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By Pilar Aurelio Muñoz
Spring 2025

David Dorado Romo is a historian, musician, writer, and translator from the El Paso/Juárez border. His work focuses on reimagining the rich and complicated history of this border by telling its neglected and forgotten histories. He is the author of two acclaimed books that center these critical histories: Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, 1893-1923 (2005) and Borderlands and the Mexican American Story (2024). Through his interdisciplinary approach, David allows the creative spirit to guide him by leveraging stories, language, and creativity to navigate the diverse and critical community spaces where he does most of his work.

David’s work in communities is motivated by the history of the El Paso/Juárez borderlands. After collecting research for Ringside to a Revolution, he became aware of the inequities in the historic neighborhoods of Duranguito and Segundo Barrio, which are located on the El Paso side of the U.S./Mexico border. Radicalized by these disparities, David went to the people of the community to learn more about what they needed in their struggle against the city and against the financial interests of real estate investors who sought to bulldoze their neighborhoods. Since then, his work with Paso del Sur and Project Regeneración has pushed back on the encroaching gentrification that displaces communities and histories for the sake of economic progress. David’s community work in Duranguito motivates this interview. Our conversation revolved around how one becomes motivated to do community work and how one stays motivated to keep doing the work.

One thing I have noticed when I go to your pláticas, which you often hold with Yolanda Chávez-Leyva (borderlands author, activist, and historian), is that you address positionality in doing community work. Can you tell me a bit about how you’ve negotiated this positionality, especially when working with groups that may hold different values to yourself? 

I always start in concentric circles, and I go back to the space where I'm from—this origin story—that's first a personal family story, and then it goes to a neighborhood story, and it goes into a city, and then the circles get bigger and bigger.

I've always worked in the Segundo Barrio and Duranguito. After I graduated from college, I spent 15 years teaching chess. And when I was teaching chess, I worked inside the institution and outside. I always wanted to have one foot inside what could be called academia or the school system, but I also wanted to create my own spaces. So, I had an after-school cultural arts program. It was tutoring, but at the same time, it was a way to share—to create community in that case—by working with kids. And so, teaching chess started off as something that I did straight out of college. And when I was teaching chess, I was teaching a narrative. I was teaching the kids a story. It wasn't only how to fight with your mind. I was really teaching them how to struggle. It was teaching kids game theory that they could apply not only to life, but to community. You center yourself in your own space, and then that idea of the local becoming global is at least, in my case, easier to manifest.

You focus on the power of stories and narrative strategies. Do you find this focus helpful in your work?

My things are language and narrative. There are different kinds of languages—chess is a language, music is a language, obviously history is a language. I’m trying to find the connections between stories, and it's the story that has the capacity to transform people's minds that almost naturally leads to action. Because a lot of times, for instance in the Duranguito struggle, we didn't have time in the beginning to mold a story, but we had to immediately. What was the best story to counteract the story that the city was telling? The city was saying, "Duranguito is just a piece of garbage", "It has no history", "The people that are there are just renters", "They have no rights to determine anything". And we had to fight like hell to poke a pin in their balloon and deflate their story. What do you do to counteract? And I guess it's like writing about what you know about and then taking your own personal family history and figuring out ways that other people, even on a global scale can connect with it.

We're talking about space and place in the classes I am teaching, and that's exactly the kind of connection I'm trying to make: how can you take your empirical experiences and connect into this grand existential world and make meaning out of that? And so, this idea of narratives and using them to make meaning really resonate with me. And I am drawn to the idea of counter narratives because I imagine when you're trying to create these counter narratives, you might run into tension if you're working within a certain university or institution. Do you ever run into those tensions when you're trying to create these counter narratives?

I'm an independent scholar, and it goes back to that idea that I'd never wanted to be fully inside of a university, but I have at least a few toes in it right now. I just got hired to do this exhibit at the Centennial Museum at University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) as part of the book that I'm going to write called Remapping Native El Paso. So, my main thing in terms of academia is the writing, but I don't write for academia. I write just for a general audience using my academic training. And then I do show it in an academic setting at the Centennial Museum. 

But really what I'm trying to do is use the knowledge that I have in the community. For instance, when we were fighting the battle of Duranguito, I got hired by preservationist lawyers to go to a whole bunch of archives on both sides of the border to investigate the Apache Peace camp that was in Duranguito. That ended up being part of the court case that [halted the demolition of Duranguito] because of the Texas Antiquities law—which states that before you knock down a neighborhood, you have to do an archeological survey. In other words, my research was based on academic training—it had my PhD help, my coursework, my knowledge of the archives, and even just how to read the paleography of the Spanish Colonial Archive. All of that helped me. But I was putting it to practice in a setting that actually had an effect. It at least saved the buildings, and it had an effect. It wasn't just theoretical knowledge that wasn't connected to the community. And now this knowledge, I'm bringing it back, showing it in a university setting. It'll be part of lectures, exhibits, and what have you. 

