El Paso, Texas, 2016
Photograph and text by Bruce Berman
This is about “it” folks.
The last of this barrio, this old ‘hood, known in earlier days as El Pujido (the “push” referencing some knife fights the deteriorating barrio came to be known by in the fifties and sixties).
From the west is coming a vicious storm of hipsterism, of micro brewery culture, restaurants with fuzzy foo foo pinched across the top of, well, some tiny thing underneath.
From the east comes the Medical Complex, the ever expanding hospital, the tenements of Specialists that come with that, and the new dormitories/apartments for medical residents, technicians and the newly affluent.
From the south, three blocks away, is Juárez, still Juárez, blessed Juárez (where I would often walk to from my loft across the street from the San Pedro: (https://www.amazon.com/Walking-Juarez-Photographs-Bruce-Berman/dp/1546879285#ace-9766277718).
From the north? Endless Exurbia (neither sub nor city), now stretching its developing hand all the way to Las Cruces, New Mexico, 50 miles away.
For now however, there is still The Key, the sign on the San Pedro that goes back to another time when this street was U.S. 80, the Spanish Trail, the highway from San Augustine, Florida to San Diego. The San Pedro that was across the street from the oasis that was Camp Grande, the 200 unit resting place inaugurated in 1923, the stopping point in the long long journey east to west, west to east.
Only the San Pedro remains now. And me. I’m still here (since 1980). The past is always prelude. But prelude to what? Not sure.
That’s about it.
Editor’s Note (October 2020): The great “key” of the San Pedro pharmacy is gone. Se fué. Summer 2020. Sold off. Its owner and pharmacist, Hector Arredondo has passed away. His wife slowly disposed of the remaining fixtures (a soda fountain that was still making wonderful sodas in the early 2000s) and the sign sent with them. The pharmacy was gone. The Key is gone.
And what did the key mean? Why “San Pedro (Saint Peter)?”
When Hector’s father, Cecilio, was surveying the site preparing to build the pharmacy, in (approx. 1952) they found a key in the dirt. Cecilio said it was the key of San Pedro. Catholic lore has it that San Pedro holds the key to heaven. They built the sign,* a glorious 50s neon, that millions of east/west travelers went past, coming and going from San Diego headed to St.Augustine, Florida and vice versa (U.S. 80’s two termini). They named the business in honor of the revered guardian of the gate to heaven, thus, “San Pedro.”
The desesparado (disappeared) sign is the end of an era, the textural anchor of the old neighborhood that huddles against the border in south El Paso.
Where has it gone?
Who knows?
I shudder to think. Certainly not to a place with the spiritual intent that it was birthed from. The sign is gone and the era is gone with it?
That’s the way of things.
All things must pass.
It’s why we do documentary photography, no?
*Still being researched but it is believed the sign was constructed by the Jimenez Sign Company, owned by Luis Jimenez, senior, the father of world renowned artist, Luis Jimenez, jr.(https://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Fl-Ka/Jim-nez-Luis.html).
