Beto and the Builder

NOT LONG AFTER he was elected to a seat on the El Paso City Council in 2005, Beto O’Rourke dropped by a book party at a downtown hotel and picked up a present for his soon-to-be father-in-law. William D. Sanders was an El Paso legend. One of the city’s richest men, he’d done business in 13 countries and made friends in high places. He owned a ranch the size of Omaha and, through his company, a vast stretch of the southern border in New Mexico, where he planned to build a city from scratch rising up out of the desert.

Sanders, a frequent Republican donor described as reticent to the point of secrecy, and O’Rourke, a punk rocker with a progressive streak, did not immediately hit it off. Their relationship started so poorly just a few months earlier that Sanders’ daughter Amy nearly broke off the engagement. But the book that O’Rourke gave to Sanders, Ringside Seat to a Revolution, by an El Paso historian named David Dorado Romo, concerned a subject of mutual interest—the rich history of the city’s downtown and of the Mexican American neighborhoods that enveloped it. It was a paean to the city’s status as the estuarial zone of the continent, where two worlds overlap. In the days after the wedding, O’Rourke later told a friend, he and Sanders traded notes each morning about what they’d learned from the book.

O’Rourke argued in 2006 that Ringside Seat to a Revolution showed that “the more we attempted to deny that Mexico is the true lifeblood of El Paso, the more we declined.” As he cultivated a national identity as a champion of the borderlands in the years that followed, he returned to that theme again and again, occasionally citing Romo’s book in interviews.

And yet, less than a year after O’Rourke gave the book to his father-in-law, Sanders unveiled a plan that proposed turning large chunks of the neighborhoods it celebrated into parking lots—and O’Rourke, to the dismay of South El Paso activists including Romo, was right there