Guadalupe(s), Segundo barrio, El Paso-Oct. 2008
El barrio is a community. Bruised. Not what it was. Sitting on the border and prime target of speculators, er…ah…read that as “Developers,” but still standing. Go back and ask anyone in any American city, for the past 60 years if “Urban Renewal,” was about construction or destruction. If you actually need to, go ahead.
Well, if you can find anyone who lived in one of the swaths of “renewal,” go ahead and ask them (If you can’t find anyone who had been living there, now, the answer to the question, “What is being renewed,” is self answering). If you do find them -look elsewhere- and ask them, remember that from one viewpoint the idea behind “Urban Renewal,” was removal of one set of people and the re-occupation with another set.
Intended or not (I’m being nice, here).
Hard ball. Let’s call it what it is, already.
Urban Removal. Ethnic removal. Power over the powerless.
A friend of mine, the other night, who grew up in this barrio, summed it up in ten words: When he goes back to the Segundo barrio (this is the barrio in El Paso that hugs the border, adjacent to the bridges to Mexico),” he said, “It hurts bad. They took the heart out of it.”
Yeah, but so far they haven’t totally taken the life out of it. It is still a living community. Kids play on Seventh Street. The skateboarders are in Armijo park, every afternoon and evening. Casitas along Park and Tays and Hills and Ochoa still sit, sweet and personal. The kinds can play in the streets at night under the protective eye of the neighborhood. Classic. Kids play outside, have the freedom that the older generation remembers -you?- and they know their neighbors, experience a homogenous culture (language, custom and culture). The more upper scale neighborhoods could learn a lot about living outside the house, letting kids run the neighborhood, neighbors taking responsibility for the entire generation of children. They need to get out of the car. Human interaction is good (even for kids)!
El barrio.
They call it “blight.”
I call it home.
The Guadalupe -and the neighbors- are looking out for this ‘hood.
There’s still a little heart.
Sin corazon…Keep out.
