El Paso is a city in southwestern Texas, adjacent Mexico and New Mexico. It has a population of 609,000. The Mexican city across the Rio Grande at El Paso is Ciudad Juarez.
The community is heavily Democrat in voter orientation though two Republicans, Jack Vowell and Pat Haggerty, represented El Paso County in the Texas House of Representatives from 1981 to 1995 and 1995 to 2009, respectively.
It is home to The University of Texas at El Paso, which despite not having tremendous athletic success has had two notable accomplishments:
- The 1966 men's basketball team (when the school was known as Texas Western) became the first team of all-black players to win the NCAA championship, defeating an all-white Kentucky powerhouse team in the process (as of 2019 it remains the only Texas university to win the men's basketball title; the accomplishment was later featured in the movie Glory Road)
- Bob Beamon, who later set the world record in the long jump at the 1968 Olympics (by nearly two feet over the prior record, due in large part to Mexico City's thin air at high altitude), was on the track team