David Romo
Historian, musician, and author
El Paso, Texas
11/3/21
The streets of El Paso, Texas come alive through the songs and stories of David Romo. Donning black leather and an acoustic-electric guitar, David leads Semester in the West students along grided sidewalks, past colorful murals and beside brick buildings. He tells tales of El Paso’s historic inhabitants—indigenous Mansos and Mexican revolutionaries, Pachuco anarchists and Spanish spies—through the form of narrative melody. For David, music is a force for rebellion. It is a way to impart the unspoken and often repressed stories of those who have shaped what is now U.S.-Mexico borderland.
David grew up traversing the illusive boundary between El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Chihuahua. He considers himself a fronterizo: a person who moves fluidly between the U.S.-Mexico border. “But,” he laments, “I spent a large part of my life trying to get as far away from both of these cities as possible.” It took four years at Stanford, two-and-a-half in Jerusalem, and five in France before he realized the cultural richness he had been seeking was in his hometown all along. After moving back to El Paso, David began chronicling the Texas city and its Mexican counterpart by blending genres of history, ethnography, and music. His most recent publication, Ringside Seat to a Revolution, uses a method called “psychogeographic” mapping to tell the untold tales of the Mexican Revolution. Today, David uses his voice to fight the industrial development of El Paso’s historic neighborhood, Duranguito. Through art, activism, and history, David reinvigorates old narratives to inspire new passions for the cities of the border.
By Kate Joss