Episode 92 – El Paso: The Pass of the North…The Rio Grande Frontier, Part One

Hello friends, and welcome back to Hidden History of Texas. This is episode 92 – this is the first in a series I’m calling The Rio Grande Frontier – Welcome to El Paso: The Pass of the North When most people think about Texas history, their minds usually start in the  east. They think of Nacogdoches, San Antonio, Austin's Colony, the Alamo, cattle drives, oil fields, and railroads. But today, I want us to start from the opposite direction. Let’s travel nearly six hundred miles west of San Antonio, across deserts, mountains, and vast stretches of open country, to a city unlike any other in Texas. A city that was old before Texas existed. A city that was part of Spain, then Mexico, and only later became part of Texas. A city that sits on the Rio Grande and has served as a gateway between worlds for more than four centuries. In my lifetime, I’ve either driven through or, when I was a child, been driven through El Paso numerous times. But we never really stopped and visited the city, in fact, most of the times I drove to the west coast, I would usually drive through El Paso and stop in Las Cruces New Mexico. I really don’t know why, except when I was driving the Freeway just didn’t seem to offer any real enticing places to stop. The one occasion that I was able to actually spent time in El Paso was when a company I was working for asked me to temporarily run their branch office. After spending some time there, I realized that El Paso was and is distinctly different. We Texans have a tendency to talk about Texas as if it's a single culture. But standing in El Paso, listening to conversations switch effortlessly between English and Spanish, (or as we call it using Spanglish) and  looking across the Rio Grande toward Ciudad Juárez, I understood that Texas has always been more complicated, and more interesting, than that. So join with me as we explore El Paso. The story begins long before there was a state of Texas. Long before there was an Alamo. Long before Stephen F. Austin brought settlers into Mexican Texas. In 1598, Spanish explorer and colonizer Juan de Oñate led an expedition north from Mexico. Near present-day El Paso, his expedition crossed the Rio Grande and entered lands that Spain hoped to claim and settle. That crossing took place more than twenty years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Think about that for a moment. Many Texans think of San Antonio as the oldest chapter of Texas history. But the El Paso region was already part of the Spanish frontier before the first permanent European settlement was established in San Antonio. For centuries, this crossing would become one of the most important gateways in North America. The Spanish called it El Paseo del Norte. The Pass of the North. And that name tells us everything we need to know about why the city exists. To understand El Paso, you have to forget the modern map for a moment. Today, we see a border separating the United States and Mexico. But for much of history, this region was not viewed as a dividing line. It was a corridor. A road. A meeting place. A connection between communities. Travelers moving north toward Santa Fe passed through here. Merchants passed through here. Soldiers passed through here. Missionaries passed through here. Families settled here. Trade flourished here. For generations, El Paso was less a frontier outpost than a crossroads of cultures. One of the most dramatic moments in its history came in 1680. That year, Indigenous Pueblo peoples in New Mexico launched what we historians call the Pueblo Revolt. Spanish settlements throughout New Mexico were attacked, and surviving colonists fled south. Many of them arrived at El Paso. For a time, El Paso became a refuge and administrative center for Spanish authorities driven from New Mexico. It is one of those remarkable stories that rarely appears in Texas history textbooks. For a period of time, the future of Spanish New Mexico was being directed from what is now Texas. As centuries passed, El Paso developed in ways very different from the rest of Texas. When settlers were arriving in East Texas from the American South, El Paso remained connected to older Spanish and Mexican traditions. Its trade routes stretched toward Santa Fe and Chihuahua. Its culture reflected centuries of interaction among Indigenous peoples, Spanish settlers, Mexicans, and frontier communities. In many ways, El Paso belonged to a different world than the one developing around Houston, Galveston, or Austin. And perhaps that's still true today. When Texas won its independence from Mexico in 1836, life in El Paso did not suddenly transform overnight. The city remained geographically distant from the centers of political power. The Republic of Texas claimed the region, but for many years its influence remained limited. The people of El Paso conti