The Origin Story: A blind date, a border and Beto O'Rourke

Sanders was new to El Paso and he wanted to make sure she understood that it and Juarez “are two halves of a larger community” — and that the binational vibe was something she’d be into.“She felt really good in Juarez,” O’Rourke told The Associated Press in an interview. And, though now he calls for tearing down the border walls that have stood between El Paso and Juarez in some form since the 1970s, O’Rourke voted just last year to approve new border barrier construction.Such decisions still touch nerves with some in a city that wrestles with divisions over class and ethnicity in ways O’Rourke rarely talks about on the trail.“He doesn’t support us because we’re barrio people,” said 90-year-old Antonia Morales who lives in the Duranguito neighborhood, where city authorities have begun decommissioning homes and fencing off streets in hopes of eventually building a sports arena. A sea of lights cuts the desert darkness at night.“It just didn’t feel like another country,” said Rep. Veronica Escobar, a fellow El Pasoan who replaced O’Rourke in Congress after he vacated his seat to challenge Cruz.Juarez felt almost like an El Paso suburb. Kennedy’s Secretary of the Navy, was an alum.“It was a challenge to be at that school, the student body was so different, the work level so different than in El Paso,” Melissa O’Rourke said.O’Rourke went from Woodbury to Columbia University and then to drifting in New York City. He instead founded a web design firm out of his apartment, calling it “Stanton Street” for one of the city’s main arteries, after cursory research revealed that the local online market was still relatively untapped.“When I left El Paso, I was certain that I would never come back and I couldn’t wait to get out,” O’Rourke said. And he eventually would find politics.“I had purpose in El Paso that I didn’t quite have in New York,” O’Rourke said. But the bloodshed to the south was also to their own city’s economic benefit as tens of thousands of people — including, at one point, Juarez’s mayor — fled their homes to reside in El Paso.In response, O’Rourke began advocating for the federal decriminalization of marijuana as a way to hurt drug cartel profits and therefore stem the killings in Mexico. “But here we know the truth.”O’Rourke counters that he never expressly voted for eminent domain and that he’s been able to win over many of the downtown residents who once criticized him.“Those are my neighbors, those are my friends, those are the people that I care about,” he said during a town hall in 2017.O’Rourke and his wife and their three children, Ulysses, Molly and Henry, now live in a sprawling, colonial-style house in El Paso’s tony Sunset Heights neighborhood, about a mile from the border.