Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 261, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 November 1917 — EL PASO to JUAREZ [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

EL PASO to JUAREZ

YOU can see El Paso two ways. You can be a little hysterical, as I am, over the border-town thrillingness of things. Or you can close a cold, canny commercial eye and get a chamber-of-commerce angle on its go-West-young-man opportunities. I never saw h town where they care so little about dust storms and so much about industrial chances, writes Zoe Beckley in the Pittsburgh Dispatch. My ninth story window Is In as handsome a hotel as ever reared its elegant facade from the gilt and marble, Turkish rug and hat check belt of New York city. It has all the modern conveniences with a few western developments like free newspapers at your door in the morning. Now look out southward, past a rocky mountain almost at your elbow, into that longish, squat-buildlnged street where the sun shines and the dust blows. At its end runs a ribbon of muddy water, too shallow to wet the ankles of a Chihuahua pup. The Rio Grande! —Beyond you see ablotchofbro wn cubes scattered on the slope of the grim and rugged mesa, with the shotmarred, whitewashed Cathedray of Guadalupe rising feebly in their midst. Mexico! The cubes of ’dobe houses, where whole 1 families, including the dog, the burro, the pig and the flea, live in dirtish desuetude. Ragged, sans furniture, building their mesquite wood fires on the mud floor! Mexico! You are looking from the twentieth century Into the sixteenth, with only a street and a bridge to join them. Neat Shops Scare Trade Away. Now we’ll descendTiud walk toward that famous though mangy-looking international bridge where the neat United States sentry and the forlorn cot-ton-clad, grubby Carranzista meet face to face every 20 seconds at the mld-

die. Near the bridge the Mexicans get dirtier, the street dustier, the shops shabbier. iZ “We don’t fix up the place much,” one storekeeper told me. “We’d lose our Mex trade. They don’t feel comfortable comirig Into a fussed-up, flossy place!” That wooden jumble over there to the left is the market. Note the Mexican women on the ground, shawls to the eyes (they believe all Illness comes from something in-breathed; hence the envered months) selling stuff, The flapjacks they claw from a bucket and stuff into the palm of the passerby are tortillas, Mex bread. They are not considered snqpworn because the customer finds them wanting in quality, but are casually slapped back again into their receptacle. Apparently the wearing qualities of tortillas are excellent. You have seen a limp stack of them. examined and rejected by half a dozen prospective purchasers, yet they look scarcely frayed, and are still quite salable. Hear the music? Guitafs, tambourines and voices. A group of greaser lads are playing, half for sheer love of it, half for the coins the people eating at the long, sloppy tables will throw them. Lunching and lining at the market place is the sociable Mexican mode. Baths Their Passports. There is a government bathhouse by the river bank, where certain ceremonies must be performed by the rebellious citizens of Juarez before they can commute regularly into El Paso as house and hotel servants, workmen and clerical employees. Now we crosslthe bridge. Afoot, the military authorities and customs men treat you indifferently. In the trolley ear the examination is more elaborate.

Past the poor ’dobe houses, through the doors of which you get glimpses of family life unpleasantly intimate, we go into the Via Diabolo, called by Jack London the wickedest slum in the world. I cannot vouch for its depravity, but I should think it must be the dirtiest, dustiest, poorest, weirdest, rowdiest, tawdriest and most heterogeneous, barring possibly some sinister suburb of Algeria.— 1 — Gaming houses are the staple Sunday attraction. Sweating crowds of men and women rim the tables, the lottery booths, the wheels of fortune — and, to judge by most of the patrons, of misfortune—that fill the barnlike shacks. One man in five is some sort of soldier, wearing some sort of fragmentary uniform. Poverty and Squalor. Notice the rakish cartridge belts—some worn straight around in rows, some over one shoulder, some over both crossed back and front. Ammunition is debited to the men, and they have to take care of it! The begrimed fellows, with the bits of leather thonged about their bare feet, with dirty serapes on their shoulders, are of the piteous peon class. You have seen poverty and squalor at home, but never such as this! The poor at home at least work in the hope of overcoming their wretchedness. Here all is sodden. No opportunity, no ambition, no hope at all. - There are a few. prosperous gamblers In the gaming dens who serve to set off the sinister raggedness of the rest Sinister, because everyone totes a gun, sometimes ,a rifle, and appears to appraise thirstily the modest jewel on your breast, the purse beneath your pocketflap. And now the bull ring, ancient chipped by random shots of many an opera bouffe revolution, painted in

raucous dabs of white, green and yellow, tfith a band emitting frightful blares above the entrance arch I A grubby Mexican in cotton clothes and a hat with towering crown and 30-inch brim distributes handbills announcing that at 4 p. m. “four arragantes y bravos toros, four” will be fought to death. Follow the names of the intrepid matadores, banderillerqs, picadores, etc., who are to fight “under the auspices of the Charities association” (!). - Seats on the “entrada sombra” (shady side of the ring) are $2; those on the “entrada a sol” are $1 —and if in all the world there is to be seen more wanton cruelty and horror for a trifling fee tell me 'where it is! Yet women and young girls flock there, bringing dressed-up children as to a sylvan picnic! A huge motor dashes up to the beggarly “plaza” In a choking dustcloud. It grazes the toes of squatting beggars and loafing men, sideswiping the unruly Mexican horses on which halfdrunken “soldiers” 1011. From It step half a dozen Mexican officers In expensive, well-fitting service uniforms, brave leather puttees, spurs and festoons of braid. The crowd stares and cringes. The slim a subaltern, who buys tickets, and with great eclat they pass inside to their hideous entertainment. , , You wonder what is In the mind of the resplendent officer as he views the ragged, halwtarved desperadoes of his “army.” Some sophisticated persons whisper to you that few names are published of those who fall in batt]p. It pays better to keep the names on the roster ! The poor creatures’ pittances come In handy for bullfights and other extras.

The International Bridge.

Mission of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Juarez.