My ENT surgeon, Dr. Julian Vellucci, was “99 percent” sure my cancer was HPV-positive, which he said meant a 90 percent five-year cancer-free survival rate. HPV-negative tumors, more often caused by smoking and drinking, carry a five-year survival rate below 50 percent.

That single-letter combination, HPV, links my throat to a cancer most people associate only with women: cervical cancer. The same virus, human papillomavirus, causes both, and a single vaccine prevents both. That is why the true hero of this entry is not a surgeon but a vaccine and the people who promote its use.

The Same Virus, Two Cancers

HPV is responsible for roughly 60 to 70 percent of oropharyngeal cancers like mine in the United States, the same viral family that causes nearly all cervical cancer.1 The vaccine was first developed to prevent cervical cancer and was only later understood to protect against the throat cancers now rising fastest, including my own.

Cervical cancer rates have declined for decades because Pap smear screening can detect it early. Oropharyngeal cancer has no equivalent screening test. It requires awareness of early symptoms, as in my case. However, a vaccine does exist. It is the same shot, given to the same children, that may have prevented cancer in me had it been available in the 1980s.2

A Physician’s Fifteen-Year Campaign

Jennifer Molokwu, M.D., M.P.H., director of Cancer Prevention and Control at Texas Tech Health El Paso, has spent much of her career trying to close that gap. Her 2019 study of a community-based, multicomponent HPV vaccination intervention significantly raised immunization rates in a largely Hispanic El Paso population, proving that trusted local messengers, not just clinics, move the needle.3 In 2024, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, known as CPRIT, awarded her program a $2.5 million grant to expand HPV vaccine access to uninsured and underinsured residents across El Paso, Hudspeth, and Culberson counties, with an expected reach of 83,000 people.4

Molokwu did not choose an easy fight. Texas’s overall HPV vaccine completion rate is 39.7 percent, among the lowest in the nation, even as El Paso County has posted one of the state’s highest initiation rates, at 83 percent. That gap between starting the series and finishing it leaves children exposed. This is where Molokwu’s team focuses its efforts, in clinics and schools, and in addressing the mistrust that keeps parents from returning for the second and third doses.5

Why Trust Is the Real Obstacle

A 2025 focus-group study of El Paso’s Vaccine Task Force found that trusted sources of HPV vaccine information mattered more than mere availability and that Hispanic parents along the border prioritized the advice of promotoras, community health workers, and family physicians over impersonal campaigns.6 A separate qualitative study of El Paso families found that knowledge gaps, not access alone, drove low HPV vaccination uptake, with many parents unaware that the vaccine prevented cancers beyond cervical cancer.7

I find this final gap deeply personal. If more people understood, as I did not until my own diagnosis, that this vaccine could have stood between me and a surgical biopsy, the campaign to close it would carry greater urgency.

My Biopsy

Surgery is surgery. This procedure, though a biopsy, still required general anesthesia. I arrived at 5:30 AM for the outpatient procedure at The Hospitals of Providence Sierra campus in El Paso, where many COVID protocols were still in place. Many waiting room patients wore masks as they answered questions about symptoms.

What struck me was the repeated questioning on another topic: my name and date of birth, with why I was there worked in here and there for good measure. This is the so-called Joint Commission protocol, formally its National Patient Safety Goal on patient identification, which requires at least two identifiers — typically name and date of birth — before any medication, specimen collection, or procedure.8 For every encounter, whether an interview or a medication dispensation, the healthcare provider looked at my wristband and asked me to state my name and date of birth. These were not yes-or-no questions. I had to provide the answers myself. I found this very reassuring.

After my biopsy, my throat was sore, as expected. I tried yogurt, honey, and cinnamon, which, to my surprise, calmed the pain significantly. That result tracks with the clinical literature: a randomized trial of post-tonsillectomy patients found honey reduced pain scores and analgesic use more effectively than standard care alone, and a separate study found honey combined with acetaminophen worked synergistically to control post-surgical throat pain without opioids.9 Enhanced yogurt and acetaminophen replaced the need for opioids.

