Beautifully renovated on the outside, San Elizario church is crumbling on the inside. (Kristopher Rivera/Borderzine.com)

Crumbling from the inside out, a Mission Trail chapel prays for support

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SAN ELIZARIO, TX – A chapel dedicated to San Elizario has stood on this spot  since the days the conquistadores wound their way north on the old imperial Spanish mission trail along the Rio Grande, but the current church built in 1877 is falling apart. Extensive repairs have maintained the exterior of the church, but the crumbling interior looks like it has been damaged by a violent exorcism. The walls have been battered by storms that weakened the adobe and created numerous pits and cracks. Lillian Trujillo, a tour guide for the church who has deep family roots in San Elizario still sees beauty in the existing structure. “Even though it’s damaged you can see that it’s a beautiful church.

The suffering of New Orleans has a lesson for El Paso

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New Orleans composer Allen Toussaint once said “To get to New Orleans you don’t pass through anywhere else. That geographical location, being aloof, lets it hold onto the ritual of its own pace.” Sound familiar? As my last semester at UTEP draws to a close, the magnitude of change that has and will come my way has been so palpable that the last few months have become a blur of reflections over my career, what I will be doing in the next five years and wondering how I will ship Hatch chili to Louisiana. Had someone warned me about this, I probably would have laughed incredulously.  However, less than a year ago, I obtained a public relations position within a local liquor company that will soon branch out to New Orleans, Louisiana.