Beto O’Rourke’s first foray into politics was publishing a quirky alt-weekly newspaper in his home town of El Paso in 2002. It was a short-lived tabloid that published dispatches from a teenage drug mule, featured copious coverage of the local hipster music scene, and even included a couple of erotic-themed stories in the Valentine’s Day issue.
The paper Stanton Street lasted just four months, a total of 17 weekly issues, before O’Rourke pulled the plug due to lack of ad revenue. But during its short run it sought to be a youthful, left-leaning alternative to the El Paso Times, the city’s daily paper that Stanton Street criticized as “reactionary” and overly “Anglo” in one cover story.
Two of its cover stories were penned by an anonymous “Virginia X,” a teenage girl who claimed to work as a drug mule trafficking drugs between Juarez and El Paso, and described overdosing multiple times on cocaine and heroin and being sexually assaulted by a group of men.
“I’m too busy trying to kill myself. I’ve spent the last month or so trying to collapse every vein in my body. It’s amazing how many different places there are to shoot up that no one would notice,” wrote Virginia X in one article.
In another cover story, headlined, “Teenage Mule: Addicted to my summer job: Running drugs and getting high,” Virginia X claimed she was paid $1,500 by a cartel member to carry drugs into the U.S. The story described her picking up kilos of heroin at a Juarez bar and shooting up drugs in a bathroom before crossing back over the border to El Paso.
“He tells me to take my shirt off this time. That wasn’t in the deal. I hope I’m being paid extra for it. One brick is taped to my stomach, one on each side, and one on my back,” she wrote. “All I need to do is grin and say ‘American.’ I’m over — fuck’s sake. I crossed. No suspicion. No problems. Unbelievable. God bless America.”
Lisa Degliantoni, who edited the paper and later worked for O’Rourke’s technology company, told the Washington Examiner that the pseudonymous writer was “over 18 when she wrote that.” “She was older. I think that was a personal narrative she was sharing from her past,” she said.
Although Stanton Street was largely focused on local music and entertainment, it also provided an early glimpse of O’Rourke’s political leanings. The paper was critical of the North American Free Trade Agreement, an accord O’Rourke now favors, and published columns that supported universal healthcare, the government of Hugo Chavez, softer immigration laws, and stronger relations between El Paso and the bordering Mexican city of Juarez.
“People loved it,” said Degliantoni. “There wasn’t anything like it at the time … it was very, very popular and it was a super different perspective of the storytelling around El Paso, which had previously been, like, ‘This town sucks.’”
O’Rourke launched the paper in January 2002, capitalizing on the success of a local news and entertainment website he had started a couple of years earlier, also called Stanton Street. The project started on a shoestring budget of about $10,000, raised mainly from small donations from friends of O’Rourke’s father Pat, a former judge.
Degliantoni said she first met O’Rourke when the two of them were living in New York City in the mid-1990s. At the time, O’Rourke was working a series of unsatisfying jobs, including as a nanny and at a small publishing company in Queens. She said O’Rourke didn’t have grand ambitions of moving back to El Paso but was forced to do it for financial reasons. He later persuaded her to move to the West Texas city to help him launch a print newspaper.
“You have this kid who didn’t hit it in New York and now he’s got to face, ‘What do I do?’” she said. “Then you move back to [El Paso] where all anybody talks about is what a piece of shit their town is … there is a deep ugly stepsister sadness to people who live there. But then there’s this rumbling of, ‘Hey, maybe we can do things different. Maybe we can be the people we’re waiting for.’”
Degliantoni said O’Rourke oversaw all the content published by the six-person staff, but did not personally write for the paper because he was busy running his technology company, also called Stanton Street, out of the same office.
“He did not frequently write at all. He would help make decisions on, like, cover stories, and he knew the content that was being produced, but he never produced it himself,” said Degliantoni.
