“El Paso” spotlights the hundred-year histories of five families whose stories illuminate the importance of El Paso in America’s extensive narrative of race, immigration and violence. 

UT alumna and New York Times reporter Jazmine Ulloa, who grew up in El Paso, released her novel “El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory” on March 3. Ulloa was a national politics reporter for The Boston Globe in 2019 when a self-proclaimed white supremacist drove nearly 10 hours to El Paso and opened fire at a Walmart, killing 23 people. She said she got on the earliest flight she could and reported on the tragedy for the next week. 

This was the beginning of “El Paso.” 

“What I kept trying to come back to was trying to show how you don’t really understand the country without knowing El Paso,” Ulloa said. “El Paso is, and has always been, this rich, multiracial, multiethnic stomping ground where these forces of conservatism, liberalism, white supremacy and the resistance to that have always been at odds, and how it’s just one place of many in the United States that is now dealing with these forces.” 

El Paso’s history as the “Ellis Island of the South” inspired Ulloa to research and report on five families whose histories represent just that. 

“Each of the families is emblematic of a critical turn in Mexican American history and border history and in understanding how we built immigration through Republican and Democratic administrations,” Ulloa said. 

Ulloa said her time at UT reframed the way she thought about her hometown. She recalled when Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Media Diana Dawson prompted her class to write a story about sense of place, and she chose to write about El Paso. 

“I think it was subconscious that I already had (the book’s) genesis,” Ulloa said. “The seed was already planted because I had felt such an eagerness to get out (of El Paso), and then here I was at UT, surrounded with a campus of 40,000 students … that’s when I first started realizing I really didn’t appreciate this place that allowed me to be so fully Mexican and American at the same time and not have to question it.”

At UT, Ulloa started a magazine to encourage students to explore study abroad options outside of traditional places like London or Spain. She also founded a Latino-run publication called Adelante. Ulloa said running these two publications ignited her spirit for telling underreported stories.

"There was always that feeling of not being understood,” Ulloa said. “Once I left, I understood it wasn’t just Texas (that didn’t understand El Paso). I didn’t understand my hometown. It was the rest of the United States, too … I realized (El Paso) should hold an even bigger place in this American telling and the story of the United States.”

Although she was never Ulloa’s professor, Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, an associate professor of journalism and director of the Center for Mexican American Studies, was influential in Ulloa’s time at Moody. Rivas Rodriguez reported in El Paso for seven years and would often promote Ulloa’s work. 

“She is one of a small army of UT grads from our journalism program who have gone on to write about marginalized communities and the American experience with so much insight that we just know that we’re doing something right,” Rivas-Rodriguez said. 

Ulloa’s passion for telling underreported stories has led her to an extensive journalism career with a focus on politics and the nation’s battles over immigration. She said her work is coming at a time when the U.S. has been on the frontlines of the harshest immigration crackdown the country has seen since World War II. 

“Working on this book has made me realize how the foundations for all of these actions, the policies, the rhetoric, the treatment of the immigrants, were laid long before, brick by brick, decade by decade in my hometown of El Paso,” Ulloa said. 

Journalism and history junior Kai Ming Fong grew up in El Paso and has a passion for its history. He said he finds it compelling how the town’s identity clashes with itself regarding immigration. Eighty-one percent of El Paso’s population is of Hispanic or Latino descent, and 46% identify with two or more races, and yet it has a rich history of racism and violence against people of Mexican descent, as well as African American and those of Chinese descent. 

“El Paso has a part where the best of American history and the worst of American history kind of happens simultaneously, and which is true for any part of the country, but being in El Paso, it’s especially prevalent because of the unique identity that the city has,” Fong said. 

Ulloa said that discovering El Paso’s full story came with a new level of understanding around how the past, present and future of immigration policy are coming together. She said learning how the immigration system was built over time, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, helped her understand the frustration and disillusionment within both parties. 

“A lot of what we’re seeing, we’ve already seen before … but we’re also entering really unknown territory, the way that the administration has been pushing the bounds of immigration enforcement in every city has been, in some ways, unparalleled,” Ulloa said.