If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains.

—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Can you describe the mood of El Paso as you feel/see it?

First, what is visible: the lavish expanse of light. Light on the stone benches. Light on the slopes of the mountains surrounding the city. Amid this tapestry, one city leans upon another, and it takes an effort to see the dividing line between the two. Ocher fencing disappears into the horizon; these are the steel posts that divide Mexico and the United States. The wall stretches along Paisano Drive, next to the University of Texas campus where I teach my creative writing classes, and climbs the hillside until it vanishes into the distance, like a train winding toward the blue. Right next to it, a tall hill displays a phrase in Spanish: “la Biblia es verdad, léela” (“The Bible is true, read it”). The words are visible from all of downtown El Paso, but the sign is located in Ciudad Juárez. It belongs to another reality, to another pain. The sky is the same, the air as well; only the distance is imaginary.

Second, what can be heard: the soft sweep of voices from groups of people who, at all hours of the day and night, fill the various crossing points on the bridges. Their voices touch each other like their bodies do; leaning one upon the other, the sounds are also material. Someone begins a sentence in English and finishes it in Spanish, or the other way around. But it doesn’t worry or confuse us. The border is not just a place; it is a state of mind, and a border-dweller is someone for whom the existence of a limit is not a reason to stop.

What is your most heartbreaking memory in this city?

When I was pregnant with my second child, I had complications that forced me to be on complete bed rest. I read a lot, including the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which I chose because I knew that El Paso’s landscape inspired the author’s postapocalyptic fiction. In the book, a father and his son are traveling south through a dying world. At one point in their journey, they encounter a blind man, and in the face of such helplessness, the son feels pity while the father feels fear.

Before parting, the father tells the man that he keeps going because of the Boy, and that the Boy is a god to him. Shortly after, I gave birth to my son on the morning of March 13, 2020, the same day the global pandemic was declared. That scene from that beautiful book inspired by the landscape of El Paso kept appearing in my mind because, more than ever during those days, I thought so much about life and death and what it means to carry one’s heart in the body of another. Like the character in the book, I also clung to this new life as if it were a divinity; I didn’t want to and couldn’t separate myself from my child.

A few months later, still during the lockdown, in early 2021, I read the news that, not far from my home, coyotes had thrown two girls under five years old over the wall from a height of fourteen feet. The girls survived, and although I hear stories of crossings every day, those struck me as the most heartbreaking. What kind of world forces us to endanger new life in such a way? From what pain and desperation do we originate, that we are forced to separate ourselves from our own hearts?

What is the most extraordinary detail, one that goes unnoticed by most of the city?

From the scenic route—where so many park to see the city from above, and from that bird’s-eye view, perhaps glean a unifying glimpse of all that multiplicity—the two sister cities seem like one, or almost. When you park during the day, you see the bridges, the well-cut grass on this side, and the gringos’ perfectly finished sidewalks. But when night falls, it’s no longer possible to distinguish the Rio Grande and the iron canals; a luminous tapestry unites the two cities and the boundary truly blurs. The only difference, if you look closely enough, is that the streetlights in Juárez are much brighter than in the city of El Paso.

What writer(s) from here should we read? 

Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club by Benjamin Alire Sáenz is a book of stories about crossings where people meet on the border; often it is love and empathy that unite them, but greed and war that separate them. Alire Sáenz is also the author of several books of poems, in which the desert is the archetypal image of the border and what it means to confront a wasteland as both a destination and possibility.

Another book, The Verging Cities by Natalie Scenters Sapico, proposes another formula for crossing the border through love. But in this instance, the book includes a lover who crosses without crossing, because his legal situation is still in process. There, we feel the distance of bodies in the political realm, the friction between their ways of inhabiting the same landscape. Other poets who speak of crossing borders in terms of the body and language are Sasha Pimentel and Rosa Alcalá.

Is there a place here you return to often?

