◆ Killer targeted Latinos at El Paso Walmart that’s a microcosm of border communities.
El Paso Walmart, one of the nation’s busiest, drew customers from both sides of border
EL PASO — Two nations physically and culturally come together in El Paso. The bustling Walmart on the city’s east side, just minutes from the border with Mexico, exemplified those ties.
The store was a border version of Middle America: A large number of Mexican American families from El Paso crowded into the megastore daily for inexpensive groceries and, late in the summer, back-to-school supplies. Almost as often, families from Mexico drove across the international bridge to buy lower-cost TVs, cartons of diapers and discount clothing. It was one of the company’s top 10 in America: Where most big-box stores of its kind average 14,000 customers a week, the El Paso Walmart, a retail analyst said, saw 65,000.
Its racks were stocked with Mexican soccer jerseys, cans of chile and salsa and Mexican flags, folded beneath the American and Texas flags on display. The pharmacy staff was fully bilingual.
“It really does feel like a United Nations store,” said Burt Flickinger, a retail consultant who has visited and studied the store.
This is the border as it is lived everyday, far from the heated national debate over immigration. Children come and go across the international boundary for school; others come for jobs and shopping.
It was in this Walmart, on a sunny Saturday morning, where a white gunman angered by what he called the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” chose to carry out a horrific act of violence.
Gunmen motivated by bias have previously targeted American Jews, African Americans, Muslim Americans, gay Americans and American journalists. The gunman, identified as Patrick Crusius, 21, targeted Mexican and Mexican American shoppers and workers in Saturday’s attack, killing 20 people and wounding 27 others.
While there have been numerous Hispanic victims in several of the mass shootings that have shocked the nation in recent years — including the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., in 2016 — the massacre in El Paso was the deadliest anti-Latino attack in modern U.S. history.
The manifesto that a federal law enforcement official said Crusius wrote and posted online minutes before the shooting made his anti-immigrant beliefs clear. He wrote that immigration “can only be detrimental to the future of America,” and bemoaned a future in which Hispanics would take control of the local and state governments, “changing policy to better suit their needs.”
The apparent anti-Latino motive behind the attack stunned residents and officials, who saw the nation’s fraught debate over culture and immigration erupting with sudden violence in a city that has been a focal point of immigration and a place — like many border towns — where the notion of immigration and national identity has rarely felt divisive.
“What was most shocking to me is not that it was a mass shooting but the motive, the fact that he specifically targeted Mexican Americans and Hispanics,” said Gilda Baeza Ortega, 67, a librarian at Western New Mexico University who was in El Paso visiting her parents. “He came here for us.”
Across the country, many Latinos were describing Saturday’s targeted killings as a 9/11 moment, and the FBI’s announcement Sunday that it had opened a domestic terrorism investigation only reinforced the notion, especially in a city that is 80 percent Hispanic.
“This Anglo man came here to kill Hispanics,” El Paso’s sheriff, Richard Wiles, said. “I’m outraged, and you should be, too. This entire nation should be outraged. In this day and age, with all the serious issues we face, we are still confronted with people who will kill another for the sole reason of the color of their skin.”
Before the attack upended the sense of normalcy in El Paso, the Walmart and the shopping area surrounding it lured many people from across the border, and many El Paso residents looking for something to do on a weekend afternoon. People from both countries would go to new releases at a cinema not far from the Walmart, shop for discount clothing at a nearby Ross Dress for Less or stop in for happy hour at Hooter’s.
Texas has long been a state where Hispanics have shaped, and in many ways defined, what it meant to be Texan. But in recent years, the old white Texas and the new Hispanic Texas have repeatedly clashed.
Some of this tension involves who gets to tell history. Activists and scholars have begun focusing on the legacy of racist campaigns of terror against Latinos in this part of the West, including the killings a century ago of Mexicans by lynch mobs composed of Anglos. Going back further in the debate over any “invasion of Texas,” historians point out that it was actually carried out by Anglo slaveholders who migrated to the region in the 19th century when it was still part of Mexico, then seceded in 1836 and enshrined white supremacy in the first Texas Constitution.
The more recent clashes have led not only to yearslong court battles but to physical confrontations between white and Hispanic lawmakers on the floor of the Texas House of Representatives. White Republican officials in Texas have publicly expressed alarm about what they describe as an “invasion” of migrants spreading disease at the Texas border.
El Paso residents have now seen the most hateful parts of the debate bringing violence to their doors.
Adriana Ruiz was among those who left flowers, having picked up a bouquet from another Walmart in El Paso after church.
“I just …” she said, her voice trailing off. “Right now, my heart is broken.”
Ruiz, 50, said she was pained by the animosity that has surrounded the national debate about El Paso as it became a ground zero of sorts in recent months in the rush of migrants coming from Central America. A hateful act seemed like such a stark contrast to the vibe and texture of the city where she was born and raised. She remembered going to Ciudad Juárez in Mexico on Saturdays with her mother, grandmother and aunts to go shopping.
“No matter who it is,” she said. “We make them feel at home.”
The shooting, she said, showed that a toxic environment outside El Paso was finding its way into the city. She heard it in the rhetoric about life in the city that did not reflect what she knew, especially that from President Donald Trump.
“That is something that came from the top,” Ruiz said, referring to the influence frequent portrayal of the border as a place of crisis that is threatened with invaders from outside.