I'm just finding a natural way to go back and forth between academia and the community. And there'll be some things that academia will not allow you to do. So, you find creative ways of doing both. For instance, when we had the exhibit about Duranguito at the Centennial Museum, we had to call it Where the World Meets the Border, an exhibit of El Paso's First Ward. We couldn't even call it Duranguito because even the name was too political. But I mean, when you work within academia, you try to open up the envelope as much as possible. Then, you find yourself in spaces where you don't have to play those games, where you can totally open up the envelope. I mean, there'll be limits also within the community, but you definitely can open it up in a bigger way. 

So right now, I'm an independent scholar. I'm focusing most of my energy on writing and consulting. I get asked to do all kinds of consulting work, historical consulting. One project that ended up being more than I thought was when I gave these talks to a group called Encuentro. It's organized by Marist and Jesuit groups where they bring people from all over the United States, and in some cases other parts of the world, to learn about immigration in El Paso. At first, I thought, I don't really want to do this. It seems like I'm just giving tours to people, and it didn't feel meaningful for me. So, I agreed for a couple of times, but I really didn't want to do it. I just had a group from Dartmouth and Boston College, and I had a group of graduate students from Yale University, and they don’t know nine-tenths of the history I’m giving them. 

I am assuming that your book Ringside to a Revolution really helped establish you as a border scholar in that regard. I can see how you would get that leverage over time. Have you ever run into an issue where you had to confront an ideology of a funding partner that just didn't work out?

I mean, so many opportunities opened up to me because I did write Ringside Seat to a Revolution. But I'm sure if I tried to get some kind of tenure track, which I have never really been interested in, maybe the fact that I'm so outspoken might close some doors and open others, but since I haven't really put myself in the market, I don't know how to answer that. 

It’s just an intuitive sense that some of the bureaucrats are a little afraid of me because of the track record of just confronting some of the people that are doing the funding or who sit on the Board of Regents of the UT school system and things like that. We go hard after [Paul] Foster and [Woody] Hunt, and they're the ones that have all the influence, they're the ones that established Heather Wilson at UTEP. So, I'm sure doors are closed to me, but because I don't even try to knock on their doors, I don't even see the effect too much because I'm not interested. So yeah, I'm probably not a very good example. You probably want to know more about people that already have tenure and deal with that. I mean, I deliberately didn't want to put myself through that. I wanted to find creative ways.

That's exactly what I'm looking for, those creative ways. When you said you made your own spaces when you were teaching chess, you created your own space, you created your own narratives, and those are the kind of strategies that I'm trying to understand how to implement because I don’t know if I'm going to end up in academia as a tenured professor or whatever, but I do want my work to be community facing. And so, I'm curious about how you personally navigate that space. And I think you answered it perfectly.

Yeah. A lot of it’s just being guided by the spirit. Sometimes you just feel you're supposed to go in that direction, and you don't know why. I never would have thought that chess was going to give me 15 years of professional work. I got paid well for teaching chess. And now who would've known that giving Walking Tours was going to open this really cool academic space. It makes me feel good about the work because chess would've just been the game, right? What's the big deal. And walking tours, I mean, what's that? 

It's important work. I'm always trying to think of how I can decenter the classroom, or how I can take education outside of the four walls and the seats. Walking tours and these creative spaces are exactly how you decenter the institution in some regard.

I'm thinking that I want to take kids to the open-air sites where I'm doing research on these archeological sites, it's really cool. And that's a great way of reconnecting them to their indigenous past in ways that I don't know, a book won't do.

Literature is one way to do it, but I think you're right. Just being out there in the field, getting your hands dirty and feeling the sun on your back as you're hearing the story about where you come from is incredibly powerful. And it gets you in touch with those spirits you're talking about.

Yeah, but even in looking for those spaces, you have to go through a lot of scary signs. There was one sign in San Tomás that said, “No trespassing, trespassers will be shot, and those that survive will be shot again”. I took a friend up there, and this one guy followed us in the truck to say, “Why are you on my land? People here have guns?”

And that's just a metaphor for it. You're always going to have gatekeepers and people that are going to censor you and threaten to kill you even when you're out in the wild. But that's part of the excitement, right?