About forty minutes by car from El Paso, a very short distance in Texan terms, are the White Sands dunes. Although they are in the state of New Mexico, it’s very easy to reach them from El Paso. I go back to that place three or four times each year to reconnect with a breathtaking view. It consists of three hundred square miles of gypsum desert, the remnants of an ocean that existed there millions of years ago. The purity of that white is only comparable to that of snow before it touches the ground. I often return to that site to feel both the vastness of the world and the insignificance of our time in it. I have a collection of photos of poets I’ve brought there, with whom I now share the memory of an impossible meadow, a vision of another world where beauty and desolation coincide, as in a cherished poem.

Is there an iconic literary place we should know?

On one of the streets of Segundo Barrio, one of the oldest urban settlements in El Paso, there is a somewhat neglected apartment building where a commemorative plaque still remains, marking the year that writer Mariano Azuela lived there. Azuela, who was from Jalisco, is the author of Los de abajo, a fundamental novel about the Mexican Revolution. The work was published in installments between October and December of 1915 in the newspaper El Paso del Norte, and then first published as a book in Mexico the following year. Segundo Barrio, also referred to by some as “The Other Ellis,” was one of the principal entry points from Mexico to the United States during those years. I find it striking that such an important text as Los de abajo was written in El Paso; it offers a picture of the years when the city was, indeed, a balcony from which to observe the battle of Juárez.

Are there hidden cities within this city that have intrigued or seduced you?

This is a city that leans into the places and secret possibilities of another. Thousands of people cross daily between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, each with their own reasons. Most come to study or work in the United States and return to Mexico at night. Others cross from El Paso to Juárez because medical services are more accessible; to see the dentist, the optometrist, or the hairdresser, and to buy papayas and bananas that actually taste like something. I am one of the people who crosses to Juárez to feel that I am back in Latin America, and closer to my native Colombia. I enjoy being back, even if only briefly, in a world where, for example, despite so much hardship, shoe repair shops still abound, and there are noble reasons why someone mends a wooden chair or an old watch. In part, it’s like embarking on a journey into one’s own past. I also cross over to eat tacos and visit the bookstore at the Centro Cultural de las Fronteras, where all the walls are covered with books in Spanish.

Where does passion live here? 

Passion here is the language of exchange, the blend of expressions and cadences spoken by the people who cross the border, those who translate songs, the names of foods. Those born here, like my children, have a mother tongue not necessarily tied to a territory, but to a state of living on a boundary. That form of abundance inspires passion.

What is the title of one of your works about El Paso and what inspired it exactly?

My book, En las praderas del fin del mundo (Valparaíso, 2019), is inspired by the desert landscape of El Paso, including the Chihuahua Desert, and also by the Franklin Mountains and the dunes of White Sands and Samalayuca, Mexico. This book explores the rite of pilgrimage in the desert through a fragmented dialogue between a migrant mother, father, and son. The book reflects upon the forms of belonging associated with territories and the loss associated with being uprooted. It also considers the experience of motherhood.

Inspired by Levi, “Outside El Paso does an outside exist?”

I return to Calvino to answer this question and to honor this series: “Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes.” Outside of El Paso and its daily crossings, the lively transit of the border—of commerce, the exchange of objects and words that make up the world’s bazaar—lies the thickness of the void, crossed by those who implore the night not to see them. There are trees wounded by light, and ravines through which lost voices advance, hoping that we will recognize them.

Andrea Cote is the author of three poetry collections, En las praderas del fin del mundo (In the prairies of the end of the world), La ruina que nombro (The ruin that I name), and Puerto calcinado (Port in ashes); and two selected works, Chinatown a toda hora (Chinatown 24/7) and Desierto rumor (Desert murmur). She has also published two books of prose: A Nude Photographer: A Biography of Tina Modotti and Blanca Varela or Writing from Solitude. In 2019, she curated and wrote a critical study for the Colombian women poets’ anthology Pájaros de sombra, winner of the 2020 International Latino Book Award for Best Poetry Collection. Cote has received the National Poetry Prize from the Universidad Externado of Colombia, the Puentes de Struga International Poetry Prize, and the XXIV Premio Casa de América de Poesía Americana, among other honors.  Her poems have been translated into numerous languages, and she has translated into Spanish the poets Kahlil Gibran, Tracy K. Smith, and Jericho Brown. She is a professor of creative writing for the Bilingual MFA at UTEP.