From a snug chair by a window in the second floor bar of the Helmsley New York on a Spring afternoon in 2002, Debbie Nathan beheld 42nd Street and noted, "New York is just a huge Juárez. Both cities have a manic energy but it's more cheerful here because there's still some residual social democracy. People are better fed; they take advantage of stuff and they feel entitled to live here. I dislike the humbleness of the border, but I like the same stuff about New York that I liked about Juárez.

"Juárez and South El Paso are like a bar, they intensify your mood. Everything is raw and more on the surface in El Paso than it is in places where everything's been mediated, and it's articulated so dramatically that I didn't have to theorize there, I could just feel things, and I felt at home."

Born in Houston in 1950, she didn't feel at home growing up. "My father's father's family were Litvaks who immigrated to Houston in the 1870's, and his mother's family settled from Alsace-Lorraine to Mississippi and New Orleans before the Civil War, and they were snotty, filled with conservative prejudices. My mother's family were more recent immigrants from Russia, and my father's family looked down on them. I'm a lunatic because this Southern, East Texas, Jewish family was wired with all this weird Eastern European, Russian/German/Lithuanian strife.

"A lot of rural rednecks were moving into the suburbs when I was growing up on the edges of Houston in the Fifties, and I was treated poorly as a Jewish kid. I spent the summer of 1964 in Saltillo, and I felt like a human for the first time because it was like I was in my own subculture. I mean, Mexicans are Catholics, but Catholics are more like Jews than Protestants are, and I became very sentimental about Mexico because of that."

After earning a BA at Temple in 1972, Nathan wanted to continue her studies in the Southwest, and she interviewed at UNM with a professor who pontificated on Navajo linguistics while he ogled her legs, so she inquired at UTEP. "It was like applying to work at Village Inn. Nobody asked me what I had studied or what I wanted to do, and I liked El Paso so I enrolled."

For the next two years she immersed herself in the world of downtown El Paso/Juárez, and during her first year, she took a trip into Mexico to research and possibly write about the land seizures taking place near the Pacific coast, but ended up indulging in a wild and wanton week on an island off Mazatlán with a Norwegian med student from Wisconsin named Morten instead.

With her Masters in linguistics, she took a job teaching ESL at Brooklyn College, and Morten took an internship at St. Vincent to be near her, but when he had to go back to school to finish his medical degree in 1980, they moved together to Chicago and Nathan began her career in journalism at The Reader. "It's reporting turned mushy when Harold Washington was elected mayor and I just didn't want to be a part of that. I kept thinking about the border and decided that that's what I'd like to write about, so when Morten finished school in 1984, we moved to El Paso."

She joined the staff of the El Paso Times in the waning days of Barbara Funkhouser's editorship. "Sometimes it was difficult because I had a baby daughter and newsrooms are a male environment, but working at any daily is difficult, and Funkhouser liked me. She thought I was eccentric and radical, but she was a good, hands-off editor. It got me out and into El Paso and that was exciting. I could write what I wanted but I often had to write more than a story a day. They liked my enterprise, and I wrote some good stories, but I had to write on my own time to make them as good as I did.

"I was covering the Margaret Randall deportation trial when I met Adrienne Rich who'd come to testify, and I took her to the river by La Hacienda. She's an incredibly noble old lesbian poet who looked like Mother Time, with a gnarled cane, and she was hobbling around down by the river when the Border Patrol came screeching up and jumped out of their van and yelled, 'What are you girls doing down here,' and she was blown away by that and insisted I write about El Paso from a national perspective, and that's when I resigned from the Times and started freelancing.

"I was investigating INS/Border Patrol abuses and became interested in how the border exposed the psycho-social-sexual fears that are a part of the nationalism and patriarchy of America. Since there were no laws and people had no rights, there was an arbitrariness to what the Border Patrol would do. You'd see incredible acts of kindness on their part, and then you'd see equally incredible acts of cruelty, sometimes from the same agent. I'd never seen anything that looked so much like fascism, and there was a sensual humanity to it that fascinated me. I felt more like a Renaissance essayist than a leftist political radical, and I had a hard time remembering I was supposed to have this heavy public position because I wouldn't feel all that political. At the same time I was calling for people's rights and marching around and organizing, I'd also want to hangout and bullshit with the Border Patrol agents.

"Between the late-Eighties and mid-Nineties, I wrote a lot for the Voice and had pieces in Playboy, The Nation, Redbook, In These Times, The Texas Observer, The Progressive . . . all the lefties."

Cinco Puntos Press published a compilation of Nathan's articles in a book called "Women and Other Aliens" in 1991, and four years later, she co-authored a book called "Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch-Hunt" (Basic Books, 1995), an essential contribution to the debunking of the recovered memory/child abuse hysteria that had gripped the country.

