El Paso in many ways is the Ellis Island for Mexico and much of Latin America.
Part of the job for me and others from El Paso who live along the border is to dispel the myths about how supposedly dangerous the border is.
Juarez had become a failed city. The mayor of Juarez lived in El Paso. Not only did he not live in his own city, he didn't live in his own country. You had all these kids out of school who didn't want to work because they saw their mothers toiling in jobs for hardly any cash.
In terms of immigration, we're seeing a lot of Democrats and Republicans use the really elastic term, 'Comprehensive Immigration Reform,' and they don't totally understand what that means. For us in El Paso, it's part of a larger discussion about the nature of the border.
We in El Paso and Juarez are literally one community. There's no separation; there's no DMZ; there's no buffer.
I was born in '72, and my dad was county judge of El Paso from '82 to '86. He was just as independent as he could be, and had an amazing joy in life and in being with people, which, from my perspective as a kid, was that he was always going to do the right thing, and damn the consequences - political or otherwise.
The border is safe; it's secure. El Paso is the safest city in America. Let's own that. Let's be proud of that. And then, I think, good policy can follow from that, better outcomes included.
Growing up, everyone around me in El Paso, Texas, was all about watching 'The Wall' and, you know, 'Money' and 'Dark Side of the Moon,' which are fantastic records, of course.
It all started in a local park in El Paso called Madeleine Park. At a ditch, a very small ditch, that everybody used to go skateboarding in. It was me and Jim Ward and an acoustic guitar. He and I constructed the very first phases of At The Drive In.
I was in dire need of a band that was serious about getting out of El Paso.
