You can read the article some where after this dash - Download Playboy article.
It's hard to break this all down, but I think it can be done.
First off, don't be upset that El Paso wasn't portrayed in the best light. Playboy and a whole other list of magazines aimed at horny men with a little education eviscerate cities, religions and other types of people and places all the time. It's a formula they use to sell magazines.
I've been to two writing workshops on how to write feature length articles where the science of journalism meets the art of short fiction. These are the types of articles you see in men's magazines and even in other types of magazines like Vogue and Texas Monthly. More specifically, the article in Playboy is a case of facts meet fiction to form a very entertaining picture for readers.
One thing men like to read about is the heavy contrast between tranquility and violence. Playboy has done articles on Canadian and American biker gangs that were considered egregiously over the top by both law enforcement and the gangs themselves. However, the readers (mostly males) were riveted to the violence and sexy underworld known only to outlaws and men who had chosen much different paths in life than they themselves had. There's a reason movies of mindless violence and ridiculous plots are still at the top of the list - men love it.
My point here is that the author had no other choice but to write what he did. His assignment was not to go to El Paso and write some loving travel article about food, mountain biking and sweeping sunsets. His charge was to deliver something a 35 year-old man could read with interest while sitting on the pot.
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The one thing I see immediately is that the author saw El Paso through Cinco Puntos Press owner, Bobby Byrd's eyes. There are 700,000 plus El Pasoans and we would all show the author a different version of El Paso if asked to give a tour. Our first inclination is to say, "I would have taken him here and never taken him there!" You have to wonder what the author would have seen if left on his own to discover the city. Something tells me that would have been even harder to stomach.
Within the text of the article the author writes in parenthesis, "what neighborhood in El Paso is not a Mexican barrio?" Obviously we can figure out that this statement came from the author's experiences afforded to him by his guide, Bobby Byrd. Byrd makes no bones about the fact that he thinks El Paso in its essence is the central part of town. Many of you would disagree. Not everyone in El Paso finds 100 year-old homes that are falling apart to be the best representation of an entire city.
Obviously, the author saw what his host wanted him to see and figured that if there was anything different, Byrd would have shown him that. Just look at each place Byrd took him and picture what each of those neighborhoods look like. If you take someone to all the bad parts of town (whatever that really means is up to you), they're going to paint the entire city as they saw it.
Being escorted through the Segundo barrio and back up to the "Devil's Triangle" doesn't conjure up the kinds of nostalgia from a stranger that we feel. My dad still sees the neighborhood near Austin high school where he grew up as it was forty years ago. I see it completely different as does my wife who has been here for only a short while. He thinks it's neat and I think the place needs a major face lift.
The point here is that if you take a guy to all the bad parts of town, expect him to have a bad impression of the entire city. Had they taken him to the far Eastside and to the developments on the Westside, he may have written a different description of the city. Bobby Byrd's El Paso isn't everyone's El Paso.
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The author takes some poetic license, for lack of a better phrase, with the Schlitz beer and peeing behind the bush at the Music Under the Stars concert he attended. I haven't seen anybody other than rednecks drink schlitz beer in this town and everyone knows that there are cops all over the place at that weekly concert and you can't just go around pissing in bushes without ending up in cuffs.
The important part of his invention of these activities is that he becomes a part of a problem he talks about later in the article. In the section where he introduces Professor Saenz, the author attempts to show how misconceptions of the border (car thefts) are developed out of fear and dislike for Hispanics.
How does falsely accusing a crowd of locals of being Schlitz drinkers and public pissers help the image of Hispanics? His efforts to quash the rumors that border Hispanics as dirty and violent are useless when he goes on to paint border Hispanics as dirty and violent.
The rest of the article is filled with these little embellishments down to the comments made by Commissioner Escobar about "government cheese." I'm sure they went to Chico's Tacos. I wish they hadn't because to any outsider Chico's isn't nearly as cool as we think it is. It plays into negative Hispanic stereotypes that the local Hispanics are trying to avoid (sorry to use "Hispanic," but they're not "Mexicans" and Latinos hate being called Chicanos and Chicanos can't stand being called Latinos, however they don't want to be lumped in with plain old white Americans. So excuse me if I tiptoe around your identity issues.)
