Juárez began as El Paso del Norte in 1659
Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua’s largest city, faces El Paso across the Rio Grande and forms the second-largest binational metro on that border, about 2.5 million strong. Franciscan García de San Francisco founded it in 1659 as El Paso del Norte; the Juárez name stuck after 1888.
Four bridges—Bridge of the Americas, Ysleta–Zaragoza, Paso del Norte, and Stanton Street—saw nearly 23 million crossings in 2008. Apache raids around 1750 spurred presidios such as San Elzeario. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo set the river border; channel shifts and the 1853 Mesilla sale tightened the frontier geometry.
Until about 1930, people moved freely across. U.S. Army posts seeded what became El Paso. The Christmas 1846 Battle of El Bracito nearby marked the Mexican–American War’s local footprint. Benito Juárez's republican forces paused at El Paso del Norte during the French intervention of 1862 to 1867 before he set up a government in exile in Chihuahua, and after 1882 the Mexican Central Railway brought banks, telegraphs and trams.
The founding mission, Guadalupe de los Mansos, was the first permanent Spanish development there in the 1660s, and the town prospered on traffic between Santa Fe and Chihuahua; timber for the first bridge over the river came from Santa Fe in the late 1700s. After the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Piro and Tiwa refugees arrived, and a presidio went up beside the mission in 1683. By 1750 the district held close to 5,000 people.
Today the combined El Paso–Juárez region exceeds 3.4 million people, second only to San Diego–Tijuana on the border. More than 300 maquiladora assembly plants fill its industrial zones, a 2007 New York Times report said it was taking up more new industrial space than any North American city, and in 2008 fDi Magazine called it the City of the Future.
Source: Ciudad Juárez
