Two Clashing Visions for El Paso’s Future

By KENT PATERSON

El Paso, Texas — If any person embodies the El Paso Firme (Strong) slogan that emerged after the Aug. 3 Walmart Massacre, Toñita Morales is a leading candidate. El Paso’s elite, however, would likely abhor such a designation.

Sitting outside her modest home in the downtown Duranguito neighborhood, the 91-year-old woman recounts why she has become a prime leader — and inspiration of — the three-year-old grassroots movement that’s resisting City Hall’s plans to raze Duranguito and replace it with a $180 million basketball arena.

A Mexican immigrant who moved to El Paso in 1965, Morales became active in community affairs and helped clean up Duranguito of crime and drugs.

Nowadays, Morales denounces betrayal by city officials who’ve fenced off much of her neighborhood, including a community garden Morales helped cultivate; relocated most of the neighbors and even attempted to demolish buildings activists consider historic.

Morales says the city government offered $14,000 for her move from her rented residence, a sum she declined.

“If I get sick, the $14,000 is gone,” the activist elder stated. “I don’t agree that they are demolishing a historic barrio for an arena when the city has many appropriate places for this,” she says.

The energetic nonagenarian’s steadfastness was applauded by dozens of supporters, when she addressed a Dia de Los Muertos celebration held outside her doors on a chilly fall day.

“You know I’m 91. I’m here and I’m gonna stay,” Toñita declared in her sharp, clear voice to cheers.

Fought in the courts, in city council chambers and on the streets, The Battle of Duranguito pits an alliance of historic preservationists and community organizations like Paso del Sur against the municipal government and members of El Paso’s rich elite who stand to benefit from an arena.

For El Paso author/historian and Paso del Sur activist David Dorado Romo, Duranguito is the frontline of a struggle that intensified back in 2006 when Paso del Sur and other community members staved off a city plan to redevelop the Segundo Barrio, another immigrant neighborhood with a rich history.

The fencing strikes Romo as not unlike the US government’s steel barrier that now stands between El Paso and its sister city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

“It’s the same tactics, to divide people, disconnect them,” Romo says, calling the city’s Duranguito destruction an official policy of “uglification.”

Once dated to 1827, Duranguito has long been regarded as the core settlement of El Paso’s downtown area.

But recent research conducted by New Mexico historian Mark Santiago and augmented by Romo, turns official history on its head. The historians trace Duranguito’s original settlement to the late 1700s, when the Spanish government attempted to control the Mescalero Apaches by establishing an agricultural “peace camp” inhabited by the tribe in the locality.

According to Romo, members of a dozen US and Mexican indigenous nations held the first Indigenous Reclamation Day Oct.13 in Duranguito.

The historical revelations of the Apache settlement complicate, but don’t derail efforts by the city administration to build its basketball arena.

Interviewed on local ABC affiliate KVIA, El Paso Mayor Dee Margo contended an arena would add a key element to an ambitious plan of downtown economic development, including new hotels. The Republican mayor argued that he was merely complying with “the will of voters,” who supposedly approved a sports complex in a 2012 bond election.

“My goal is to “fulfill my fiduciary responsibility” of generating more tax revenue for the City of El Paso, Margo maintained.

But arena opponents assert the city has essentially engaged in a bait and switch operation, pointing to language on the 2012 ballot that speaks of a “multipurpose performing arts and entertainment facility” but no basketball arena.

Challenging a Third Court of Appeals decision that the City of El Paso could use 80% of the bond money for an arena, Duranguito activists have gone to the Texas Supreme Court. On Oct. 30, Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid and El Paso attorney Carmen Rodriguez filed a brief on behalf of Toñita Morales and neighbors, historic preservationist Dr. Max Grossman and Dr. Yolanda Leyva, longtime university professor and Paso del Sur activist.

“So much of (Duranguito’s) future depends on the Supreme Court, and that might take a year for them to take it up. I’m still hopeful we will win,” Leyva says.

Meantime, to revive the neighborhood, Paso del Sur and its allies have crafted the Plan for the Rebirth of Duranguito. The visionary plan embraces cultural heritage tourism along with new museums, murals, renovated low-income housing and residential services, among other features.

Leyva’s uplifted by the involvement of numerous young people in the Duranguito movement, many of them artists and musicians and dancers. “They really value culture,” she says of the new activist generation. “I think this is the spirt of creativity and culture.”

Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist who divides his time between Mexico and the US Southwest.

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2019

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