Like many El Pasoans, Jazmine Ulloa’s life was forever altered on Aug. 3, 2019.
Ulloa was then a reporter for the Boston Globe, which sent her to El Paso the day after the white supremacist mass shooting that killed 23 people and wounded 22 others. She grew up in El Paso, graduated from Burges High School, then went on to college and a journalism career that took her far away from home.
“That was a tragedy that happened just three minutes from where I went to high school, and it affected a lot of close people that I know and love, including my best friend,” whose father was inside the Cielo Vista Walmart at the time of the attack, she said.
Ulloa described it as “one of the hardest assignments I ever had to cover.” But the return home got her thinking about how the shooting was connected to other issues she had been covering.
“I had already been watching El Paso become this backdrop to the nation’s immigration battles, and some were calling it the new Ellis Island, and then, in this new Ellis Island, we were watching children getting separated at the border, migrants getting penned up under the Santa Fe bridge,” she said.
“And, so, I just started thinking that I needed to return and really start digging deeper into that history, thinking about El Paso, how that (Ellis Island) name fits and doesn’t, and why we don’t hold it in the same regard as we do with Ellis Island,” the disembarkation point in New York Harbor for millions of primarily European immigrants.
Ulloa concluded that immigration through El Paso and the U.S.-Mexico border is viewed much differently than the 19th and 20th century immigration at Ellis Island.
“The people passing through El Paso were mostly blue-collar workers, they were Mexican, and they were Latino workers who were lured by the promise of the American dream and then cast out with each nativist era, with the whims of each generation,” she said.
The result of Ulloa’s exploration is her new book, “El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory,” which was published Tuesday by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Ulloa, now a national reporter for the New York Times, will discuss her book Monday, March 9, at an event presented by El Paso Matters and the El Paso Community Foundation. She will speak at 7 p.m. at the Philanthropy Theatre inside the Plaza Theatre in Downtown El Paso. Admission is free, and doors open at 6:30 p.m.
Copies of her book will be available for purchase, and she will sign copies after the event.
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Ulloa tells the story of El Paso through five fronterizo families.
“I really wanted to explore how immigration had shaped the lives of the people who have crossed through it, and how they helped shape the city, and then, in turn, helped shape our country. And, so, I was looking for families who were really emblematic of that experience,” she said.
Some of the families she features in the book were people she met in her newspaper reporting; others she found through her research for the book.
“I was trying to really capture the border culture that I grew up in, that so many of us grew up in, moving back and forth between Mexico and the United States,” Ulloa said. “But then, I was also trying to capture the transnational flows through the city … since its inception.”
She explores the impact of multiple cultures in shaping the El Paso region – Indigenous, Mexican, Chinese.
“I wanted to tell a different story about El Paso, one that wasn’t just focused on – but that didn’t look away from – the violence at play at the border, but really captured it as this multiracial, multi-ethnic region that it’s always been,” Ulloa said.
At heart, Ulloa’s book is an attempt to put El Paso at the center of the nation’s story, rather than as a footnote. She said she feels she has a responsibility to her hometown.
“I have the privilege to work at the New York Times, to work at a place with such a big national footprint. I should use it to bring a fuller picture of the place where I’m from.”
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