Frontera NorteSur

“We were the Ellis Island of the Southwest,” Fred Morales declared, as the El Paso historian kicked off a tour of the neighborhood known as Chihuahuita, or Little Chihuahua. Nudged up against the Rio Grande, Chihuahuita has experienced the arrival of immigrants of many colors and nationalities over the centuries, Morales told a group of about 35 people gathered for one of his monthly walking history tours the last weekend of June.

As the name suggests, Chihuahuita draws its moniker from the ancestral backgrounds of residents whose families hailed from the huge Mexican state just across the river.

“We are a city within a city,” Morales said. “We are tucked away like a sock. Most people don’t even know we exist.”

Morales, who grew up in Chihuahuita, made his remarks as the small community of approximately 300 people near downtown El Paso celebrates its 200th anniversary as a settlement. According to Morales, Chihuahuita remains a low-income community, with the annual median household income in the $11,000 range.

Easily missed by visitors, Chihuahuita is flanked by the Santa Fe Bridge that connects with neighboring Ciudad Juarez, the Franklin Canal, a railyard and a water treatment plant.

Narrow streets, where passage is frequently made difficult by commercial trucks darting in and out, embrace adobe and brick homes and apartments painted in yellow, tan and other tones befitting a desert landscape. Many residences are protected by metal gates and grates, and some exude eye-catching artwork: the dreamy wall mural of “Joe” and “Carmen” or the colorful image of the Virgin of Guada-lupe. Passing trains rumble the ground.

A walk through Chihuahuita conjures up memories of the older sections of Mesilla, New Mexico, up the road off Interstate 10.

Paradoxically, a shady and finger-shaped park, “Serenity Park,” sits underneath the reinforced, double border fence, which has a lower section topped with barbed wire. Similar to the metal screens that now cover the pedestrian walkways of the Santa Fe Bridge, the fencing obscures the view from one country to the other. In the age of border security, even vistas now have barriers.

Although Chihuahuita might be overlooked in the growing hustle and bustle of contemporary El Paso, the community has played a pivotal role in the border city’s history.

According to Morales, the arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad in 1881 created a “labor pool” for Chihuahuita’s residents.

By the early 20th century, the border neighborhood was on the frontline of the 1910 Mexican Revolution; the tenements which were built in 1916 sheltered refugees from the bloody conflict.

Chihuahuita grappled again with violence during Prohibition, when gun-battles between U.S. border guards and booze smugglers were so frequent that the neighborhood was called “El Barrio de La Mancha Roja,” literally “The Neighborhood of the Red Stain,” Morales continued.

The confrontations reached such a level that U.S. security forces placed a machine-gun nest in front of one tenement building, he added. In the 1970s, an event that foreshadowed the border security issue in U.S. politics took place when local gallery owner Adair Margo guided former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on a tour of the so-called “Tortilla Curtain,” which in El Paso consisted of an easily penetrable chain-link fence, Morales said.

Nowadays, the Korean names on a local warehouse and commercial truck trailer identify Chihuahuita as one more stitch in a globalized economy.

Dripping with insights into deep history, Morales’ tours have attracted a steady and devoted following from El Paso and surrounding areas.

Don Ward, a former nurse who now lives in nearby Chaparral, New Mexico, said he joined the walk to “get a feel of the area” Though familiar with El Paso, Ward said had “no idea really what (Chihuahuita’s) importance was” until last weekend’s walking tour.

For Maria de Jesus Baca Gore, the summer stroll through Chihuahuita reawakened a family history that is part of a much larger one. “What I get from it is my heritage, knowledge of my great-grandmother from Mexico, because this was a stopping place,” Baca Gore said.

According to the native El Pasoan, her parents met in Chihuahuita when they were children, fell out of touch, reconnected at a carnival and got hitched at ages 19 and 18, respectively. Baca Gore is a World War Two baby who was born in an apartment on Chihuahua Street in the heart of Chihuahuita. “They made midwife deliveries during the war,” she told FNS.

Baca Gore’s father, Donicio Baca, served in the European theater of World War Two. Possessing a third grade education, the young man followed his father’s footsteps into the employment of the American Smelting and Refining Company (Asarco), which operated a large smelter in El Paso until 1999.

Baca worked at Asarco for 43 years, raising a family of 19 children on his salary. “We were the biggest family for Asarco,” Baca Gore said. “My mother never worked.”

Fred Morales’ descriptions of Prohibition-era Chihuahuita evoked a native daughter’s memories of stories told by her own relatives.

“There (were) always bullets flying overhead,” Baca Gore said. “Every night in the tenements they’d tell everyone, ‘Don’t go out!.’” On the flip side, Chihuahuita’s inhabitants generally led honorable lives and contributed positively to El Paso, she said.

Now approaching 70 years of age, Baca Gore is from a big family with roots that go back to places like El Valle de Allende in south-central Chihuahua state and northern New Mexico, where ancestors from the Lucero de Godoy family first arrived in the 1600s as Spanish military escorts, were granted land and then either killed or driven out by the 1680 Pueblo Revolt.

Relatives from both sides of her family live in California, Colorado, Chicago, El Paso, and several Mexican states.

Family reunions in El Paso, including one on top of the Holiday In, and Denver have drawn hundreds of people, Baca Gore recalled. Among other pursuits she recounted, her relatives served as soldiers, worked the railroad in Kansas, toiled in sugar beet fields in Colorado, and sweated in the smelters of Chihuahua and El Paso.

In the big sweep of history, Baca Gore’s family-and by extension Chihuahuita-has been around for the Spanish colonial period, the U.S. conquest, assorted Mexican political upheavals, the rise and fall of an old industrial economy, and the transformation of the Paso del Norte from small settlements like Chihuahuita into the international metroplex of today.

Passing down family and regional history to the next generations is an important duty for the Pasena.

“I’m proud of being part of that,” she said. “I want the future Mexican Americans to know about that. I have six kids and I tell them where we come from.” A cousin has meticulously traced the family tree back centuries, according to Baca Gore.

“We’re getting old and we want to leave something for the great grandchildren,” she stressed.

Morales predicted changes for Chihuahuita, but said his old stomping grounds thankfully managed to avoid a highway extension plowing through it as part of the ambitious if nerve-wracking transportation reconfiguration of modern El Paso underway all over the city.

“The neighborhood will go through a transition in the future, but the good thing is we were able to convince the Texas Department of Transportation to not go through the neighborhood,” Morales informed his tour group.

The author of numerous books on El Paso and Ciudad Juarez history, Morales said he’s organizing a library exhibit on Chihuahuita to commemorate the community’s 200th anniversary later this summer.

After the tour, Morales showed this writer and El Paso historian-photographer Robert Chessey the renovated apartment in the old tenement complex he lived in during the 1970s. According to Morales, the old digs had an earlier, notorious tenant in the late 1920s: Ignacia “La Nacha” Jasso.

Still in the early stages of a storied if illicit career, La Nacha, who would go on to dominate much of the local and regional heroin trade until her death in 1974, apparently hid out in Morales’ future Chihuahuita home during one of the times she fell out of favor with the Mexican authorities.

The ghost of La Nacha still lurks around Chihuahuita, as the on-going seizures of heroin by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at the adjacent Santa Fe Bridge attest to the endurance of a contraband business that creeps alongside the people and products which flow between two politically separated but historically inseparable lands.