el paso juarez border, Industry, Photography

BELLY OF THE BEAST

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Workman in a main copper furnace, ASARCO, El Paso, Texas 1993,
Photograph by ©Bruce Berman

Requiem
Photo and Text by Bruce Berman

Workman in the Belly of the Beast of the long gone ASARCO smelter.
I loved you and hated you. You tasted like sulfur and gave me so many sweet images.
For an ad agency, I once lied about you for you: the Contop pollution control project which was a $20million joke that never actually did anything except asuage the feelings of nearby Kern Place rersidents whose equity shot through the roof once you were disappeared. They shared the same air as you did.
I dropped a virtual tear for you when you were blown down, your dirty skin replaced by a Grid of Developers who insisted (their) progress was impossible with you.
Millions if not a billion drove by you on I-10.
Your Balls were esposed right there in the middle of a large American city as they drove by. Was that stack a monument of porn? Was it a deterrent? Did we like a deterrent?
You provided a living for hundreds in many generations.
You were bipartisan. You spit down and poisoned two cities and two nations.
I’ve sat in shanties in Juárez and smelled you and I have clinked beer bottles, while my eyes watered from your exhaust, standing in tony house parties in Kern Place.
To say the least… you were definetely something!
I miss you and your edge, your soul of wildness, your huffing and snarling fire.
You were, they say, a remnant from an era that needed to die. We did to you what we do to old rabid dogs.
You were removed with a promise of something great to come.
You couldn’t be tamed so you had to die, dramatically disappeared and eventually replaced by… what?

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America, el paso, Gentrification, Industry, Juarez, Texas, US/Mexico Border

MEMORIAL

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Photograph and text by Bruce Berman

I miss you ASARCO.

You were texture. You were identity. You were muy macho. You had cajones. Your candy stripe shaft spewed your acids and we ran for cover. At least we were moving. You were not vanilla. You were not something else. You were, well, ASARCO, un madre. You were definitely not bourgeois, pro seguro. On dark nights, down on Paisano, huge trucks dumped your excrement and giant flames roared into the sky, lighting up I10 like a festive firecracker.

Now you are a bald pallet awaiting “The Grid.” They fiddle before they drop the hammer, just enough time for one to build trust in the untrustworthy. What should go on the ground that has your blood? Should it be a Western Town? Giddy up! Should it be an amusement park? Ice cream! Maybe it could be a “multi use” nothing (Ha! What else do you think they will do!)? We need more apartments and strip centers! Maybe we can just let UTEP spread its, its…well…it could just spread whatever it is that UTEP has.

I will politely clap. I am not lamenting the inevitable any more than I do on The Day Of the Dead.

Yes you were a cancer dispenser, a reminder of danger, vulnerability and of the sweat and blood of working men. Oh yeah, you were one bad hombre. Oh, and how the gerentes avoided your gaze. You were so not sheik. How could we sell this bipolar berg as the cultural and artistic epicenter of the great southwest with your giant schlong sticking into the sky, having intercourse with the eyes of every passerby? No no no, you had to go. You were so, well, nasty!

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Industry, Love, US/Mexico Border

A Kiss For Asarco

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Man In Flames, ASARCO/El Paso – 1987

All photos ©Bruce Berman

 La Calavera-1986

A Dear John Letter to ASARCO
by Bruce Berman

Au revoir ASARCO. You were the spine of the border, a big giant dong sticking up out of the river, pouring flames and sulfur, lead and smoke. The town grew up around you, fed off of you, then outlived you. You looked down on battles and traffic, always with the bifocals of looking at two countries at once. Looking east to El Paso,  you looked down on the dusty foothills of the Franklins that became Kern Place and Mesa Hills, the sheik and elite (in its own mind). On the other, looking west, down into the dust and turbulence of Juarez, you looked down onto Colonia Felipe Angeles, which, too was foothills, that became a shanty town which became a barrio which became (shhhh..not quite yet) a path to a port of entry into New Mexico. What a vantage point you have had.  When I first saw you I stood up straight, saluted and said, Wow, yes sir!

I dug you from the gitgo, had the pleasure of working inside you, being constantly re-awakened by you, of working inside you near those flames with the weather outside 105 degrees, feeling the comradie of your workers, the satisfaction of being inside something that wild and crazy and productive, a caldron of energy and raw power.

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