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Why I Love This City Where Americans Aren’t Always Welcome
It involves Taquito Mexicano’s al pastor, a secret beverage called chucho, and the Wise Man of Juaréz
Some people call Julian Cardona the Wise Man of Juárez because of his sayings and the philosophical lilt of his speech. But there’s one he came up with on a recent trip there that stuck with me and made me laugh while the margaritas went down at a bar just across the border.
“The chucho has left a stain on your mind,” he told me.
I first came to Juárez and El Paso — sister cities that were once the same city before the complexities of the relationship between the United States and Mexico required walls, laws, and checkpoints — last June to report on immigration and the border. I didn’t realize back then how close the two cities were until I found myself in the office an immigration attorney. “Go over to Juárez if you get a chance,” she said. You mean, I can just walk over there? Yes.
Cut to dusk, and a pale Midwesterner walking solo into Juárez with no particular place to go.
What I found was nothing short of revelatory: Here, in this place we are constantly told is filled with death, the city roars with exuberant life.
In Juárez, where if you believe some in this country, Americans aren’t welcome, and where a teeming mass of undesirables is supposedly scrambling to breach our border and overcome our way of life, millions of people are living lives not unlike our own. Work, play, food, drink, love, pain, life, death.
Julian, the Wise Man of Juárez, has been here for all of that, doing a diligent job in documenting the constant drug killings that are so heavily associated with the city. He is my fixer and friend, a photographer, journalist, and man about town. It should be noted that, without him, my trips in and around Juárez would likely be much different — and not in a good way. Most of the time I’m in Juárez I’m with him and I’ve noticed that, in some places without him, I’m not exactly welcome. For all my singing praises of the city, it remains a relatively unsafe place for non-Spanish-speaking Americans to…