The Connection Worth Repeating

Cervical cancer mortality among border Hispanic women stands at 5.7 per 100,000, more than double the national average of 2.4, the highest rate in the country. My own suspected cancer and that statistic share a single preventable cause. The HPV vaccine protects against the virus behind both, which means Molokwu’s fifteen-year campaign in El Paso clinics is not adjacent to my story. It is the same story, told earlier, before the biopsy, before the diagnosis, before any of this became necessary at all.

Dr. Vierra is a writer with Texas Tech Health El Paso. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author, writing as a patient and a journalist, and do not represent the official position of Texas Tech Health El Paso. Clinical decisions should be made in consultation with a qualified healthcare provider.

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How to follow the whole archive. If you want both the illness series and the institutional history — entries on UTEP’s past, Texas Tech Health El Paso, and the Fox Cancer Center, along with historiography and method — simply keep all sections checked. You’ll receive every new post from The University Historian in your inbox.

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Notes

April 2026

Every cancer patient eventually meets the surgeon who will, quite literally, decide what happens to their body next. Mine walked into the exam room already knowing more about the mass in my throat than I did, and within minutes he had a scope up my nose and a plan for what came next.

The Visit

Julian Vellucci, M.D., FACS, greeted my wife and me the way I imagine he greets every new head and neck cancer patient: with a smile, without wasted motion, and with a command of the anatomy that made the appointment feel less like a diagnosis and more like a briefing.

He was the first doctor I saw who actually used the word “cancer” in my presence.

The CT scan had already told him much of what he needed to know. Still, we had to learn the why of Boris, my tumor.

He threaded a flexible nasal scope up my right nostril, past my sinuses and down toward the base of my tongue so he could see Boris firsthand on the color display screen. My wife got the clearer view, since I had a scope up my nose and my head tilted at an angle that offered no dignity whatsoever. I came home with a picture of Boris.

Vellucci told us he was “99 percent sure” the tumor was HPV-positive, a distinction that matters enormously in oropharyngeal cancer. HPV-positive tumors respond far better to treatment than those linked to tobacco and alcohol. Because Boris sits at the base of my tongue, confirming that suspicion would require a biopsy under general anesthesia rather than an office procedure.

He scheduled the biopsy for the following week along with a p16 immunohistochemistry test. That pathology report, more than any conversation in the exam room, would determine which combination of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation would carry me through what this series calls The Ordeal.

An Unlikely Path Home

I did not appreciate that day how improbable it was that this particular surgeon was sitting across from me in El Paso. Julian A. Vellucci was born in Vicenza, Italy, and grew up in El Paso, earning a cum laude bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2008 before turning to medicine.1 He completed his medical degree at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston in 2014.2

For thirteen years, Vellucci served as a commissioned officer in the United States Army, a period that coincided with and then overlapped his medical training. He completed his otolaryngology residency at Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington, in 2019, and then worked as an attending otolaryngologist at Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center from 2019 to 2021, directing ENT clerkships for medical students and physician assistants. His final Army assignment brought him back to El Paso, to William Beaumont Army Medical Center, from 2021 to 2023, where he also directed clerkships for general surgery and OMS residents, medical students, and physician assistants.3 He returned to his hometown in uniform, years before he would return again in a white coat.

The Fellowship That Defines Him

In 2023, Vellucci left the Army to enter the Advanced Surgical Head and Neck Oncology and Microvascular Reconstruction Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, completing it in 2024. This credential matters most for a patient like me. It is not a general surgical fellowship; it trains surgeons to manage complex head and neck malignancies, perform free-flap microvascular reconstruction, and carry out salvage surgery when chemoradiation has failed and tissue needs to be rebuilt. Vellucci himself has described the program as a place that made him feel like family from his first interview.4 When he finished, he came home again, joining Southwest ENT Consultants in El Paso.

