The anti-Latino massacre that America quickly forgot casts a long shadow in El Paso

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EL PASO — 

I never go to Walmart in Southern California. It’s declasse and too far from where I live.

On the road, it’s a godsend.

Air conditioning. Bathrooms. Usually a McDonald’s, maker of the greatest fast-food breakfast of them all, the Egg McMuffin. All the toiletries, snacks and clothes — reasonably priced — a traveler can ever need.

My wife and I plan our road trip stops around Walmarts. There’s the one in Gallup, N.M., perpetually packed with buses from the nearby Navajo and Zuni nations. In Danville, Ky., we once bought rain boots while waiting for a flat tire to be fixed. A Walmart Supercenter in Weatherford, Okla., is near a Braum’s, the state’s delightful cross between In-N-Out and Trader Joe’s.

Walmarts dot the road from Clifton, Ariz., to El Paso — in New Mexico, one is in Deming, a few are in Las Cruces, then there are a bunch as Interstate 10 enters Texas.

El Paso is one of my favorite cities, a place so Mexican it makes Los Angeles feel like Mission Viejo. It also has a long tradition of sending residents to Southern California who still maintain ties to their hometown. Through more than a dozen visits, as well as conversations closer to home, I’ve been impressed with their pride in being from a place where Mexico and the United States meet.

I wasn’t looking for good times or a rest stop, though, when I pulled into a Walmart minutes away from the border around 5 p.m. after leaving the mining town of Clifton that morning.

Five years ago in August, a gunman walked into the store and fired hundreds of bullets from a semiautomatic rifle. Twenty-three dead, 22 wounded. It was one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history and the deadliest in which Latinos were targeted.

As I parked my car and winced at the sight of a dead bird nearby, I remembered that Latinos were the majority of victims in four of the 10 worst mass shootings in modern memory: El Paso; the 2022 Uvalde school massacre in Texas; the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in 2016; a McDonald’s in San Ysidro in 1984.

In the American Southwest, thousands of Mexican Americans were lynched from the end of the Mexican-American War through the early 20th century, in attacks aimed at instilling fear in a minority. Today, Latinos remain vulnerable, even as our numbers grow.

In a manifesto, the El Paso killer wrote that he was “simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion” of Latinos. The language seemed cribbed from the rants of Donald Trump, who started his 2016 presidential campaign by saying that Mexicans who were coming across the border were “rapists and drug dealers.”

Nowadays, the Republican nominee rails about migrants “poisoning the blood of our country” and eating household pets.

A few months after the mass murder, Walmart erected a memorial on the south side of the parking lot. It wasn’t initially on my itinerary as I drove through the Southwest to talk with Latinos in an election year.

But as Trump’s anti-immigrant slurs have gotten nastier, paying homage to those who lost their lives to anti-Latino hatred became important to me.

At the same time, some El Pasoans are tiring of the record number of migrants passing through. Last fall, Mayor Oscar Leeser said the city was at a “breaking point” and booked buses to send them to New York, Chicago and Denver.

If the so-called Ellis Island of the West — 83% Latino, with a border town’s enduring economic and family ties to Mexico — can pull up the proverbial welcome mat, any Latino-majority area can.

I reached out to friends and activists who were usually more than happy to show me around town. They either declined to meet me or didn’t respond.

El Paso can never fully move on from what happened five years ago — but that doesn’t mean people are dwelling on it.

The evening I arrived, the Walmart was packed — or rather, everywhere but near the memorial. The parking spaces around it were empty. Cars slowed down as they passed by, then kept going.

Inside the store, kids ran around the aisles lugging new backpacks and grabbing back-to-school gear. Soldiers in uniform pushed carts brimming with laundry detergent and chips. Elderly people waited for pharmacy orders. Clerks switched between English and Spanish and Spanglish.

Almost everyone was Latino.

