El Paso

City and administrative headquarters of El Paso County, Texas, at the base of the Franklin Mountains, on the Rio Grande, opposite the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez; population (2000 est) 563,700. It is the centre of an agricultural and cattle-raising area, and there are electronics, food processing, packing, textile, and leather industries, as well as oil refineries and industries based on local iron and copper mines. With strong links to Mexico the economy particularly benefited from the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1992. There are several military installations in the area. The city is home to the University of Texas at El Paso (formerly Texas Western; founded in 1913).

The site was seen by Spanish explorers as early as the 1530s, and was named El Paso del Norte (‘the North Pass’) by Juan de Oñate in 1598, as he established colonization routes north into New Mexico. In 1682, Tiwa refugees from Isleta, New Mexico, where the Pueblo Revolt had just occurred, established Ysleta del Sur. Their present reservation is the oldest community in Texas; population (2000 est) 400. Americans arrived in the area and began settlement north of the Rio Grande in 1827. Fort Bliss was established in 1848, and remains a major army base, home to the US Army Air Defense Artillery Centre. In the American Civil War, El Paso was seized by Union troops from California in August 1862. It was incorporated in 1873.