Dismantling El Paso's Utah Red-Light District: Local Citizens' Spatial Struggle against Vice in the US-Mexico Borderlands, 1880s–1920s

Historians of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries have focused on the battles against new discovered arenas of social sinning in this era. Key among the sites needing cleaning, if not elimination, were red-light districts. El Paso, Texas experienced this phenomenon. From the 1880s to the 1920s, this border burg was one of numerous cities in the United States that practiced limited tolerance or sanctioned prostitution and vice in segregated red-light districts. One reason prostitution was tolerated in El Paso was because city officials collected weekly fines from bordellos and other businesses that in turn funded police salaries and other law enforcement expenses until the 1920s. This financial dependence created a moral conundrum in the city as reformers sought to dismantle the red light district.

This poster examines the struggles of the “social purity” movement to dismantle El Paso’s Utah Red-Light District. With the use of Sanborn Insurance Maps, El Paso City Directories, the El Paso Central Appraisal District, this poster recreates one block of the Utah Red-Light District that operated between East Overland and Second Street. This block served as the border between vice and virtuous businesses, and its depictions in local maps across four-decades illustrate the ground-level struggle that persisted between local respectable business owners and vice proprietors over spatial control. Respectable El Pasoans along the border of the district attacked vice at the grass-root level by calling for city government to contain or eradicate the its boundaries. When this failed, owners infiltrated the space with reputable businesses and took spatial precautions to disassociate their establishment from vice businesses. The argument highlighted within this poster will demonstrate that locals’ efforts for change are best understood in conjunction with Progressivism waves of reform, which set the legislative impetuses locals needed on the nation margins to successfully dismantle vice and reverse their initial failures. Respectable owners seized the opportunities of federal and state legislative reforms to permeate and redefine the block’s space with “reputable” businesses and new construction.