Conversations Across Our America: Talking About Immigration and the Latinoization of the United States

Yolanda Chávez Leyva

Yolanda Chávez Leyva is a professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she also directs the public history program. Over a wonderful home-cooked breakfast on Saturday morning I interviewed Yolanda in her home about her work with El Paso del Sur, an emergent organization founded to resist the urban renewal plans crafted by the city’s political and business elites, which involved redevelopment of the downtown area and the adjacent historic Segundo Barrio. The plan was developed and subsequently adopted by the city council without input from residents. It involves the displacement of numerous people and a redesign of the neighborhood that would destroy the barrio’s structural and historical integrity. yolanda: El Paso del Sur formed in May of 2006. The Paso del Norte Group’s plan was announced in March of 2006, and everyone was really excited because the way that it was framed. It was going to redevelop downtown , and like so many other cities, our downtown is really vibrant, but it used to be vibrant in a middle-class kind of way. Now it’s very vibrant in a working-class way and shoppers from Juárez are the main shoppers. If you go to south El Paso, where the bridges are, you see thousands of people every day crossing to go shopping in downtown. So a lot of stores sell very inexpensive goods. There’s a growing Korean business community here the past twenty-five years. louis: What makes it affordable to come shopping here, as opposed to over there? yolanda: It’s specialty items, but also it’s regular things. When I walk across to Juárez, there’s always families carrying like a hundred toilet paper rolls, and then stuff like electronics. All that stuff is much cheaper here. yolanda chávez leyva 132 conversations across our america And the clothing in downtown is super cheap. So there was this big deal about “we were going to redevelop downtown, put money in downtown.” But once David Romo started to investigate it, because he’s done a lot of journalistic work, he discovered a map that was marked “Not for Distribution .” He wrote a newspaper article for the alternative online newspaper, the Newspaper Tree, and it’s called “Not for Distribution.” He was really shocked to find out the real plan for El Segundo, which was to build condos, to build very luxurious kinds of stores, and to put a Wal-Mart and a mercado. It’s the same old story of wanting to displace a living community and sell the culture . Just like Olvera Street in the ’30s. Once that got out a few of us historians said we have to do something, we can’t let this just happen. We got together, and we drew in artists, lawyers, activists, the director of the Farmworker Center, and we started meeting and trying to figure out what to do. Our demand has always been to scrap the whole plan and to start over with input from people in El Segundo because people in El Segundo have not had input. In the summer of last year, what the city did as public input was to have a series of meetings. This is how disrespectful the city is . . . they had tables with games, and each game board represented a certain street in El Segundo. Each group could decide what to put on these streets, as if people weren’t already living there, as if it was just empty land. There were no people from El Segundo there. It’s such a huge conflict of Yolanda Chávez Leyva, Professor of History, University of Texas-El Paso. Photo provided by Yolanda Chávez Leyva. 133 confronting threats to community interest with Robert O’Rourke, who’s the city councilman that represents El Segundo being the son-in-law of the developer behind the plan. The ethics board said, “There’s no conflict of interest there.” Now he’s started to recuse himself from any votes having to do with the plan, but what that means then is that El Segundo doesn’t have anyone speaking on their behalf. louis: What was their time line for implementing this? yolanda: They passed the plan Halloween of last year, and Paso del Norte, which is the group of businessmen, developers, civic leaders, and politicians behind the plan, they...