About This Episode
This special episode of Words on a Wire brings together host Daniel Chacón and historian David Dorado Romo to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Romo’s groundbreaking book Ringside Seat to a Revolution. Before an audience of students, faculty, and community members, the conversation revisits a work that reshaped how El Paso—and the U.S.-Mexico border more broadly—is understood, blending rigorous archival research with a deeply human, story-driven approach to history.
Romo reflects on his use of “microhistory,” a method that uncovers meaning through overlooked details, marginal spaces, and everyday lives. Rather than focusing on dominant figures or official narratives, he traces the hidden poetry of the borderlands—stories of healers, laborers, and resistors whose experiences reveal the deeper textures of revolution, migration, and power.
The episode highlights powerful historical figures such as Teresita Urrea, a young Indigenous healer whose spiritual practice became a form of resistance, and Carmelita Torres, a teenage domestic worker who sparked a border uprising by refusing humiliating disinfection procedures. These stories open into larger conversations about public health, racism, immigration policy, and the unsettling historical connections between early 20th-century border practices and later global atrocities.