I mean, it's people like you that are out there exploring these spaces that make it possible to even begin to talk about these spaces. As an educator, you've given me stories to go retell in the places that I'm in. I can come out to Boulder, and I'm able to talk about Duranguito and Segundo Barrio because of the way you have re-narrativized the history of the community and its neighborhoods. And so, one of the questions I have is thinking about how we can ensure that we are working for the community and with the community and not just in this weird academic way where I can type up a report and send it up to someone. My question to you is, how have you gotten feedback from the communities you work with just to know that you're being guided in the right way, or what are some ways that you've managed that?

Well, how the [Duranguito] experience started was that Yolanda and I had a podcast, and people invited us to this meeting a week after the residents found out that their neighborhood was going to be destroyed, and they were going to be kicked out. We just went up to them and said, look, we worked with Segundo Barrio, and we have this podcast through UTEP. Would you mind if we just interviewed you to see what you're going through? And so, in our very first meeting, Yolanda and I recorded them and asked: how do you feel about this? How did you find out? We just asked them questions, and then we just let them talk. And Doña Julia said, “Well, help us organize marches right away.” They were radical.

We started having regular meetings. And at every meeting, we just reminded people that they were the leaders. We said:

“We’re just technical experts because we could hook you up with lawyers and artists and journalists, but you have to tell us what you want. And we'll never do anything without your consent. We'll never think that we know better than you what the solution is. We'll just propose it, but you have to give us the final go ahead. And if you want us to talk for you at meetings, yeah, we'll talk, but we really think that it should be you, but we don't want to put you in danger or anything like that. So, make sure you don't put yourself in danger. And if you want us to talk, we'll talk. But we feel that it's more effective if you're the face of this movement.” 

So that's how we did it.

So, privileging the community, putting them front and center and making sure that you frequently connect with them through regular meetings?

Yea, and it was really time consuming. You have to sacrifice a lot of your life. And ultimately, I sacrificed my academic career because I was getting all kinds of prestigious awards and postdocs, and I couldn't sustain both. I couldn't sustain the flight towards this professional mountain climbing and community work. So, I decided to figure out ways that I could still be part of this academic community in creative ways. But I mean, trying to climb the ladder would've taken way too much of my energy. And I didn’t think that was why I'm on this earth, to climb the academic ladder. I thought that there'd be more, I don't know, gratifying ways of living.

I am in that debate myself. I see people in academia, these lifelong professors, and I get very frustrated with certain conversations because they're just so disconnected from where I come from and those problems and from the way that people actually have to live at the border. And it's just this kind of weird Dickensian ghost of an academic future. I ask myself if that is the kind of path I want to take versus these liminal grounds that you walk that I think are very important. And I think it kind of leads me to maybe one of my last questions. You've been at it for so long, David, as long as I've been paying attention, you've been at it. And even longer than that. How do you maintain your energy, the spirit, the motivation to keep going and keep doing the work?

So, I'm thinking of this idea of being an intellectual that's not completely part of academia, but you're still an intellectual. And it reminds me of Gramsci's organic intellectuals. That they're just people from the community themselves that get to conceptualize what everybody's going through, tell the story. So being a storyteller, if you have to limit yourself to one medium or one way of telling it, that can be super draining. It burns you out. And I think that's why academia can burn out a lot of people— because there's rules. Some of them are explicit, some of them are just implicit in what kind of language you can use or the way you tell it. I guess even within academia you can choose your mediums, you can do film, you can do a musical, but not really. I mean, it's hard to do a musical in a history department, whereas I get to do that, right? I get to integrate. I want to do a musical based on my writing. And I invited Yolanda to put some of the oral histories that she's collected to music. And she said yes, but then she had to spend her time moving her office at UTEP to another place. So that's part of that tug of war. There are limits to how creative you can be within academia, but I guess you can do it, and it'll sustain you. 

Storytelling can be loads of fun if you do it in a way that you follow the spirit. And if I follow the spirit, I don't get rushed and I don't have deadlines. So, that's just an extreme luxury. And I don't know how applicable it is to academia. Within academia, I think you have to just hustle really hard to give yourself spaces to follow your spirit, to not just be stuck on what you know is going to bring you academic success, but then it just burns you out because that's not what you really want to do. 

So, in order to sustain myself, it's not only that I do music to retain my sanity. It's more that, even when I do music, I try not to get caught in one way of doing music. I don't learn the jazz theory for five years unless my soul just needed jazz theory for five years, then yes. So, I guess the answer is, you have to allow yourself to follow your spirit, because if you get all rigid, it's going to burn you out. And the spirit in my case, means creativity.