The mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart struck a city

The mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart struck a city some call a Mexican American intellectual, political and literary center.

The massacre that killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso struck a city that has long been the cradle of Mexican American culture and immigration and suffered through bloody episodes of racial violence in the past.

The white gunman apparently wrote an anti-Hispanic rant before opening fire with an AK-47-style rifle on Walmart shoppers — many of them Latino — rattling a city that has helped shape Mexican American life across the U.S. for generations.

Many Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado and beyond can trace their families' roots to El Paso, sometimes called the "Ellis Island" of the border. The city served as a port of entry where immigrants from the interior of Mexico had to come to gain entry into the United States before World War II.

Mexican Revolutionary leader Pancho Villa visited the city. Country artist Marty Robbins famously sang in 1959 about falling "in love with a Mexican girl" here. It is the birthplace of civil rights lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta, journalist Ruben Salazar and poet Pat Mora. The city is also a geographic center of sorts for Mexican Americans, sitting about the same distance to Los Angeles as it is to Houston.

"El Paso has a deeper history than what you see on the news," said Sergio Troncoso, an El Paso-born novelist who now lives in New York City. "That manifesto shows that white nationalists continue to reduce El Paso to immigration and a place of foreigners. It's so much more than that."

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