On August third one year ago, a 21-year-old white man from Allen, Texas, drove across the state to a Wal-Mart in El Paso, alongside the Mexican border, where he shot and killed 23 people and injured 23 others, the majority of them Mexican and Mexican-Americans.
The El Paso matanza, or massacre, is considered to be the deadliest anti-Latino attack in U.S. history, and one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history.
On this two-part episode, we talk with several people from El Paso about that day, about what has transpired in the year that has passed, about how life has and hasn’t changed along the border—politically, culturally, and spiritually.
In part one, Commonweal's editor Dominic Preziosi is joined by Monsignor Arturo Bañuelas, a priest in the diocese of El Paso, and Professor Neomi De Anda, the current president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States, sits down with assistant editor Griffin Oleynick, and audience development director Milton Javier Bravo.
For further reading:
- Night Will Be No More, Bishop Mark Seitz
- Confronting White Supremacy, John Gehring
- Injustice at the Border, a collection of Commonweal pieces
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