Humanity, On The Street
By Reed Young
Jonathan Blitzer’s “Crossing Over,” published in our Fall issue, chronicles the remarkable life of Claudia Delfín, a forty-seven-year-old transgender woman from El Paso whose reality has been shaped by the U.S.–Mexico border and by the city that lies just across it, Ciudad Juárez. Blitzer writes:
Claudia has spent her life shuttling between El Paso and Juárez—for a time, under the thick fog of drugs and addiction, as a sex worker and minor gangster. She’s been clean for eight years and now works as a drug counselor for a local nonprofit, hauling addicts out of the same slums where she used to score and delivering them back to life, if they’ll let her.
Delfín has derived purpose and strength from the darkest times in her life. As she puts it to Blitzer: “I’m a blessing.”
So far, the response to the piece has been passionate and inspired. Spanish novelist Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga wrote, on Facebook: “An account at the beating heart of multiple borders: personal, sexual, social, and political. . . . We alone are where borders are created and dissolve—this, in spite of everything. In this piece, we learn that.” On Twitter, the New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson encapsulated it: “Humanity, on the street.”
The story’s success comes in no small part from the photographs of Reed Young, which vividly illustrate Blitzer’s writing. In August, Young spent four days with Delfín in El Paso and Juárez, on assignment to visually portray her life with all the sympathy and accuracy of the article. He returned with a trove of images that did just that—far more than we were able to print in the magazine. Below, we offer an ancillary collection from Young’s trip, and a chance to delve even deeper into Claudia Delfín’s world.
— The Editors
Captions by Jonathan Blitzer.
Claudia gets coffee before work.
Claudia leads group therapy sessions for recovering addicts. The agency where Claudia works provides methadone treatment. “If I didn’t do this work, I might still be an addict,” she said.
Claudia spends half of her time at work doing outreach on the streets of El Paso, conducting AIDS tests, distributing condoms, and providing counsel for community members.
The northeast corner of El Paso is known as the Devil’s Triangle for its notorious combination of prostitution, drugs, and gangs. Lining the thoroughfare are dilapidated motels rife with sex work and drug-dealing.
The northeast corner of El Paso is known as the Devil’s Triangle for its notorious combination of prostitution, drugs, and gangs. Lining the thoroughfare are dilapidated motels rife with sex work and drug-dealing.
One of the four bridges linking El Paso to Ciudad Juárez.
The desiccated Rio Grande glimpsed from the Santa Fe Street Bridge. “It’s hard to imagine now, because the river is dry,” Claudia said, but in the 1990s, when she used to ford the river in order to avoid border patrol on the bridges, the water came up to her chest.
Claudia buys gum from a vendor on the Santa Fe Street Bridge. She knows many of the vendors in downtown Juárez from her frequent trips, and she always makes a point of buying something to support them.
A view of the Santa Fe Street Bridge from Juárez, looking north.
Claudia has always bought her hormones in Juárez, where they’re cheaper and can be purchased without insurance. She first transitioned in Juárez as a teenager.
Claudia takes the Linea Central bus from downtown Juárez to her friends’ house in Alta Vista.
The iconic "X," or "La Equis," monument was begun in 2007 and completed in 2013. Standing roughly two hundred feet high, it towers above downtown Juárez, a few kilometers east of where Claudia regularly crosses.
The Mariscal neighborhood of Juárez, once the city’s red light district, used to be full of bars and clubs. These days, it is a husk of its former self, as all of the old haunts have either been shuttered or razed.
Claudia sits with her friend Sofia and Sofia’s son, Alan, at Sofia’s house in the Alta Vista neighborhood of Juárez.
Claudia with her friend Gerardo, Sofia’s husband and Alan’s father. A decade ago, Claudia used to cross into Juárez to score drugs and party; now, she goes to visit her friends and babysit.
Families cross into El Paso, from Juárez, at dusk. Many of them go shopping at a string of dollar stores and groceries downtown, then return home, to Juárez, just before dark.
The Rio Grande, seen from the Santa Fe Street Bridge.
Cars queue up, sometimes for hours on end, to enter El Paso from Juárez.
Two flags announce the dividing line between the U.S. and Mexico. In the background is an exhortation written in lime on one of the rolling hills making up the Juárez Sierra: “Ciudad Juárez, the Bible is the Truth. Read it.”