I walked back to the memorial, where a pickup truck with Chihuahua state license plates had just parked. Lucio Vallejo, 52, and his wife, Gloria, 47, had driven in from Juarez, Mexico, for their weekly shopping trip.

“The massacre is something you never forget,” Vallejo said in Spanish. “But don’t people have to live? If you don’t continue with trying to get back to normal, then you’re never going to heal.”

“The United States has too much violence,” his wife said, also in Spanish. “It’s bad in Juarez, of course, but that’s all cartels and criminals. In this country, there’s just a hatred of people for who they are. We just don’t understand why it’s so racist toward Mexicans. We’re neighbors, aren’t we?”

Nearby, Ben Gutierrez loaded his purchases into his trunk.

“We rallied for each other, and we remembered to step up,” said the 32-year-old machinist. “‘El Paso Strong,’ you know? But the hate just doesn’t stop.”

Gutierrez mentioned Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who has bused more than 100,000 migrants from the border to Democrat-run cities across the country in the last two years.

“It’s pathetic, like a cruel joke — ‘These aren’t people, they’re just trash, and I’m going to dump them on you’ is what the governor is saying. And then you have [Texas Atty. Gen. Ken] Paxton going after nonprofits for helping migrants. When you hate like that, that’s when mass shootings happen.”

He looked at the memorial for a while. It’s a set of 30-foot-high gold-colored pockmarked cylinders visible across the border. A giant plaque lists the names of the dead.

At night, the memorial — called Grand Candela — lights up in a beautiful display. During the day, it looks like a group of 5G antenna towers.

Gutierrez and I didn’t talk about the presidential election. On my drive in, I hadn’t seen any signs supporting either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. The city is a blue buoy in the red ocean that is the Lone Star State — two-thirds of El Paso County voters chose Joe Biden in 2020.

But Trump improved his performance in the county that year by nearly 6 percentage points from 2016. And among likely Latino voters statewide, Harris doesn’t have much of an edge, with 49% supporting her compared with 43% for Trump, according to a September poll by the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation.

Nationally, 37% of likely Latino voters favored Trump, a recent New York Times/Siena poll found — the most support for a Republican presidential candidate since George W. Bush was estimated to have won 44% of the Latino vote in 2004. Surveys show that Latino opposition to illegal immigration is at its highest point in decades.

Many of us are the children or grandchildren of people who crossed the border illegally. It’s far easier to sympathize with migrants when they’re your friends or cousins or from the same region as you. But for Mexican Americans, does that sympathy hold when they’re Venezuelan? Chinese? Haitian?

When it was Mexicans getting deported, we marched on the streets and voted against Republican policies and politicians. Now that it’s other nationalities, fewer and fewer Mexican Americans care.

This is assimilation at its most American.

In August, the city of El Paso dedicated a memorial in the southwestern corner of Jim Crouch Park, next to a football field. Victims’ names are listed on pointed granite slabs meant to evoke a crown, which surround a slab stating, “We Remember and Honor Them / Crowned with the love of our Ciudad Fronteriza” — our border town.

A soccer team practiced. People jogged. A group of Little Leaguers counted out jumping jacks. But in the hour I was there, no one stopped to pay tribute.

Then, I noticed Shante Buchanan waiting for a bus a stone’s throw away. She didn’t even know about the memorial.

The 53-year-old moved from Dallas a few years ago to find work — and she hasn’t been successful.

“El Paso is a great city. It’s not how people make it out to be, all dangerous and Mexican because it’s right on the border,” said Buchanan, who is Black. “Of course El Paso is Mexican. Where is it next to? Mexico!”

“There’s no invasion happening here,” she concluded as her bus pulled up. “There’s just people trying to live. People trying to make new lives. What’s so bad about that?”

The afternoon sun shone straight in my eyes as I hopped back on the 10 toward New Mexico. Usually, I spend my time in El Paso eating and catching up with friends.

This time, I wanted to leave as fast as possible.