He is now a board-certified diplomate of the American Board of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery and an active fellow of the American Head and Neck Cancer Society, a professional society limited to surgeons who have demonstrated sustained commitment to head and neck oncology. His stated primary practice interest is head and neck cancer, with secondary interests including voice surgery, thyroid and parathyroid disease, salivary glands, upper airway disorders, sinus and sleep surgery, and facial plastics.5 He is not a generalist who occasionally encounters a case like mine. He trained for this work in one of the country’s most demanding fellowship programs. He chose to bring that training back to the city where he grew up.

What the Timing Means for El Paso

For decades, El Paso’s most complex head and neck cancer cases meant a drive or a flight to Houston, home to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, one of the top-ranked cancer hospitals in the country. That distance is roughly 700 air miles and considerably farther by highway. Steve Fox, the donor whose gift is funding the forthcoming Fox Cancer Center at Texas Tech Health El Paso, made that trip himself when he was diagnosed with head and neck cancer years ago, precisely because this region had no equivalent option. Until recently, that gap in specialized surgical oncology was not an inconvenience; it was a structural feature of cancer care on the border.

Vellucci’s arrival changes that math for at least one category of disease. The presence of a fellowship-trained head and neck surgical oncologist in civilian practice means that patients whose tumors are large, whose lymph nodes are involved, or whose treatment might eventually require reconstructive surgery no longer automatically need to leave the region for that level of expertise. It does not replace the case for a comprehensive cancer center—the Fox Cancer Center’s mission runs far broader than any single surgeon’s practice—but it closes one specific and significant gap while that larger institutional project is still under construction.

Vellucci is married with two children, and outside the clinic his interests run toward precision and speed: cars, motorcycles, Formula 1, tennis, and the outdoors6. Thirteen years in uniform tend to leave a mark on how a physician communicates. There is a certain directness, a comfort with decisive action under pressure, and a habit of explaining the plan before the patient has to ask for one. I felt that in the room. He did not soften the odds so much as frame them accurately in his exam, a biopsy scheduled for the following week, and a clear next step rather than an open-ended wait.

The Biopsy

Surgery is surgery, even when the word attached to it is only “biopsy.” Mine was done under general anesthesia, and I arrived at 5:30 in the morning for the outpatient procedure at the Hospitals of Providence Sierra campus, where several COVID-era protocols were still in place at check-in. Becoming a surgery patient means entering a world built entirely around protocols, such as bracelets, verifications, repeated questions about my name and birth date, and every one of them exists for a single reason: to keep me safe while someone I had met only once put me under and cut into the base of my tongue. The pathology report from that morning would set the entire course of my treatment. It arrived, eventually, with an answer. That answer belongs to the next entry.

Dr. Vierra is a writer with Texas Tech Health El Paso. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author, writing as a patient and a journalist, and do not represent the official position of Texas Tech Health El Paso. Clinical decisions should be made in consultation with a qualified healthcare provider.

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How to follow A Journey Here. This Substack is its own section of The University Historian. To get only these cancer‑journey entries by email, click “Subscribe,” then go to your subscription settings (or visit theuniversityhistorian.substack.com/account). Under “Emails enabled for,” leave A Journey Here checked and uncheck the other sections. You can change this at any time.

How to follow the whole archive. If you want both the illness series and the institutional history — entries on UTEP’s past, Texas Tech Health El Paso, and the Fox Cancer Center, along with historiography and method — simply keep all sections checked. You’ll receive every new post from The University Historian in your inbox.

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Notes

June 2026

June is Cancer Survivors Month. On June 7, communities across the country observed the 39th annual National Cancer Survivors Day, a celebration of life founded in 1987.1 In 1985, Fitzhugh Mullan, a physician who had survived treatment, published “Seasons of Survival” in the New England Journal of Medicine and introduced “cancer survivor” to the clinical literature, replacing “victim” with a concept of ongoing life.2 A year later, 23 individuals founded the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship in Albuquerque and established a definition that holds today: a cancer survivor is anyone from the moment of diagnosis through the rest of life.3

My university, Texas Tech Health El Paso, is marking the month by inviting students, faculty, and staff to wear lavender and form a human ribbon on the central quad. I will be wearing lavender. By Mullan’s definition, my diagnosis started the clock, and to some, I am already a cancer survivor.