O’Rourke’s only published article in the paper was a introductory letter in the first issue that paid tribute to his father, who was killed in a bicycle accident six months before the paper launched.
“Pat O’Rourke is the inspiration behind this venture,” he wrote, promising that the paper would work “tirelessly to deliver the best independent coverage of El Paso, knowing that this great city will make our efforts worthwhile.”
When the venture folded after four months due to lack of advertising sales, O’Rourke took the failure in stride, said Degliantoni.
“He’s not somebody who gets hung up and bogged down, I would say, by failure,” she said. “He did not make us feel bad that we didn’t write compelling enough cover stories … he didn’t shame the sales team and say what terrible numbers they had. He was just like we tried our best, and it didn’t work.”
O’Rourke acknowledged that financial problems led to the paper’s demise in an interview with Mother Jones.
“First of all, it was perhaps one of the worst times to do something like this,” said O’Rourke. “And it also wasn’t sufficiently capitalized.”
Some of the Stanton Street covers focused on local news, such as the county’s plan to demolish a landmark hotel, budgetary problems at the Natural History Museum, and a fluffy interview with then-El Paso Mayor Ray Caballero that informed readers, “Mr. Caballero would like you to know this is the greatest city in the world.”
Other cover stories were edgier, reflecting the paper’s interest in serving as an alternative to the daily El Paso Times, which O’Rourke said had “neglected” city residents.
The story in the Valentine’s Day issue, by a writer named Cleo Hemphill, began with a personal anecdote about a Valentine’s Day party.
“Years ago, you and your poet friend cornered a young man in the bathroom and offered, using as many pretty words as you could think of, to suck on his nipples if he would let you pour your Margarita on his chest,” said the story. “Leaning him against the sink, you take turns with his trusting, rounded pink nipples, that slight scent of tangerine from his body mixing with the lime juice.”
The issue also featured a poem titled, “This Morning I Made Love with the Lettuce Picker,” which read in part: “Her legs are white, her rear end/(clad in purple pajamas)/is raised like a flag planted in the dirt.” The issue ended with a nightlife reporter’s dispatch on a rodeo.
The paper didn’t shy away from politics. Each issue included a cartoon by left-wing cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, many of them taking aim at Dick Cheney and lambasting the Bush administration for 2000-era scandals such as the Enron controversy. One cover story blasted the El Paso Times, criticizing its “Anglo” editorial writers and “war-monger” columnists.
“The main editorial writers are all Anglo with the names Laird, Edgren, Self and Seltzer … right of center, such as Linda Chavez and Roger Hernandez, conservatives George Will and the war-monger David Hackworth,” wrote surrealist sculptor Ho Baron in the lengthy op-ed.
Stanton Street took an anti-NAFTA slant as well, publishing several articles that highlighted job losses in El Paso after the Clinton trade agreement. One article by the paper’s regular columnist Roberto Camp criticized “media manipulation” in a local Univision-owned news station, claiming it provided “anti-government media coverage of the attempted overthrow of Venezuela’s democratically elected president Hugo Chavez.” The column tied the coverage to President Bush’s friendship with Univision’s parent company and corporate interests of companies such as Coca-Cola and DirecTV.
Other columns criticized Texas then-Attorney General John Cornyn for opposing a casino on a Native American reservation, and advocated marijuana legalization, universal healthcare, and an event called “Conscience Camp 2002.” Much of the coverage focused on the burgeoning El Paso music scene, including interviews with local musicians and album reviews by a contributor called DJ Match.
One lengthy article by a writer named Robert Hulguin went into great detail about a James Brown-themed party he attended six years prior. “I attended only one of Elaine’s parties during a hazy spring in 1994, but I was told it was her best,” wrote Hulguin, describing a “large crowd of greying, balding hipsters with bi-focals, beautiful women with wide hips and frizzy hair, drinking Gatorade or foamy beer out of paper cuts, dancing in sheer ecstasy under the funky spell of the Godfather of Soul.”
