During the summer of 2009, I arrived at the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez borderplex as a teenager seeking sanctuary. I did not arrive from south of the border as most Americans might imagine but from the Texas Panhandle, and with a southern twang in my voice. I still remember my first few months there when I unconsciously said “fixin'” to the bewilderment of others. I carried that word from the rural, profoundly southern, Baptist, and—perhaps more deeply than anything—conservative town I grew up in, north of Amarillo. Like many rural towns in the Panhandle, some of which are majority-minority, my hometown was about half Latina/o (mainly Mexican). But the region and its communities were, and continue to be, white ruled.1
When the region’s Mexican population began to grow in the 1980s, progressive newspapers and magazines referred to the Texas Panhandle as a mirror of apartheid South Africa. Known as “the whitest part of Texas,” the area was so segregated that the Texas Civil Liberties Union called the region an “isolated example of a kind of racism that has pretty well disappeared everywhere else” and noted its moniker “Little South Africa” among social justice advocates. Decades later, discrimination and social inequality remains widespread in my home corner of Texas—a place where I grew up as Mexican and Queer (a word I didn’t use as a bisexual man until years later).2
When it came around to college applications, my A’s (plus one B in an algebra class, taught by a teacher who gave Sudoku handouts for tests) probably could have gotten me into a few name-brand schools. Not that my white school counselor ever attempted to help any of the Mexican students get into any college, much less one with a recognizable name. But that wasn’t my concern. I wanted to go somewhere I could freely be me. I wanted to find a community where the word Mexican was not a pejorative term. I yearned for a location where twenty-first-century school officials and teachers did not adhere to the spirit of early-twentieth-century Americanization programs that sought to erase children’s first language through English-only education as well as the erasure of their culture—a practice that, as historian Yolanda Chávez Leyva argues, harms children’s “psychological and physical health.” From my kindergarten class through high school, principals and teachers prohibited the speaking of Spanish. Simultaneously, they helped install thick, southern accents into Brown students’ mouths.3
Writer, journalist, and activist Bárbara Renaud González, who also grew up in the rural Texas Panhandle, went south eight hundred miles to the University of Texas–Pan American (now part of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley), where “everybody speaks Spanish” and Mexican was “a good word.” There, folks didn’t believe her when she told them “how much I needed to hear [their Spanish],” that language that was prohibited in her school, in her dad’s school, in my school. Ten miles from the border, González found “the perfect place” for her. And eight hundred miles or so west of the South Texas border, I also found the perfect place for me.4
On the foothills of a small mountain range, the University of Texas at El Paso overlooks working-class neighborhoods of Ciudad Juárez, the Rio Grande River/Río Bravo, and an ugly metal border wall that attempts to separate Latin America from the United States. Being at the university and in El Paso was one of the first times I found solace in a community. No one questioned my presence in a classroom. Professors didn’t ignore me or consider me lesser. Instead, from my first semester onward, they encouraged me to go on to graduate school. Outside of school, no one followed me around in stores. No one glared at me with racist disdain as I walked down a sidewalk. Authentic Mexican food, even if not quite as Mexican as south of the river, was available everywhere—even on campus.
In El Paso, I also found sanctuary as a Queer Mexican in the gay clubs and bars I went to. The very first was the Old Plantation, or OP. (Even if fixin’ was not often said in El Paso, the South and its problematic past reached into the city, where, during the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan controlled the school board and held significant political power.) As Chávez Leyva, of El Paso origin, wrote on her inaugural visit to a gay bar, the Pet Shop, in 1974: “the first time was magical.” The same was true for me thirty-five years later. A friend parked their car, packed with a few of us eighteen- and nineteen-year-old college students, on a dimly lit street near the warehouse space the OP occupied just a few blocks from the international border. I was excited but also nervous. Through the club’s large metal doors, we entered into the OP’S two floors of bright lights, stuffy air, blaring Spanish and English-language music, dingy bathrooms, two bars (where I could only ask for water since I was a minor), and illicit drug culture, surrounded by people of various shades expressing their sexuality.5
As I grew and matured and changed majors, I found new groups of friends, each time renavigating who I was as a Queer Mexican. I stopped going to the OP and found other locales where I felt at peace. The place that I found the most comfort in was Chiquita’s Bar. Just off El Paso’s Stanton Street Pride Square, a block of LGBTQ bars in the heart of the city’s downtown, Chiquita’s is an LGBTQ-inclusive dive bar. It is housed in a painted brick building with barred windows, in between a two-story office building filled with law firms, and an asphalt parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. The bar attracts a diverse clientele; it is a space where Queer borderlands culture is exemplified among wide-ranging gender identities, sexual orientations, expressions of masculinity and femininity, national origins, social-economic classes, ages, and abilities.