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This chapter describes a new period in Nixon's life as well as the storied history of Blacks in El Paso. Nixon would settle in this city alongside his childhood friend Le Roy White and practice his medicine there for the next fifty years. His time in El Paso would prove to be an eventful one, as he encountered, among other things, the start of the Mexican Revolution, Jim Crow, the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), World War I, and an epidemic outbreak which would take the life his wife, Esther Nixon. In addition, living in El Paso would also drive him to become more civically and politically active over time.

This chapter looks at the latter phases of Nixon's civic life as well as his contributions to the health and welfare of his fellow African Americans. It details Nixon's initiative to establish a Black hospital to treat tuberculosis (TB)—then one of the top three causes of mortality among Blacks in urban communities—El Paso's Frederick Douglass National Tubercular Hospital. Nixon's relationship with the NAACP grew strained during this time as well, and he and his second wife, Drusilla E. Tandy, would later obtain the support of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW). To conclude, the chapter also looks at a series of events that would eventually lead to an antidiscrimination ordinance in 1962 that would make El Paso the first city in Texas to pass such a resolution.

Focusing on the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border, this chapter demonstrates how Chinese, Mexicans, and African Americans blurred color lines to create dynamic social environments as well as new legal dilemmas in the borderlands. Drawing upon local newspapers, legal documents, city records, maps, and census materials, the chapter illuminates the various freedoms that non-white people struggled to realize together – particularly in work, public spaces, homes, and marriages. But the chapter also shows how the realities of multiracial life in the borderlands encountered the pressures of an escalating ideology of racial purity and segregation in the United States, culminating in the migration of black-Mexican families across the border into Mexico. Such de-facto expulsions would be a preview of the massive legal expulsions that were yet to come.

This chapter frames the nineteenth century borderlands as a theater of movement that had long been marked by imperial contestations and diverse migrations. Native American, colonial, Mexican, and American migrations shaped the region, keeping territorial boundaries porous, and racial and national identities blurred. Following the transformation of the indigenous borderlands to a capitalist borderlands, the chapter traces the seismic demographic shift that drove the region’s rapid industrialization; as the borderlands connected into national, transnational, and global circuits of migration, and oceanic lines fed back into railway connections, white, black, Mexican, and Chinese immigrants descended on the border from all directions. Focusing on the multiple boundaries that intersected at the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border – namely, the international boundary as well as the limits of Jim Crow that ended where Texas met New Mexico – this chapter shows how and why the late 19th century borderlands looked so promising for these diverse groups. It begins to develop a transborder framework for understanding immigration, emphasizing how the narrowing of economic opportunities, political rights, and social freedoms in both the United States and Mexico contributed to such diverse men and women coming together in the borderlands.

Through a close, on-the-ground reading of U.S. immigration records and newspaper accounts, this chapter shows how Chinese immigrants repeatedly improvised new cross-racial strategies to gain entry into the United States during the era of Chinese Exclusion. Their actions not only forced local immigration officials to continually adjust their own practices in response, but to focus increasing attention on racial differentiation. In the process of distinguishing Chinese from Mexican, and rooting out smuggling rings that depended upon the cooperation of Chinese sponsors and immigrants, Mexican guides, and black railroad workers, these street-level bureaucrats not only enforced U.S. immigration law, but did so through practices that rendered multiracial relations and identities suspect and illegitimate. Moreover, as immigration officials and the immigrants they sought to police drew the attention of the federal government to the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border, they brought the American state into the borderlands. The chapter thus connects local enforcement practices at the border with the broader goals of federal immigration law and nation-building at the turn of the century.

This chapter examines the multivoiced discourse on Mexican motherhood in the border city of El Paso, Texas, during the early twentieth century. The author analyzes writings by Anglo and ethnic Mexican reformers, medical experts, and columnists. She argues that these writers' efforts to encourage ethnic Mexican women to adopt standards of scientific motherhood were influenced by parallel national projects that placed women and mothers at the center of debates defining citizenship in both the United States and Mexico. For Anglo instructors, improving the Mexican home reinforced the image of the Mexican woman as a domestic laborer. At the same time, ethnic Mexican writers promised to elevate the image of Mexican families in the face of racial discrimination in US cities.

During the war years, Mexican Cristero supporters in the United States began participating in a variety of activities in order to back the religious uprising. This chapter describes these efforts, which included public processions and marches, publicity campaigns, arms smuggling, recruitment of soldiers, and military revolts along the US-Mexico border. Using previously unexamined archival evidence from both Mexico and the United States, this chapter demonstrates how seemingly separate groups of emigrants collaborated and competed in order to advance their political and religious goals for their home country. Furthermore, it illustrates that the efforts of pro-Cristero emigrants to provide material support to their compatriots in the battlefields of west-central Mexico (through gunrunning and armed uprisings on the border) affected the development, if not the ultimate outcome, of the Cristero War.

