Three decades after the first publication of Forrest Gump, Winston Groom returns to fiction with this sweeping American epic. Long fascinated with the Mexican Revolution and the vicious border wars of the early twentieth century, Winston Groom brings to life a much-forgotten period of history in this sprawling saga of heroism, injustice, and love. El Paso pits the legendary Pancho Villa against a thrill-seeking railroad tycoon known only as the Colonel—whose fading fortune is tied up in a colossal ranch in Chihuahua, Mexico. But when Villa kidnaps the Colonel’s grandchildren and absconds into the Sierra Madre, the aging New England patriarch and his son head to El Paso, hoping to find a group of cowboys brave enough to hunt down the Generalissimo. Replete with gunfights, daring escapes, and an unforgettable bullfight, El Paso becomes an indelible portrait of the American Southwest in the waning days of the frontier, one that is “sure to entertain” (Jackson Clarion-Ledger).

El Paso was a crossroads long before it was a border town, and its restaurant history represents the same intersection of foodways and culinary traditions. When the Ladies' Auxiliary for the YMCA produced El Paso's first known community cookbook in 1898, a number of its recipes appeared in English for the first time. Many of the eateries that supported that variety are now gone, but places like Jaxson's, Griggs and the Central Café changed the city's tastebuds forever. Walk the colonnade of the Hollywood Café or plop down at Bill Parks Bar-B-Q in this collection of standbys served up by the El Paso County Historical Society.

This memoir of growing up in El Paso in the 1940s and 1950s creates an entire city: the way a barrio awakens in the early morning sun, the thrill of a rare desert snow, the taste of fruit-flavored raspadas on summer afternoons, the "money boys" who beg from commuters passing back and forth to Juárez, and the mischief of children entertaining themselves in the streets. López-Stafford shows readers El Paso through the eyes of Yoya--short for Gloria--the high-spirited narrator, who is five years old when the book begins. Yoya is a survivor. Her young mother has died, leaving her in the care of her much older father, who tries to provide for his family by selling used clothing. Her brother Carlos, Padre Luna, and a community of children and women assume responsibility for Yoya, but like the inexplicable loss of her mother, unexpected changes separate her from her beloved barrio. The search for su lugar, her place, becomes a search for identity as Gloria seeks to understand her various homes and families.

This thought-provoking book examines gang history in the region encompassing West Texas, Southern New Mexico, and Northern Chihuahua, Mexico. Known as the El Paso–Juárez borderland region, the area contains more than three million people spanning 130 miles from east to west. From the badlands—the historically notorious eastern Valle de Juárez—to the Puerto Palomas port of entry at Columbus, New Mexico, this area has become more militarized and politicized than ever before. Mike Tapia examines this region by exploring a century of historical developments through a criminological lens and by studying the diverse subcultures on both sides of the law. Tapia looks extensively at the role of history and geography on criminal subculture formation in the binational urban setting of El Paso–Juárez, demonstrating the region’s unique context for criminogenic processes. He provides a poignant case study of Homeland Security and the apparent lack of drug-war spillover in communities on the US-Mexico border.

The Chicano characters in Richard Yañez's debut story collection live in El Paso's Lower Valley but inhabit a number of borders—between two countries, two languages, and two cultures, between childhood and manhood, life and death. The teenaged narrator of "Desert Vista" copes with a new school and a first love while negotiating the boundaries between his family's tenuous middle-class status and the working-class community in which they have come to live. Tony Amoroza, the protagonist of "Amoroza Tires," wrestles with the grief from his wife's death until an unexpected legacy fills him with new faith. María del Valle, "La Loquita," the central character of "Lucero's Mkt.," crosses the border into madness while her neighbors watch, gossip, and try to offer—or refuse—aid. Yañez writes with perfect understanding of his borderland setting, a landscape where poverty and violence impinge on traditional Mexican-American values, where the signs of gang culture strive with the ageless rituals of the Church. His characters are vivid, unique, fully authentic, searching for purpose or identity, for hope or meaning, in lives that seem to deny them almost everything. Yañez's world is that of the Southwestern Chicanos, but the fears and yearnings of his characters are universal.