But I have a long road before I fully reach the designation that the three people I am writing about earned. Before I was a cancer patient, I was a cancer writer. I sat across from these survivors and took notes. I thought I understood, but I did not. I prefer to call them cancer pathfinders now. They are showing me the way.

David Lepe: Faith, a Good Staff, and Attitude

David Lepe runs Lucy’s Cafe West, part of a five-location family operation that his mother, Lucinda (Lucy), built from a ten-seat counter diner on El Paso’s Mesa Street more than 50 years ago. Lucy passed away in 2024. Her hands were on the business into her seventies.

The same month he opened his restaurant, Lepe was diagnosed with colon cancer. He had attributed a year of abdominal pain to an ulcer and had never undergone a colonoscopy. “I hadn’t even heard about a colonoscopy,” he told me. That gap is not unusual in his community. Hispanic adults in the United States are screened for colorectal cancer at 53.4 percent, compared with 70.4 percent for non-Hispanic white adults; Texas has one of the largest disparities in the country.4 His story is that number made personal.

His care was provided entirely in El Paso. Dr. Angel Gonzalez at University Medical Center performed the surgery; approximately 90 percent of his colon was removed. Dr. Sumit Gaur at Texas Tech Physicians of El Paso, the same medical oncologist who now manages my treatment, recommended a year of chemotherapy.

“Even though it was hard, living with a bag and doing the chemo,” Lepe said, “it was a great blessing. I think it’s one of the things that saved my life.” The blood tests came back clean every session. He has been cancer-free without leaving his restaurant, his family, or his city.

“Faith, a good staff, and attitude make up about 50% of the ingredients you need to recover,” he said. “It’s about confidence.”

I asked about the other half. He shrugged and smiled. I will have to discover those ingredients on my own.

Kristin Sizemore and Jennifer Rau, Sisters in the Fight

Kristin Sizemore and Jennifer Rau are sisters who both grew up in El Paso. They also survived breast cancer, Jennifer in 2014 and Kristin in December 2018. They built something in response. Together, they co-founded the Sisters in the Fight Breast Cancer Foundation, which funds cancer screenings for women who otherwise cannot afford them. “It should never be a situation where you have to choose between taking care of your family or taking care of yourself,” Kristin told me.

Breast cancer screening costs in this region are approximately $150 to $180 per person. Financial barriers to screening drive diagnostic delays, and these delays correlate with later-stage diagnosis and worse outcomes. Their annual golf tournaments raise funds to help pay for these screenings for those who would otherwise go without.

“When you’re sick, especially with cancer, you want to be at home,” advised Kristen. “You want to be surrounded by the people you love.”

Added Jennifer: “Having to unplug and stay in a different city, go to Houston to MD Anderson, and not being with family and friends, that’s a burden and stress you don’t need.”

What They Taught Me

What I carry from those conversations is not the data. It is the spirit of what surviving looks like from the other side. Lepe’s shrug about the half you cannot plan for. Kristin and Jennifer turning their own diagnoses into a fundraising engine that screens women who have never met them. Their evidence, specific, lived, and El Paso, is that survival here is possible and that what gets built here matters.

El Paso is home to two universities tackling the problem from different angles. Texas Tech Health El Paso is building the Fox Cancer Center to provide the comprehensive oncology care the city has never had. Across town, the University of Texas at El Paso is advancing the science to understand why cancer strikes this population the way it does. UTEP's College of Health Sciences has assembled a cancer research cohort that targets the exact gaps these three stories identify.5

June is Cancer Survivors Month. I will spend it in pretreatment, preparing my body for the road ahead, the path through treatment, which, for many, is the toughest part of the journey.

The designation I am working toward began with a physician in 1985 who decided that “survivor” mattered enough to write it down. By next June, if all goes as it should, I will be wearing lavender for a different reason. These three pathfinders walked this road before me. Their footprints are still visible, and I intend to follow them.

