Photos: Fast cars and cool teens in El Paso’s sultry Second Ward

Danny Lyon’s full-color dispatches from America’s borderlands

Teenager in Second Ward El Paso, Texas, June 1972. (Danny Lyon/DOCUMERICA)

South El Paso’s Second Ward—El Segundo Barrio—has long been a crossroads for Mexican-Chicano culture on the U.S. border. Known by some as the “other Ellis Island,” it’s also one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country.

In 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency tapped photographer Danny Lyon to chronicle the social consequences of the environmental crisis in America. The project was part of its Project Documerica, an initiative modeled on the Farm Services Administration photo projects of the Great Depression. The EPA wanted to take the pulse of a nation reverberating from the upheaval of the 1960s, and South El Paso was still emerging from decades of neglect—a veritable slum of overcrowded tenements and poor sanitation on the banks of the Rio Grande.

One of the most prolific living photographers, Lyon was already a member of the prestigious Magnum agency. But despite his renown and the reach of many of his other works from the period, his Documerica photographs of El Paso have been mostly forgotten.

Chicano youth culture was the central focus of Danny Lyon’s photographs from south El Paso.

Maybe it was his failure to come up with a clear story. Lyon’s work from El Paso is nonetheless exemplary of the immersive, experiential mode of documentary he helped pioneer—teenagers and cars being recurrent hallmarks of his youth-oriented approach to deep hanging out. American photography at the time remained a product of the FSA’s evidential style and straightforward tone. Lyon represented a shift toward a more intuitive approach to documentary that left room for authorial intent and reflexivity in what had been a practice of purely external representation. Much of Lyon’s oeuvre flows seamlessly between subjects and time periods, presenting historical events as layers in a lived experience which places self portraits and personal snapshots on equal footing with hard news imagery.

Documerica never took off the way Stryker’s FSA did, and after years of neglect the archive’s color film has deteriorated from poor storage techniques. Perhaps America in the 1970s was ready to move on from old ways of looking at itself. Dispatching a team of visionary (mostly male) photographers to reflect the “truth” of a nation was nobly intended, but it didn’t fully take into account the changes wrought by World War II, civil rights, and the end of Modernism.

Photographs by Danny Lyon courtesy Project Documerica/EPA.

El Paso’s Second Ward.

Rio Grande Valley. El Paso abuts the border demarcating river.

El Segundo Barrio was going through a slow process of urban renewal in 1972.

Asarco Smelter Works employee cemetery.

Stanton Street in the Second Ward of El Paso, Texas.

Adobe houses (R) were a remnant of earlier, ad hoc construction in El Sugundo Barrio.

Teenagers of the Second Ward.

Asarco Smelter Works near the U.S.-Mexican Border. The air is polluted for three miles in any direction from the plant.

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