Old New Mexico Tales

El Paso

Before the Texican conquest El Paso was a thriving trade city, a major commercial hub on the Rio Grande River. It was ruled by Don Rafael Carrera whose humble backgrounds did limit his ambition as he brutalised his way to power. The Carrera Cartel was infamous in the border region but Rafael believed he has a greater destiny. He sought to legitimise his rule and strived to enforce law & order and good governance under his iron rule. After a short but extremely bloody Cartel civil war Don Rafael was triumphant and set about normalising life in El Paso. He brought years of stability in which he fostered El Paso as a commercial hub and stamped out piracy on the Rio Grande under his control. A short victorious war against the Bandits of Las Cruces helped unify the populace behind him and brought an end to brigand activity on the trade routes.

Don Rafael brought prosperity to El Paso and nurtured the growing educated classes. He established schools, orphanages a free hospital, and built his own, gaudy, theatre. Those who worked with him became wealthy and those who did not ‘went away’ but as long as worked with him, or for him, you had a good life. Dictatorship was hardly a rare form of government in the Post-Apocalyptic world but Don Rafael’s was far from the worst. He incorporated and developed the old Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, which lay just across the Rio Grande, as a suburb of El Paso.

Over Don Rafael’s twenty three year rule he brought prosperity and a sense of order to El Paso. The city doubled in size and tripled in wealth with control of a good swathe of the Rio Grande valley to the north and south. He gentrified central El Paso and even founded a University. It was a shock to all when he died in 95 A.F. of a heart attack in the arms of his mistress Florinda. Don Rafael had five legitimate children, three sons and two daughters, and an unknown but extensive number of bastards from his many mistresses.

Without the iron fist of Don Rafael many of the supressed squabbles and feuds resurfaced and El Paso fell in to chaos. A Unity Council was formed but it was weak and infective, there was even a move to introduce democracy and elect a leader. Eldest son José took power in Juárez and declared it free Mexican city separate from El Paso. Francisco, the husband of Rafael’s eldest daughter Mercedes, declared himself Presidenté of Greater El Paso and claimed all land north of the Rio Grande. Fighting broke out between the two leader’s forces with Don Francisco’s men capturing Juárez after much bloodshed and damage.

In desperation Don José appealed to the Texican Republic for help who gave him favourable replies. José imagined himself as a future vassal of Texas leading a loyal client state but the Texican Republic had other ideas. Expansion of the Republic in to Louisiana and even Mississippi by Overseer-General Patrice Davis-Knight was popular within Texas while the fiasco of the Oklahoma Column was not. A Texican Army under William Jay- Lepetomane was sent to El Paso following Don José’s invitation which captured El Paso and annexed the area in to the Texican Republic to the dismay of Don José.

Los Exiliados (The Exiles)

The arrival of the Texicans was a shock to the populace of El Paso who were distracted in with own internal squabbles between Francisco and José. An assault on Presidenté Francisco forces, who were labelled as terrorising bandits, soon defeated them with an artillery barrage followed by an infantry assault. Then Don José’s own ‘pirate’ river flotilla was sank when it refused to surrender. The citizens of El Paso soon found a Texican ruler in Don Rafael’s palace and Texican soldiers on the streets.

The remnants of Francisco and José’s forces fled, some in to Mexico, some in to the Sacramento Mountains but most to Las Cruces where they united as the ‘Exiles’ under Rafael’s youngest son Don Alejandro. Here he has assembled a credible force to block further Texican expansion and to dream of returning to El Paso.