At least I now know I am not a victim, nor a survivor—at least not yet.

I am a cancer pathfinder.

And that has made all the difference.

Dr. Vierra is a writer with Texas Tech Health El Paso. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author, writing as a patient and a journalist, and do not represent the official position of Texas Tech Health El Paso. Clinical decisions should be made in consultation with a qualified healthcare provider.

This post is public, so feel free to share it.

Share

How to follow A Journey Here. This Substack is its own section of The University Historian. To get only these cancer‑journey entries by email, click “Subscribe,” then go to your subscription settings (or visit theuniversityhistorian.substack.com/account). Under “Emails enabled for,” leave A Journey Here checked and uncheck the other sections. You can change this at any time.

How to follow the whole archive. If you want both the illness series and the institutional history—entries on UTEP’s past, Texas Tech Health El Paso, and the Fox Cancer Center, along with historiography and method—simply keep all sections checked. You’ll receive every new post from The University Historian in your inbox.

Notes

My personal care physician sent me a text after my cancer diagnosis while I was still in the emergency room.

Not a message through the patient portal. A text directly to my phone. It said she was sorry, that she was here for me, and that we would figure this out together. That is not a clinical protocol. That is a relationship.

Dr. Azucena Del Real has been my primary care physician for three years. She also cares for my wife. She knows us, not just our charts: my hypertension, the recent-onset Type 2 diabetes she caught early, the medications, the comorbidities, the history. When the CT confirmed cancer on April 14, she did not have to be briefed. She already knew the whole patient.

In medicine, that kind of knowledge has a name: continuity of care. In a fragmented specialist system, it is rarer than it should be.

A stubborn advocate

Del Real’s father was a dermatologist who made Sunday house calls to small towns in Guanajuato, in central Mexico, compounding his own medications because his patients couldn’t afford commercial prescriptions. He died when she was nine. “Since I can remember,” she told me in a 2023 interview, “it’s been like I’m going to be a doctor, I’m going to be a doctor, I’m going to be a doctor,” emphasizing how stubborn she became in her pursuit.

She completed medical school in Tijuana in 2013 and spent five years qualifying for a U.S. residency. This included taking the medical licensing exams, completing a master’s in clinical research at UC San Diego, and working as a technician at a diabetes research organization, where she monitored patients’ insulin levels at 5- to 15-minute intervals, around the clock. That experience matters now. She doesn’t manage my diabetes from a textbook; she managed it first at the lab bench. She completed her internal medicine residency at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine in Edinburg in 2022 and joined Texas Tech Physicians of El Paso’s Transmountain clinic shortly after.

Del Real entered medicine having already seen the system from the inside of the insurance apparatus. Somewhere between medical school and residency, she also worked as a high-risk case manager for an HMO in San Diego, approving or denying transfers, identifying why patients kept returning to the hospital, and arranging transportation for those unable to get to their appointments.

Del Real told me that internal medicine is not always well understood in this community. “We are family doctors, too,” she said, “though we see only adults—adults with preventive needs, with screenings, with highly complex diseases.” She divides her practice between the outpatient clinic and inpatient hospital medicine at the Hospitals of Providence Transmountain campus, where she manages direct patient care and co-manages patients in the surgical ICU. She also trains the next generation of hospital specialists, supervising medical residents who came to El Paso from around the globe.

During active cancer treatment, an oncology team manages tumors. The primary care physician manages everything else. In my case, that means multiple concurrent lines of comorbidities: blood sugar control through the metabolic stress of chemoradiation, blood pressure management against a chemo drug’s impact on the kidneys, coordination of pain management, and oversight of a prescription burden that is about to become substantial. None of these items appear on an oncologist’s daily agenda. All of them fall to Del Real.

Her philosophy of care is built around a single question she asks every patient before they leave: What do you know? “I take the time and I say, why are you here? What is happening? And then we leave with a closing conversation to make sure we both understand.” For a cancer patient navigating a system that rarely speaks to itself, the PCP who asks that question—and means it—is the difference between understanding what is happening to you and being processed by it.

