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Speaker 1: for less. Hi everyone, this is Monica. Thanks so much
Speaker 1: for listening to the show, and thanks also for your
Speaker 1: feedback and comments. I'm personally very moved to see how
Speaker 1: you engage with these stories. Along the journey of this podcast,
Speaker 1: we'll see many of the themes that are front and
Speaker 1: center in our society at this very moment. These include
Speaker 1: police accountability, freedom of the press, globalization, immigration, and violence
Speaker 1: against women. We hope the story we tell portrays the
Speaker 1: importance of questioning our institutions and holding them accountable. We're
Speaker 1: taking a break from our main story this week, but
Speaker 1: in the meantime, we wanted to leave you with a
Speaker 1: teaser into the second half of the podcast. You'll remember
Speaker 1: from our last episode we met the so called Devil's
Speaker 1: lawyer Dante al maras he offers journalist Alfredo Corcillo a
Speaker 1: passport into the Howatis underworld. First of all, I can't
Speaker 1: get over how appropriate it is for a man named
Speaker 1: Dante to lead Alfredo into the underworld. To me, Wattas
Speaker 1: is itself a character in this podcast, and like any
Speaker 1: good character, Wattas is complicated. The city is made up
Speaker 1: of these many intertwining layers that you can't always see
Speaker 1: how deep they go. Well, we're about to take the
Speaker 1: plunge into one of the darkest layers. Before we let
Speaker 1: Dante guide us, I want to introduce you to somebody else.
Speaker 1: His name is Howard Campbell. He's an anthropology professor my
Speaker 1: alma mater, the University of Texas at al Paso. Well,
Speaker 1: for the last twenty seven twenty eight years, I've been
Speaker 1: wandering around downtown wada Is and I in fact created
Speaker 1: a kind of research methodology which I call wandering. To me,
Speaker 1: Howard is not your typical professor in that he conducts
Speaker 1: the bulk of his research in a library or on
Speaker 1: a computer or over the phone. He's an anthropologist and
Speaker 1: he gets out there. I grew up in the state
Speaker 1: of Idaho and the mountains and wandering around the forests.
Speaker 1: The idea is to wander around and get to know
Speaker 1: a place intimately on a personal level, without necessarily a
Speaker 1: full blown research plan, and sort of stumbling onto things,
Speaker 1: meeting people, in a very impromptu way, and in that
Speaker 1: way I felt that I got to know downtown Wada
Speaker 1: Is quite well. Of course, have any is, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: is one of the great walking streets in the entire world.
Speaker 1: I would compare it to La Ramblas in Barcelona, or
Speaker 1: lau Revo in Tijuana, or Reforma in Mexico City, or
Speaker 1: Broadway in New York City. That is an incredible street
Speaker 1: of anat is. Thousands of people at times on the street,
Speaker 1: and just this endless parade of interesting people and characters
Speaker 1: and unpredictable kinds of eccentric people and regular people and
Speaker 1: criminals and all the like. Can you describe what it's
Speaker 1: like to walk from El Paso over the bridge onto
Speaker 1: Abne the hotters, And so once you get on the bridge,
Speaker 1: you're in this nomad's land. You're going from one world
Speaker 1: to another, one country to another, one city to another.
Speaker 1: But also you're in this nether world in which the
Speaker 1: law doesn't really hold as strongly as the United States
Speaker 1: government like it too. And you see a lot of
Speaker 1: people making a living from illicit activity, scams, hustles, people begging,
Speaker 1: people selling drugs, people smuggling birds, the human creativity on
Speaker 1: the bridge is remarkable, and it's quite remarkable to leave
Speaker 1: a kind of a regular, upper middle class professional job
Speaker 1: in El Paso and all of a sudden being at
Speaker 1: times the most dangerous city in the world. I hate
Speaker 1: to say it, but part of the appeal for a
Speaker 1: lot of people that explore Wadas is the attraction to
Speaker 1: the dark side. Howard discovers. It's not that difficult to
Speaker 1: wade into this dark side. You simply have to walk
Speaker 1: across the International Bridge and be willing to walk past
Speaker 1: the boundaries of caustion. That's what Howard does. But I
Speaker 1: often try to pretend I'm just a tourist or one
Speaker 1: of the American expats that lives in Wadas and goes
Speaker 1: to the kind of grungy bars. I've had some difficult
Speaker 1: circumstances where I've been essentially captured by police that took
Speaker 1: money from me, or else pulled me away from the
Speaker 1: crowd of people into a dark area and threatened me,
Speaker 1: was locking me up in jail if I didn't pay them,
Speaker 1: or pushing me around that sort of thing. About a
Speaker 1: year ago, as robbed by a woman. It was a
Speaker 1: very strange circumstance. She told me this kind of sob
Speaker 1: story about how difficult her life was and wha is
Speaker 1: and she wanted me to see how badly she was
Speaker 1: living after being deported from the United States by President Trump.
Speaker 1: She said, Howard follows the woman to her one room apartment,
Speaker 1: which is in what's known as a vism dove, in
Speaker 1: this case, a three story building on a dirt lot.
Speaker 1: Once I got into the apartment with the intention of
Speaker 1: interviewing her, she started taking off her clothes and said
Speaker 1: we were going to perform a sex act. And I said, well,
Speaker 1: I didn't come to do this. I came to interview you.
Speaker 1: And then she locked me into the room with a
Speaker 1: padlock and a chain on the door. I picked up
Speaker 1: a hammer and a sharpened piece of metal from a
Speaker 1: table and threatened me. As I turned to the right
Speaker 1: and looked at the wall. She had a table with
Speaker 1: two atues of las an tam mauerte and burning candles
Speaker 1: so the grim Reaper statue. After speaking English, she switched
Speaker 1: to Spanish and told me that she was a member
Speaker 1: of the Familia Michoa kind of drug cartel, and she
Speaker 1: started telling me if I didn't pay her that she
Speaker 1: would call for her pamp. She called Jore and also
Speaker 1: the police, and so I was trapped. Eventually, I had
Speaker 1: to give her all of my money and she let
Speaker 1: me out. And this one was five feet tall, so
Speaker 1: I felt she beat me. She actually told me I
Speaker 1: won gringo. So sometimes you get your come uppance. Maybe,
Speaker 1: and maybe I deserved this, you know, because I'd been
Speaker 1: exploring in the sort of the darker side of downtown
Speaker 1: Badis for so long. I kind of expected something like
Speaker 1: this would happen, And ultimately it wasn't so bad. I
Speaker 1: lost some money in a bit of my pride, but
Speaker 1: I wasn't harmed. Howard got lucky that time, and I'm
Speaker 1: willing to wait. His risk tolerance is far greater than
Speaker 1: most anthropologists. He also has the privilege of coming and
Speaker 1: going from Watas whenever he pleases. That's a luxury lots
Speaker 1: of people who live in Wattas don't have. We'll hear
Speaker 1: more from Howard later in the podcast, and we'll be
Speaker 1: back with another full episode of Forgotten on June twenty ninth.
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