The Other Side of the Border

You have picked a bad night to cross,” the man tells the shivering couple in the kitchen, as they watch snow falling outside the window. The other man replies, “Every night is bad.” This observation, recounted in Octavio Solis’s Retablos, a coming-of-age memoir set in El Paso during the sixties and seventies, still applies in the borderland. At El Paso’s Sacred Heart, the Spanish-speaking Jesuit parish half a mile from the border, hundreds of Venezuelan migrants milled outside the church’s overcrowded shelter, Casa del Sagrado Corazón, spilling out into the alleyway and nearby street corners. Those inside and outside the shelter were all part of a refugee crisis that has pushed past 7 million.