When the region’s Mexican population began to grow in the 1980s, progressive newspapers and magazines referred to the Texas Panhandle as a mirror of apartheid South Africa. But the region and its communities were, and continue to be, white ruled. Like many rural towns in the Panhandle, some of which are majority-minority, my hometown was about half Latina/o (mainly Mexican). I carried that word from the rural, profoundly southern, Baptist, and-perhaps more deeply than anything-conservative town I grew up in, north of Amarillo. ![]() I still remember my first few months there when I unconsciously said “fixin'” to the bewilderment of others. ![]() I did not arrive from south of the border as most Americans might imagine but from the Texas Panhandle, and with a southern twang in my voice. ![]() During the summer of 2009, I arrived at the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez borderplex as a teenager seeking sanctuary.
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