a small fleet of drivers who deliver for high-end restaurants that don’t have established delivery services. Tonight was a good night, so I had to stay longer.”

The questions and details began to energetically flow out of him, and I felt reassured. Luis may drive like a bandit, but he quickly revealed himself to be a curious, considerate guy with a nimble mind. The whites of his eyes were crisscrossed with veins, yet he seemed like the kind of guy who could stay up and keep talking as long as he needed to.

He was 26-years-old and running a fledgling business, which meant he basically worked 10-hour days, seven days a week. Hence the appearance of his eyes.

His father was Mexican and his mother American; they split up when he was young and his father went back to live in Mexico. He was an important member of a champion El Paso high school football team, and had attended the University of Texas, El Paso, where he majored in poli-sci and economics. He talked fluidly about NAFTA, public education, the American drug appetite, narco-trafficking, football, Charles Bowden and Noam Chomsky.

He loved Couchsurfing.org, saying, “It appeals to my inner-hippy heart. You know: mi casa, tu casa. Why would anyone young stay in a hotel when they could do this? It’s a brilliant, simple idea. Take my couch—you tell me a story, I tell you a story, we’re both better off. And plus,” he laughed at himself, “I’m running this baby business so I don’t get to leave very often, you know?”

In the past year he’d had visitors from Beirut, Alaska, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Albany, all of whom had written favorable posts about their experiences with him on the Couchsurfing website as I would soon do. Many of his visitors were eager to get a sense of what was happening in Juarez from him, and he knew that was also what I wanted to talk about so he jumped right in.

“Man, Juarez is a mess. It’s terrible. I grew up in El Paso and it’s got this all this sprawl now, and yeah maybe I’d like to live somewhere cool like San Francisco and hang out, but I love it here. But when I was a kid I always wanted to live in Juarez. All my cousins over there seemed to be having so much more fun. There was nobody killing anyone in those days. We’d run around in the streets at night, eat delicious Mexican food with the family, play the new video games all day. In high school me and my buddies would go over and hit the bars, stare at the beautiful Mexican women. Now I can’t get anyone to go over with me. Nobody. My grandma lives there and none of my friends will come with me for one of her big breakfasts. My girlfriend wouldn’t even come with me to my cousin’s wedding. This big, huge, insane wedding with the whole Mexican side of my family, and my girlfriend wanted to stay on this side of the border.

“It’s crazy. But life goes on there, you know?” he said with a grin.

“People don’t walk around wearing rifles and strapped into bullet-proof vests. Thousands of people go to work and get home safe. You can still go to the tienda without being shot – people do every day. No American kids go over to drink anymore, and that’s wise, but in broad daylight it’s not that crazy. You’re not going to get shot if you stick to the main drag and don’t go around asking questions about gangs and drugs and cartel battles. Basically you’re safe in Juarez if you’re not being stupid.”

He spoke energetically but sounded exasperated by the topic. And just under the exasperation there were sediment layers of frustration left by the calamities that had come to a way of life he’d loved and by the way the questions people like me were now asking implied that Juarez was beyond help, swallowed up irremediably into the violent mythos of the border.

He slouched on his stool and rubbed his eyes. I asked him how one accounted for the low crime in El Paso, but he thought I meant compared to Juarez, which got him going.

“It’s safe because we’ve got something called the rule of law here, man! Over there people are killed and nothing happens. And we’re a first world country so we’ve got lots of money so we’ve got cops who’re paid well enough to keep away from playing along with the drug lords. No murderers go to jail over there. No reporters who value their lives investigate the murders. It’s nuts. I mean, Mexico is beautiful, I love it there, but impunity is killing that place. Two years ago my uncle was pulled out of his house and shot.”

“What?”

“Yeah, this happened two years ago,” he said, spinning an empty bottle in his hand, his eyes cold.

I tried not to react too strongly, “What happened?”

He told the story slowly, dragging along the same exasperation, the animation gone from his face.

“They’d been messing with him for months. Different people calling him and demanding money for reasons he didn’t understand, threatening to kidnap his kids. He didn’t make much of it, just thought it was a sign of the times, you know: Juarez headed to the dogs. And then one day three SUVs pulled up outside his apartment complex and a bunch of armed men in ski masks hopped out and came in and got him. No one knows who, no one knows why… I doubt anyone will ever know anything about it.

“He was a wealthy businessman. Does that mean he was corrupt? Who knows. He was an amazing guy, a great uncle. In Mexico everyone plays into the system a little bit. You can’t get by if you don’t. Did they kill him for a debt? To send a message? No one will ever know,” he said, shrugging.

“Jeez, Luis, sorry.”

“Yeah man,” he said, nodding his head, “me too.”

I scrambled for something to say but Luis was already shifting us on to other things, asking me about being a teacher, about books I liked, movies. We left Juarez behind and began trading stories about football and girlfriends. He spoke to the bartender about catering a party, quoting prices and handing him a business card. A little after one we went out to our cars and zoomed back to his house, where he set me up on his couch and said goodnight.


Kevin Reilly grew up in Manhasset and went to high school at Friends Academy. He majored in English at Williams College in Williamstown, MA, and returned to the Williamstown area three years after graduating in order to teach English and photography at Buxton School, a small progressive boarding school. He is entering his sixth year a Buxton, and will be teaching a course on the politics and cultural representation of the US/Mexico border border this fall.


Feature image courtesy of emdot via Flickr.