This chapter explores how established Jewish organizations confronted the legal conundrums the quota laws posed. It examines Jewish leaders’ responses to the illegal immigration of Jews over the Mexico-Texas border and to the plight of Jews stranded in Europe with U.S visas rendered defunct by the Immigration Act of 1924. The quota laws posed new dilemmas for American Jewish leaders, pitting their desire to operate in solidarity with Jewish migrants against their need to be regarded as law-abiding Americans. Moreover, there were a number of gray areas that remained in the laws themselves. Jewish leaders exploited this lack of clarity in their efforts to shape the regime of U.S. immigration law as best they could. Whenever possible, they sought to engage in a strategic balancing act, trying to argue the cases of Jewish migrants without seeming to encourage or condone any law-breaking on the part of those migrants.

Chapter 4 supplies a history of the Bracero Program and its implementation by the INS. Upon its inception in 1942, the United States and Mexico described the program in highly aspirational terms as an expression of the Good Neighbor policy. Yet it presented federal agencies such as the INS with the complex realities of implementing a binational agricultural employment program that led to the hiring of 4.5 million guest workers over the course of twenty-two years. Faced with an enduring shortage of money, manpower, and materiel to implement the Bracero Program, the INS in the 1940s was in a state of disarray. Local agency officials found themselves buffeted by competing pressures to carry out the agricultural employment, as well as immigration, duties surrounding the Bracero Program, and to simultaneously open the line to bracero workers and close it to undocumented immigrants.

This concluding chapter chronicles the latter part of Nixon's life and retirement from advocacy work, as well as his legacy among African American medical professionals and the locals of El Paso. Between 1948 and his death in 1966, Nixon had lived a relatively quiet life, devoting himself primarily to his medical practice and his family. Less than three years after his retirement, however, Nixon was involved in a car accident, dying five days later in the hospital on March 6, 1966, surrounded by friends and family. During his lifetime and the years afterward the chapter describes how Nixon's legacy has continued to shape history today. At the same time, however, the chapter laments on the neglect which still plagues Nixon's legacy, and concludes with some final reflections on Nixon's remarkable life and work and his impact on the lives of countless people within and beyond the borderlands.

This chapter discusses drones—or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)—and their being prone to system failures and pilot mistakes. Relatively small and vulnerable, they can be felled by something as simple as a gust of wind. The source of one El Paso crash was revealed to be a mechanical malfunction. It caused operators, who always operate at a distance, to lose control of the pilotless plane. As is often the case with unmanned vehicles, it was not clear who those operators were. A Mexican attorney general spokeswoman denied her country’s involvement with the drone, but later that same day another Mexican official said it was being operated by the Ministry of Public Security and was following a target at the time of the incident. A spokesman for the Mexican embassy in the United States said that the drone, while belonging to Mexico, was part of an operation in coordination with the US government.

This introductory chapter looks at the social and political contexts behind the intertwined histories of Dr. Lawrence Aaron Nixon and the American West. As a Black man in the United States, Lawrence Nixon was exposed to constant cultural conflict merely for being who he was: “unapologetically Black,” which in the minds of some was the antithesis of being an American. The chapter first shows how Nixon's life in El Paso, Texas, illustrates both the Black West's regional distinctiveness and its continuity with the legacy of African American history in the rest of the nation. Nixon's life is also an example of the diversity of the Black past and the existence of multiple African American historical traditions. Next, the chapter places Nixon's contributions to the civil rights movement in a broader context and demonstrates how it paved the way for future resistance.

After a brief survey of the historic churches in Tomé, Socorro, and surrounding areas, the chapter focuses on Our Lady of Purification (Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria) in Doña Ana. The emphasis is on the restoration of the church in the 1990s, and on the training program for at-risk youth that provided restoration workers. Attitudes toward adobe restoration among local parishioners are also treated. As this tour continues southward it encompasses, among other churches, San José in La Mesa, where depopulation combined with Mexican immigration has changed the nature of the congregation. The Mission Trail in El Paso is also briefly mentioned. Visiting information is integrated throughout the chapter.

This chapter describes how the Gary and El Paso conventions became potent symbols of what later would be called the era's “identity politics.” First coined by black feminists in the Combahee River Collective in 1977, the term most often referred to the racial and cultural politics of African Americans. “Focusing on our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics,” they declared in the Combahee River Collective Statement. “We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics comes directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression.” Yet such a statement could have been articulated by any number of the era's movements, from gay men to white working-class ethnics. The term also did come to define any politics rooted in the societal cleavages of ethnicity, religion, class, gender, region, age, and sexual orientation.