Inspiring Latino Instagram Brown Issues Held A Pop-Up In El Paso

The Brown Issues organization asked their followers what city they should visit and hold a popup event and El Paso was the lucky city chosen. If you're not familiar, Brown Issues is an organization that works to bring together and empower the young Latino community. Their goal is to educate, support, and help shape the future leaders in the brown community. They highlight issues within the brown community and celebrate wins for people. With an impressive 278,000 followers on Instagram, they have a large community of supporters who are ready to listen and have something to say.

A couple of weeks ago they asked what city they should travel to and hold a pop-up event for their followers to meet and to hear some of the issues that the brown community in different areas are facing. They gave five options of cities they could visit including Dallas, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and El Paso. El Paso was one of the finalists along with Albuquerque and Dallas but the Sun City eventually won the honor.

The El Paso pull-up was held this past Saturday, November 13th at the historic Lincoln Park in south-central El Paso. Crystal Gonzalez of El Paso went to the pop-up and said it was an inspiring and motivating event:

"We discussed how the community needs to come together to tackle the issues that the brown community faces due to gentrification and how we're stronger in numbers. Organizing is the key to our success for the Latin community. We also talked about changing the narrative people paint about our Latino community and how representation matters in these spaces to ensure 'others who don't look like us don't speak for us.'"

One of the stories that Brown Issues discussed with El Pasoans was the story of 92-year-old Antonia Morales, one of the last residents of the downtown Durangito neighborhood. They wrote about her story on the Instagram page where followers began comparing Antonia's plight to the brown neighborhood that was located where Dodger Stadium was built.

While in El Paso, the group went out and supported various local, brown-owned small businesses including Love Alumni Mobile Boutique, Viejo Coffee, Gorditas Lerdo, and of course Chico's Tacos. The group also enjoyed a hike on the Aztec Cave Trail. You can learn more about the Brown Issues organization by following their Instagram.