Looking for Lucia Berlin in El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico
Alligators and high desert winds on the second stop of my Lucia Berlin research trip
Hello, friends —
For everyone who’s subscribed since my newsletter from Alaska earlier this week: big thanks, and welcome! If you’d like to read more about my journey in search of the American writer Lucia Berlin, feel free to check out my previous post. As Lucia Berlin’s first biographer, I’m really leaning into the ‘search’ in ‘research’, basically.
Here I am, writing to you go from Bogotá Airport as the sun comes up, before I change planes.
The second stop on my literary road trip was actually two stops: El Paso, Texas, where Lucia lived aged seven to ten, during the Second World War — and Ciudad Juárez, two miles away, across the border and the Río Grande.
Lucia captures both in her story ‘The Musical Vanity Boxes’, which you can read in this gorgeous collection. Her protagonists, two young girls, cross the Santa Fe Bridge into Mexico, and run through Juárez until they stumble on the Gavilán Café, which seems to materialise out of nowhere. The girls are enchanted by the café, which is ‘dark cool and quiet although everyone was talking and someone was singing.’
Lucia’s disregard for commas (when they don’t suit her sense of rhythm) is one of my favourite things about her prose.
First Impression
I didn’t want to like El Paso — it was a painful place for Lucia, who lived there during one of the most difficult times of her life (more on that in my book). But the minute I stepped out of the airport, I was swept away, literally and metaphorically.
I hadn’t expected the wind! Warm and wild, but somehow soft, too, and coming from every direction at once. It reminded me of Eve Babitz’s description of the Santa Anas in Slow Days, Fast Company:
My sister and I used to run outside and dance under the stars on our cool front lawn and laugh maniacally and sing, imagining we could be taken up into the sky on broomsticks… Once, when I was fifteen, I walked for an entire afternoon along the empty cement in 110 degrees of hot dry winds just to get the feel of them, alone.
As I later learned from El Pasoans, their city is set in the ‘high desert’ (even that phrase is beautiful), so the wind this time of year is light and dry. I found it genuinely thrilling. Here’s the closest I came to photographic evidence.
(And yes, I now have a TikTok, which you can see here.)
Meanwhile, what struck me most about Juárez was its sound. Several El Pasoans warned me that it was too dangerous to ‘cross over’ alone as a female tourist, so I walked across the Santa Fe Bridge at dawn, when I thought Juárez would be quiet — and though I felt safe, it wasn’t quiet at all, and that was a good thing. Listen.
Last Impression
The highlight of my time in El Paso was my afternoon with Lucia’s cousin Brooks Magruder and his wife Lea Magruder, who is a fabulous artist. They gave me a Lucia Berlin tour of the city, taking me to all of the buildings she mentions in her writing, most of which are still there (even the dentist’s office from ‘Dr HA Moynihan’). Here I am with Brooks, outside the house Lucia lived in during the war.
Best Discovery
I’ve long wondered what Lucia meant, in ‘The Musical Vanity Boxes’, when she wrote that the two girls ‘sat by the alligators in the Plaza’ before their trip to Juárez. I assumed that there must have been alligator statues in El Paso somewhere — or maybe it was local slang for someone who supported a certain baseball team or something?
Absolutely not. As Lea explained to me, actual alligators lived in the middle of San Jacinto Plaza, in downtown El Paso, for decades — the first one was placed in the central fountain by the park commissioner in 1889, who hoped that it would ‘occasionally take in a bad boy’ — until they were moved to the El Paso Zoo in 1965 because people kept playing ‘pranks’ and injuring them. Here’s an example that’s more funny than sad, from 1940.
What are the odds of the police officer being named Captain Good, and the tickler being named Mr Wise [guy]? And ‘malicious mischief’ — I feel like Lucia would have liked that phrase.
Worst Discovery
My flight out of El Paso was delayed by over seven hours, and they only updated us an hour at a time, so I couldn’t just go back into town and eat another enchilada.
Final Thought
School and university yearbooks are hilarious. I had the time of my life in the Special Collections of the University of Texas at El Paso, digging up the dirt on Lucia’s father, Ted Brown. Here he is, third from the left, playing basketball in 1929. Apparently he ‘had a big moment at Sul Ross when his accurate shooting won for the Miners.’
I’m off to look for Lucia in a whole other country now! In the meantime, keep well and don’t tickle the alligators.
Nina
x
My father Guyler Magruder (whose grandfather was H.A. Monyhan/Magruder, the dentist. Lucia was his first cousin) grew up in El Paso with the rest of the Magruders. He took me down there from Albuquerque once for his (60th?) high school reunion and we did a walking tour of downtown. He told me about the alligators as we entered the plaza. The typical Magruder story was that the guy in charge of cleaning that moat and feeding the alligators only had one leg. (Similar to the story of H.A. Magruder, who had a "I DON'T WORK FOR NEGROES" sign in the window of his dental office, but the black guy who shined shoes in the lobby of the Caples building had all gold teeth and everyone knew Magruder put them in for him. Haha, I guess...). Anyway, when we got to where the alligator moat was in the plaza, it was interesting to see a fiberglass sculpture by Luis Jimenez of alligators on the site. (There is a kind of grotesque statue of two Mexican dancers by him on the UNM campus in Albuquerque, too. He was building the huge horse statue near the airport in Denver when the horse fell on him and killed him. None of this is relevant, but I had to share!)
And so nice to see my cousin Brooks!! I'm so glad you got to meet Brooks and Leah.
Cheers! Cousin Jill Magruder