Let me tell you about my hometown, El Paso, Texas.

I grew up in El Paso and I’m damn proud of it. My parents are there along with my two sisters and countless relatives and friends. I met my wife in El Paso, on a Monday night one November many years ago dancing to country music at the Caravan East.

It’s the home of Glory Road, the famed Texas Western (now UTEP) basketball team that changed the face of college basketball in 1966 by starting five black players against Kentucky. My dad would take me to see those Miners play and they would fuel my passion for basketball.

El Paso, affectionately known as El Chuco, is a city where we speak English and Spanish interchangeably, a place where more than 850,000 El Pasoans live in a community of nearly 3 million by sharing a border with Mexico.

It’s a place where there were only 23 murders in 2018, a place Congressional Quarterly ranked as the safest city of its size in the U.S. and that SafeWise ranked No. 6 on its list of Top 10 Safest Metro Cities in 2019.

I go back every year and was there in August for vacation. My classmates from the Bowie High School class of 1977 had a reunion to celebrate our birthdays. “The Bears are Back,” we like to say.

While in town, my wife, daughter and I went to Cielo Vista Mall to see a movie and do a little shopping. My dad and I went to the Walmart at the mall for gas the next night.

Then, on the following day (Aug. 3), we drove by the Walmart around 7 a.m. on our way back to Dallas. Around noon, my sister called to tell us what was happening.

A day that started with a beautiful sunrise drive through the Van Horn Mountain range—the place where time changes from Mountain to Central—became a day that changed my hometown, a day that ended with the deaths of 22 people and injuries to two dozen more as a result of a mass shooting now being investigated as an act of domestic terrorism and a possible hate crime.

I watched from afar as my hometown community grappled with what far too many of our neighbors—Orlando, Las Vegas, Dayton, Sandy Hook, Blacksburg, Parkland and others—have endured. I cried for my hometown. Then I witnessed what makes El Paso strong, a community coming together, like those others, to show the world what we’ve always known about ourselves—that we are united as one.

El Paso, and no community for that matter, should ever have to experience this. I hugged my kids just a bit tighter and longer as my two youngest headed back to school—Austin for his senior year at Texas Tech, Abby for her sophomore year in high school.

El Paso Strong? Always and forever.

Until next time…

Rich Luna
Editor in Chief
rluna@mpiweb.org

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