Editor’s Note: This excerpt is adapted from El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory by Jazmine Ulloa, out March 2026 from Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group. © 2026 by Jazmine Ulloa.
On August 3, 2019, I was nearly 2,000 miles away in Washington, D.C., where I worked as a national political reporter in the bureau of The Boston Globe. It was a Saturday, and I was in a movie theater when my phone lit up with calls and messages. Friends and family in El Paso were checking in on each other and letting me know they were safe: There had been a mass shooting at a Walmart near the most popular shopping mall in town. Photos and videos from the scene showed bloody victims wheeled out in shopping carts, customers murmuring prayers through the gun blasts.