I've talked to Veronica Escobar on many occasions in public situations. I even had phone conversations with her and exchanged the rare email with her. Most of the time she's setting the record straight on something I have written or said. She does it in a nice way and is a woman who is extremely measured with her words. I called her on this and she denies saying those words and I believe her. I believe her if not only for the fact that the guy wasn't recording her words either with an electronic device or pen and paper, but also because she's a rather politically correct person and Suzie Byrd is a political correctness nazi.
I really don't see her saying those things, but I do, however, see how the author's impression of a rundown restaurant serving what appears to be slop would lead to the quote out of pure convenience. Remember, a good author of these articles always make himself out to be the casual observer while using his host's imaginary words to paint the picture he really wants you to see.
This story needs some invented details to be as long and arduous as it is. No guy wants to read the rather mundane truth that we're just like the rest of America when it comes to every day life even if they are killing a generation of men just a short distance across the border.
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I do believe that Byrd talked about the Ft. Bliss expansion in the manner the story paints. You're a liar if you don't admit you feel the same way.
It's okay to wonder aloud about how the injection of 30,000 young men into your city is going to work out. Young men of any occupation in that number would add to crime statistics in a community. Stating that fact does not diminish their value as heroes. It does show honesty in explaining what we know about young men and what they do when moved far from home and then crammed close together in large numbers.
The "narcos" aren't as much of a worry as the soldiers for the mere fact that one group is here and the other is not.
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I do agree with those who bemoan the fact that once again our city didn't come out looking too great. However good the effort in this article was to make us look safe, it was not enough to overcome the author's conjecture that you could get your ass kicked just about anywhere here in El Paso by menacing looking cholos.
The contradictory nature of the article shows me that the only goal here was to sell magazines. The idea was to paint a picture that the white males over 30 who subscribe to Playboy could read and be entertained by while taking care of natures call. It's real enough for them to picture the horrid violence in their mind, but far enough away in El Paso that they would never have to worry about it seriously.
The simple fact is that we are still viewed as an enigma that doesn't conform to what those who wish to judge us want us to be. Oh how great of a news story it would be for the major networks if El Paso was under siege like Juarez. It would be devastating to us, but a perfect story for them.
The plot lines have all been written in the minds of the producers at Fox News and CNN. Wild Mexicans with machine guns cross the border and execute innocent Americans in a battle reminiscent of an Apache raid in a dime novel of the 19th century. Audiences would again be treated to a tale that both scares and intrigues them. Network executives would love nothing more than to have millions of middle-aged, white housewives scared out of their minds and locked into their network for hours as they tell the story of the CRAZY MEXICANS WITH MACHINE GUNS!!!!
Because that hasn't happened, we get treated like shit by those would gain the most if it did - the press. Anderson Cooper comes to town and he doesn't want a great enchilada or a ghost tour of the Plaza Theatre (more on that in a minute), he wants cartel violence and he wants it on this side of the border. It's not a story until it moves over here.
Until the violence does move over here, expect the media to treat us as if we don't care about it. We do care about it, we do think about it, but we're not going to stop living our lives because of it. The press would like it if we did, though.
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We need to be cognizant of this ghost and goblins thing that some El Pasoans are obsessed with. Some things are better left for conversation among locals. We look a little hokey if the first thing we start talking about is our supposed ghost population. It's not a good way to get people to take us seriously. For example, you wouldn't mention that you see ghosts on a first date. Let's pretend all strangers are first dates and not mention ghosts.
This is not to say that folks like Ken Hudnall haven't made a great little cottage industry out of our historical sites and their eternal guests, they have and it's a fun thing for the LOCALS. I myself have been an avid reader of paranormal literature for years. I just made it a point to make sure I didn't tell strangers that I thought big foot lived in Canutillo the first time I met them and not even on the fifth time we met.
And by the way, "La Llorna" or whatever you call her doesn't exist. The river ghost is a running myth that has roots back to Roman times. Every single river in the entire world has a wailing woman ghost story and they are all identical. It would be impossible to assume that our river is the only one in the entire world where the myth is actually true. Please stop telling people about this myth, it makes you look stupid to anyone who has ever read a book on urban legends.
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We will get over this soon enough. It's just another scratch on an already scarred body.
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