Her writings have garnered her the H. L. Mencken Award for Investigative Reporting, the Playboy Foundation Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award, the Texas Institute of Letters O. Henry Award, two different first place awards from the Association of Alternative Newspapers, etc., etc., and she was a featured guest on "Donahue", "Larry King Live" and "Sally Jesse Raphael".

"My freelance work was appreciated outside of El Paso, but it defined me as a crank within it, and that wasn't a social position I wanted to occupy. If you don't like a place, it's no fun if all you do is criticize it, but doing a constant critique is a part of living in a place like El Paso. I always felt a deep affection to El Paso - I love El Paso - and that made me into a manic critic, but when people started to treat me like a crank, it made me want to leave. The irony is that I will never do journalism again as good as I did in El Paso."

In 1998, she was offered a job at The Current, a San Antonio weekly that was turning from a suburban shopping guide into a hipper journal aimed at a cross-cultural readership, and she and her family saw it as motive to take the first step away from El Paso. "It was a wonderful job. I could write what I wanted and I was treated with tremendous respect, but we didn't like San Antonio.

"It has a beautiful, old colonial downtown that San Antonians never go to, and it's surrounded by miles of slums ten times worse than El Paso's colonias, and the racism there is a 1000 times worse. For over a century, the Mexicans were treated like trash, but then suddenly they were commodified into a Disney exhibit that ruined their indigenous literature and art, and now they see themselves in an image that was created by the tourist industry.

"El Paso is therapeutic for white people because they can't isolate themselves from non-white people, but San Antonio is dominated by whites in a way that El Paso never was. There's no joy to investigative reporting when you hate a town, and I hated San Antonio."

The Current was sold and Nathan feared she'd inevitably be pressured to write more and shorter stories, so she and her family agreed again to migrate. Her daughter had begun classes at Cooper Union, so the rest of the family loaded the Toyota, drove East and rented a rambling apartment in Morningside Heights in June 2000.

She was hired for what she had thought would be a writing and editing job at a not-for-profit Latin American journal, but she found herself understaffed and overburdened. "I wanted a job that would leave me time to have a life, but it was the kind of job you had to give your life to, so I resigned and was finding editing work until the dot-com thing collapsed, and then 9/11 happened and the whole publishing market fell apart.

"Everything I liked about New York 20 years ago is still here but nobody has time to enjoy it like they used to. It's hard now to be a flaneur, a professional hanger-outer in the old European bohemian tradition. Everybody's always hustling and you have to constantly work just to try to make a dime. Being middle-class in New York now is like being a peasant in Juárez.

"Also, my kind of style is not a New York kind of style. I'm not a big schmoozer. As a journalist, I've always been a fly on the wall, sitting in the back of the room, watching what goes on, and that doesn't go far here.

"I think about El Paso, how I knew how the place worked and how I knew how to do stuff and find stuff out, but it's going to take me years to learn enough to even know New York 101, much less get underneath things.

"It's a daunting place. It doesn't matter that I have great credentials; everybody here has great credentials. The kids here all have great credentials. The business of freelance journalism is pretty damn serious. I could freelance for the New York Times, but they hardly pay and I'm 51 years old. That would be a luxury, and it's too late for that.

"On some level, I'm not a careerist. I can always get work, and I'm doing ESL again. The people in ESL are normal and nice, but the journalism people look at me with suspicion and ask what I'm doing here from Texas, and then they act like their parochialism is some kind of hipness.

"I went a little psycho after 9/11. I took my kids away from El Paso, a wonderful, peaceful place where nothing bad will ever happen because nobody cares about it, and I brought them to the center of the world, a place that's a magnet and target for so much rage, and I thought, 'My kids could have been killed'.

"On the other hand, New York's a good place to be because people everywhere else in the country were fantasizing about how horrible it was. Here it's just reality, and reality can only get so crazy, whereas inside people's heads it can get a lot worse. Six weeks later, the city was okay again and now it's back to normal. If there's any residual rhetoric, it's a national rhetoric, it's not local. The tragedy, the suffering, that's hay-seed talk, it's not New York talk, and it's actually fine to be here now except everyone's waiting for it to happen again."

Forging through the crowds on 42nd, Nathan goes on: "What's wonderful about New York is that there are so many different people so close together that everyone is forced to see each other, and no one group has moral hegemony as a minority.

"I have to go down to the Strand and then get back uptown to meet my ESL group," she says mostly to herself while waving and descending the stairs towards the IND. "Call me next time you're in town."

© 2002 Richard Baron

-30-

The above article is a slightly edited version of a profile originally published in the December, 2002 issue of El Bridge, the publication of the Bridge Center of Contemporary Art. Ms. Nathan has since become editor of City Limits: New York Urban Affairs News Magazine.

Richard Baron is a flaneur, writer, photographer and long-time arts activist who lives in El Paso. He can be reached at rbaron47@hotmail.com.