Jazmine Ulloa — El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years
New York Times journalist traces El Paso through five interconnected families across a century of border life, immigration, and American identity.
Why we picked this
This is border history told through people, not policy — five families whose stories cover a full century of what it means to live between two nations.
Jazmine Ulloa’s debut book follows five families in El Paso across a hundred years, tracing how a single city on the Rio Grande became a prism for the larger American story of immigration, identity, and belonging. Readers encounter the border not as an abstraction but as a lived place — neighborhoods, relationships, crossings, and losses accumulated over generations.
Ulloa is a national politics reporter for the New York Times, where she has covered Congress and immigration policy. She grew up in Texas and reported extensively from the border before turning that reporting into this multigenerational narrative. The book draws on deep archival research and years of interviews with the families themselves.
What distinguishes the book is its insistence on the particular: rather than arguing about the border, it shows you what the border is. This is a talk for anyone who wants to understand El Paso — and by extension, a significant slice of American history — at a level that headlines don’t reach.