Duranguito is indeed the birthplace of the contemporary city of El Paso: David Romo

For a long time, Adair Margo felt she had a right to decide what part of El Paso’s history should be celebrated and what should be erased. She is the director of a foundation that promotes the works of Tom Lea, an artist whose public art pushed narratives of European discovery, westward expansion, and Manifest Destiny. These racialized worldviews have historically been used to justify the dispossession and erasure of non-white populations.

Margo is now upset that a different historical narrative is reaching the outside world. She is irritated that community-based efforts to prevent the city and developers from bulldozing Duranguito and displacing its remaining residents have made national news. She claims there is nothing of historical importance in the part of Duranguito the city wants to tear down. In a recent column to the El Paso Times, Margo accused other scholars and me of having “invented” the term Duranguito to describe what she’s always known as Union Plaza. If she hasn’t heard the name, she believes we must have fabricated it out of thin air. Margo says we are “lying.”   

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Let’s begin by refuting Margo’s false accusation about the neighborhood’s historical name. She seems to be unaware that a number of newspaper articles and a number of oral histories in historical archives show that residents at the turn of the twentieth century referred to their neighborhood as Duranguito or Barrio Durango. This was long before investors and politicians renamed it “Union Plaza” in the late 1980s.

One of these accounts is by McGinty band musician David Concha, who immigrated to El Paso in the 1890s and described this neighborhood in the early 1900s. He stated during an oral history interview in the 1970s that: “There was a barrio called Duranguito. Duranguito started from San Francisco Street to Overland and lied [west of] Santa Fe Street…It was mostly Mexicans who lived there.” Later its boundaries moved southward. Other El Pasoans who referred to this neighborhood as Duranguito during the first part of the twentieth century include Modesto Gomez, Father Rahm, and Charles Porras.

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Margo ignores this documentation, but it does not give her the right to deliberately spread unfounded accusations. Her smear campaigns are based on the same kind of willful historical ignorance that has sadly infected a large part of the nation’s population these days.

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Before her husband, Dee Margo, became mayor of El Paso, she supported the preservation of Duranguito. Then she flip-flopped. Margo and her friend Laura Bush posed for photographers in front of a beautiful Victorian-era building within what the city calls “the arena footprint.” This building, under threat of demolition, was constructed around 1886 by Benancia Ascarate Stephenson. Born in 1829, this early Duranguito resident was a friend of Mexican president Benito Juárez and lived under five different flags during her lifetime. A few yards away on South Chihuahua Street is another threatened home originally owned by Jewish-German immigrant Adolph Solke, the president of the B’nei Zion Orthodox Jewish congregation in El Paso. The city’s first Yom Kippur service that met a quorum according to orthodox Jewish law was held here in 1901. A few yards away on Overland Street is a building that served as a Chinese laundry, one of the last standing sites of what was once the largest Chinatown in Texas. 

These and other Duranguito buildings tell the story of the origins of our globalized fronterizo city, and in many ways of our country as well, that we were never taught in school. Exciting new historical research has revealed that Duranguito was the site of a Mescalero Apache settlement in the 1790s. There was an acequia, or irrigation ditch, which the Spaniards constructed here to water the Apache fields. We also know that Duranguito was within the Ponce de León land grant of 1827. This foundational settlement was later the location of the early town of Franklin. Duranguito’s streets were first platted in 1859, making it the city’s oldest platted neighborhood. Duranguito is indeed the birthplace of the contemporary city of El Paso.

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Perhaps Margo would like to join me in a face-to-face debate in a public forum where we could continue this discussion. Hopefully, without any unfounded accusations and personal insults.

David Dorado Romo is a historian who specializes in borderland studies. He was a Fulbright scholar at Colegio de México in México City and a Resident Fellow at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico.