Who Really Rules El Paso?

By KENT PATERSON

The proverbial Gulliver who wakes up in today’s El Paso might well ask: What in the hell happened here? Gone is City Hall, replaced by a baseball stadium. The landmark Asarco smokestacks have been blown to smithereens. A sparsely ridden, new street car pretends to ferry revelers to Hipsterville near the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Endless roadwork and accidents clog Interstate 10, making the El Paso stretch of the highway one of the deadliest in the nation. Old cafes and small businesses have vanished in the dust.

An invaluable primer for understanding these startling scenes can be found in a new book published by El Paso’s Community First Coalition: “Who Rules El Paso?: Private Gain, Public Policy and the Community Interest.”

In dissecting the power structure of El Chuco, Carmen Rodriguez, Kathy Staudt, Rosemary Neill and Oscar J. Martinez revive the almost-forgotten power elite school of analysis popularized in the 1960s and 1970s by the legendary sociologist C. Wright Mills and University of California Professor Emeritus William Domhoff.

The authors are paseños with decades as academics, activists and advocates in the border city. “We saw a need for the public to have more information about local governance,” Martinez said at a December book presentation and forum held in the downtown library. “Our major conclusions are that our local government is not working well for the people at this time in this city.”

Improving El Paso’s low level of political participation is a major goal of the study, Rodriguez said. “We hope to add something to the community’s enthusiasm, for their civic engagement,” the veteran attorney told the audience.

In seven main and illuminating chapters, the authors link big money, backroom politics, manipulative political campaigns and privileged players to many of the local controversies of recent years, including the construction of a baseball stadium in the heart of the city; plans for the razing of a nearby historic immigrant neighborhood, Duranguito, to make way for a basketball arena; and the hotly disputed appointment of former New Mexico Congresswoman and Trump Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson as president of the University of Texas at El Paso.

One chapter is tellingly entitled “The Cheap, Disrespectful and Contemptuous Plan to Squeeze a Cultural Center into the Historic Main Library.” In a postscript, the authors reflect on the August 3, 2019, Walmart massacre.

A key part of the book revolves around the emergence of a new elite in the Sun City and its octopus-like reach as philanthropists, political donors, promoters of the baseball and basketball stadiums, and the driving, behind-the-scenes powers-that-be.

A nearly all-white cast in an overwhelmingly Latino city (estimated 83%), the big boys include former oil refinery owner Paul Foster, real estate businessman Woody Hunt and Republican Mayor Dee Margo. William Sanders, Beto O’Rourke’s father-in-law, also figures prominently in this story during the early years of the 21st century.

Foster is married to Alejandra de la Vega Foster, member of a wealthy Ciudad Juarez family and the current Chihuahua state secretary for innovation and economic development. Foster, de la Vega Foster and Hunt form the MountainStar Sports Group, the company behind the baseball stadium and acquisition of the Chihuahuas minor league team.

Indeed, the Sun City’s elite is a binational one, formally connected across the border in recent years by first the defunct Paso del Norte Group and later by the Borderplex Alliance.

Readers learn that as a result of El Paso’ remake in the image of the rich and famous, the city is now ranked number two among 10 Texas cities examined in per capita outstanding taxpayer supported debt.

With a per capita debt of $1,835, economically struggling El Chuco even surpasses upscale Austin. In a chapter on the debt issue, Rosemary Neill and Kathy Staudt report that the municipal debt soared 54% from 2008 to 2017, while the city’s population grew only 9% during the same time. And that’s far from the end of the story.

As Neill remarked at December’s forum, local taxpayers are also tethered to an “overlapping debt burden” emanating from hospitals, schools and county functions.

The forum featured a robust question and answer session is which issues of the efficacy of electoral politics versus broader activism, the role of labor unions and more was raised. Part of the discussion touched on J.P. Morgan’s current attempt to purchase the local electric utility and the possibilities for municipal ownership instead.

The authors acknowledge that their book only scratches the surface of El Paso’s power structure and dynamics, and invite interested persons to take up where they left off. In this sense, “Who Rules El Paso?” is an excellent blueprint, not only for citizen researchers/activists in the famed Texas city, but for communities nationwide as well. The book is available online through Amazon.

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

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2020

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