Welcome back to Musings of an Arthritic Artist! Today I'm going to be doing a book review. This review is for El Paso by Sam Moussavi, which I finished reading at the end of November.
This review will have spoilers. This isn't a very common book, so I figured it was fine for me to have a spoiler filled review.
Let's get into the review!
El Paso is a YA novel that follows Armando Salguera, a junior at El Dorado High School in El Paso, Texas. His dream is to become an NFL tight end. This book is part of the Texas Fridays series by Sam Moussavi that is a 6 book series with various standalone novels that take place in various Texas cities. The cities Moussavi has written about for this series are El Paso, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and Odessa.
The synopsis is as follows:
"Armando Salguera is a tight end at El Dorado High School in El Paso, Texas, and is aming to make his NFL dream come true. At the beginning of his junior season, things are going according to plan as Armando wows his coaches and teammates with his dominating play. But Armando's NFL dream is threatened when--after 15 years of silence--his estranged father, Oswaldo, sends word that he will be coming across the border, back into Armando's life. Could this mean that Armando's dreams of making the pros are over?"
I saw this book at my local library, and because El Paso is my hometown, I was actually really excited to see how it was portrayed. I was disappointed, though I can't say I expected the portrayal of El Paso to be accurate. As someone who grew up in El Paso, this book gets the community almost entirely wrong.
Fallacy number one is this: Armando's girlfriend, Anna de la Puente has a 4.5 GPA. In El Paso, there is nothing higher than a 4.0 GPA. I was homeschooled, and even I know that. Also, it's said that Anna is in El Dorado's Model UN club. There's one problem with that. El Dorado doesn't have a Model UN club. Only one school in El Paso has a Model UN club, and I can guarantee it wouldn't be a school like El Dorado. That school is Coronado High School, which is on the complete other side of town.
There is a section toward the end of the book that states that "El Dorado's stands were packed for the first game of the season against crosstown rival, Eastlake High School". El Dorado doesn't have a football stadium that is used for games. They have a practice field. But they don't have a football stadium that they use for football games.
For another, Eastlake and El Dorado are not "crosstown". The schools are literally 16 minutes away. Like, I don't know how small the author thinks El Paso is, but that's not crosstown. They are both on the Eastside of El Paso.
For those who are unfamiliar with the city, we have the Northeast, Westside, Eastside, Central, and Downtown sides of town. You have other small areas too, like the Upper Valley and Lower Valley. 16 minutes is not "crosstown". Canutillo High School and Horizon High School are the farthest schools from each other in El Paso that I can think of. Those schools are 41 minutes away from each other. that's crosstown. Not a simple 16 minute drive. That's practically a hop, skip, and a jump away.
Traveling from Pebble Hills High School in the Far Eastside to Franklin High School on the Westside is 39 minutes away. That's crosstown. Sorry, but 16 minutes is positively close. It's far depending on what time it is and what side of town you're on (what'll kill you is the traffic, particularly if you're on the Eastside, not the minutes). But it isn't crosstown.
I'll show you all a map.
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| El Paso Proper |
The red lines indicate everywhere that is El Paso proper.
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| El Paso Proper |
The red dot indicates more or less where El Dorado High School is located. The purple dot indicates more or less where Eastlake High School is located. The yellow is the boundary line of El Paso proper. When there's still all that much city left, El Dorado and Eastlake are not "crosstown".
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| El Paso Metro |
Also, this book literally shows no other side of El Paso except the Eastside. Which border did Oswald come through? There's multiple gates. Did he come through the downtown gate? Another one? There's 5. Which one was it? Some details were left out that, in my opinion, should've been there.
The green circle on this map indicates all this book showed of El Paso. This is literally it. Armando didn't travel to anywhere else except this side of El Paso. I know he's in school. I know there's little time to show other sides of El Paso in a 200 page book. But there was not a single mention of any other part of town. Not even Downtown. There was no mention of UTEP or any of our community colleges.
I saw a review on Goodreads that mentions that this book gives some perspective on what it's like living in a town like El Paso. No, it does not. I could tell when I read the 1st page that the author wasn't from El Paso and has likely never been to El Paso in his life, and also had done very little research on El Paso.
This is not a good representation of my hometown. My hometown is all about community. Almost everything we do is about the community. And there was very little community.
Also the focus on Mexicans and everything was a bit bizarre. I understand El Paso is a minority-majority city that is full of Hispanics, particularly of the Mexican heritage variety. However, because it is a predominantly Mexican-American city, why were Mexicans and Hispanics mentioned so much?
There was a part where Armando and his mother attended church on Sunday. The cathedral part was all wrong. I'm going to say it straight up. It was wrong. It was supposed to be a Catholic church. I know that for a fact. And it was wrong.
For one, Catholics don't have sermons. That's a Protestant thing. Catholics have homilies. There is a difference. For another, the part where it says that the congregation said that all colors and all denominations were welcome, that wouldn't happen. I have never heard that in an El Paso cathedral, and I've been to dozens of services. I've never heard it, not even once.
Why? Because skin color doesn't really matter to most El Pasoans. You have Black people, White people, and Hispanic people. El Paso is a minority-majority city full of Hispanics who have Mexican heritage. It's full of a bunch of Mexican-Americans. The whole "all colors and denominations are welcome" sounds like a white Protestant church located in a city up North or down South, not an El Paso cathedral that predominantly has Hispanics of Mexican descent.