El Paso–Juárez
— — two cities the river runs through.
Not only on a wall.
“Two cities pressed against each other along the Rio Grande, with a combined population near 2.7 million across the busiest binational crossing on the US-Mexico border. The Franklin Mountains end inside El Paso city limits; Mount Cristo Rey holds the divide between the United States and Chihuahua. The smell of mesquite smoke crosses both ways. — from the studio
El Paso–Juárez, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
El Paso and Ciudad Juarez sit on opposite banks of the Rio Grande at the western end of Texas, where the state meets New Mexico and the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The combined metropolitan area held about 2.7 million people in 2023, the largest binational community on the US-Mexico border. El Paso proper recorded 678,815 residents in the 2020 census; Juarez recorded 1,512,450. Four international bridges connect the two: Bridge of the Americas, Paso del Norte, Stanton Street, and Ysleta-Zaragoza. The valley sits at 1,140 meters above sea level, in the high Chihuahuan Desert.
The Franklin Mountains run twenty-three miles north into Texas and end at Scenic Drive inside El Paso city limits, the longest sustained range entirely within a US city. North Franklin Peak rises to 2,192 meters. West of downtown the Sierra de Cristo Rey crosses three borders; the 1939 limestone statue of Christ the King, carved by Spanish sculptor Urbici Soler, sits at 1,440 meters and is visited each October on a pilgrimage that draws thousands from both sides. The Hueco Tanks east of town hold pictographs left by the Jornada Mogollon between roughly 1150 and 1450.
Spanish Franciscans founded the original Paso del Norte mission, today's Juarez, in 1659. The Rio Grande crossing became a stop on the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro between Mexico City and Santa Fe. Texas annexed the north bank in 1850; the Mexican town renamed itself Ciudad Juarez in 1888 in honor of Benito Juarez, who governed Mexico from there during the French occupation. The 1964 Chamizal Convention resolved a hundred-year river-channel dispute by cutting the Rio Grande into a concrete channel. The Bridge of the Americas opened the same year.