Book Review: Frontera Freeways: Highway Building and Displacement in El Paso, Texas

 

Book stirs up uncomfortable memories

Book Review by Diana Washington-Valdez

The Digie Zone Network

Nov. 12, 2025

A new book by El Paso native Miguel Juarez “Frontera Freeways: Highway Building and Displacement in El Paso, Texas,” pulls back the veil on the discriminatory policies that inspired where and how the city’s major roadways were built, and the voiceless communities that these transportation projects displaced.

The book centers on the arduous struggle to save the Lincoln Center against demolition by city and state transportation officials. The 1912 building, formerly a school, church, arts facility, and government offices, is in a low-income neighborhood with a dwindling population, factors that reduced its community clout.

Before the battle over the Lincoln Center began, minorities were routinely displaced from their neighborhoods to accommodate road and freeway projects. The obliteration of the center would have represented the cultural displacement of most El Paso residents.

People who grew up as minorities in El Paso experienced or sensed that they were not welcomed in certain neighborhoods. That something had put limits on where they could live or move to. Historically, city officials allowed a Ku Klux Klan parade to take place in downtown and approved of eateries and businesses that turned away customers who were not white. So, these events were not anecdotal.

It is quite another matter to see the proof that public policies were crafted with the idea of preventing minorities from encroaching on white neighborhoods. Juarez included charts that show the race and economic restrictions in property covenants for subdivisions filed from 1900 to 1951. This is one of the most explosive sections in the book.

“For a city its size, (130,000 in 1950) covenants were filed in eighty subdivisions from 1900 to 1951,” according to Juarez. Covenants are legally binding rules that govern the use of real property. The protected neighborhoods included Kern Place, Loretto Place, and Rim Road. Unplatted lands in Ysleta, Ascarate and the Upper Valley, also held such restrictions. All that is missing from the records are the names of the property owners.

Plans to construct new highways had to work around established planning policies. If anyone was going to be displaced – forced to move out and without adequate compensation to buy a new property and then only in certain parts of El Paso – it would be low-income residents of color. The restrictions applied to all minorities and help to explain how Mexican Americans, in a U.S.-Mexico border community, were held back for decades despite their large numbers.

“Prior to the creation of El Paso’s suburbs as a response to highway building, the African American community was landlocked in Central El Paso for several reasons, mostly economic, but also due to the existence of racial covenants and class restrictions throughout the city,” according to the book.

Juarez notes that redlining – the practice of denying people access to credit because of where they live – also served to limit the property options of minorities. No doubt real estate agents functioned as the de facto gatekeepers. Those records would be useful in future research.

Highway building eventually became the work of the Texas Department of Transportation, for years, in El Paso, it was conducted under the late Joe Battle. In addition to racist property covenants, redlined neighborhoods became the real or threatened eminent domain targets of officials. The displaced residents scrambled to find new homes they could afford and in neighborhoods that were not closed to them.

The book details the recent conflict between Lincoln Center advocates and the Spaghetti Bowl expansion planners. Advocates viewed it as a fight to save a historic building with significant cultural relevance to the Mexican American community.

Over the years, El Paso developed into a multicultural community, one where the changing demographics reduced residual discrimination. The book by Juarez mentions that members of the Jewish community became allies of El Paso minorities that had been pushed aside and ignored in the name of progress.

The solidarity of advocates gave a happy conclusion to the story of the Lincoln Center, after the Mexican American Cultural Institute rescued the building from obliteration. Not only were the center and its murals saved, in 2023 it became the institute’s national headquarters. It sits under the Spaghetti Bowl expansion that once threatened its existence.

The University of North Texas Press published the 2025 book, which is based on original research by Juarez. About a third of its 210 pages, replete with maps and charts, are endnotes for the sources the history scholar consulted for his Ph.D. dissertation, and later book.

Ricardo Romo, author of East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio,” summarized that “[There] are few studies of Mexican American communities that provide evidence of the cold-hearted process of relocating people and harsh consequences of urban renewal and breakup of neighborhoods.”

Although the book focuses on El Paso, Romo stated that he “would love to see this research replicated in San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, and Los Angeles.”

“Frontera Freeways” (University of North Texas Press, 2025; $29.95) and is available via Amazon in hardback and Kindle versions as well as other platforms.