Insurance

Overseeing my cancer involves more than medical responsibility. It also involves insurance responsibility.

The health plan for Texas Tech Health El Paso employees is an HMO, or health maintenance organization. In an HMO, the primary care physician serves as the plan’s gatekeeper: every specialist referral, imaging study, and procedure requires PCP authorization before the plan will cover it. The theory is that a knowledgeable gatekeeper prevents waste and unnecessary care. In practice, for a cancer patient, this means that a physician who already knows the clinical urgency must still file paperwork and wait for an insurance company that does not.

My appointment with the radiation oncologist was delayed by two weeks due to paperwork. That is not a complaint. It is a documented fact about how the system operates. An American Society for Radiation Oncology survey of 754 radiation oncologists found that 92 percent reported that prior authorization causes treatment delays, affecting more than a third of their patients on average; 68 percent said those delays lasted five days or longer; and 7 percent said prior authorization has contributed to a patient’s death.1 A Memorial Sloan Kettering study of 178 cancer patients found that 69 percent experienced a prior authorization delay, 73 percent of those delays lasted two or more weeks, and 89 percent of respondents trusted their insurance company less after the experience.2

HMOs defend this system as evidence-based utilization management. Critics call it a cost-avoidance mechanism dressed as clinical oversight. A NORC survey found that most Americans blamed insurance industry profits for coverage denials.3

Del Real has navigated this from both sides of the desk. She knows how authorization decisions are made because she made them. When she files a prior authorization on my behalf, she is not learning the system; she is renegotiating with one she once worked inside.

Deny and delay

As of this writing, Del Real has submitted eight prior authorization requests for me to see specialists or for procedures. Two, including my radiation oncologist visit and a PET scan, were initially denied due to what can best be described as coding errors by a third-party contractor that is neither the physician nor the insurance company.

The Fox Cancer Center, rising outside my office window two years before it opens, will not fix America’s prior authorization system. That is a federal and state policy problem that no single institution can resolve. What a comprehensive cancer center can do and what individual specialist practices cannot is build the kind of integrated care team that absorbs the administrative burden on behalf of the patient: a dedicated navigator, a coordinated authorization workflow, a case management infrastructure that moves at the speed of the disease rather than the speed of the queue. The argument for the Fox Cancer Center is partly about equipment and clinical expertise.

It is also about this: cancer patients in El Paso and their doctors should not spend their time fighting paperwork.

Dr. P.J. Vierra is a writer with Texas Tech Health El Paso’s Office of Institutional Advancement.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author, writing as a patient and a journalist, and do not represent the official position of Texas Tech Health El Paso. Clinical decisions should be made in consultation with a qualified healthcare provider.

Tension has shaped every institution of higher learning El Paso has ever built or fought to preserve, and it runs through the heart of this publication.

In 1969, state legislators debated where to place a medical school for West Texas—a vast, arid expanse of prairie and desert stretching from Oklahoma to the Rio Grande west of Interstate 35. As the region’s largest city, El Paso argued it was the logical location. The governor of Texas, a Lubbock native, disagreed. After a filibuster by El Paso representatives, the 61st Legislature placed the school in Lubbock and offered El Paso a consolation prize: a regional campus, a few affiliation agreements, and the modest hope that someday the arrangement might amount to something.

Half a century later, it has amounted to quite a bit.

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center at El Paso, also known as Texas Tech Health El Paso, is now an independent university with four professional schools, a graduate school of biomedical sciences, a physician practice group serving hundreds of thousands of patients annually, and the Fox Cancer Center rising from the desert floor on Hope Court: the first comprehensive cancer center on the U.S.-Mexico border designed to serve a predominantly Hispanic population. It trains the physicians, nurses, dentists, and biomedical researchers who stay in the Paso del Norte Borderplex and care for a community that, for most of the twentieth century, had to make do without them.

Those of you who have been following A Journey Here already know this institution from a different angle. It is the system I am presently navigating as a cancer patient. The resident who delivered my diagnosis trained here. The specialists managing my care practice here. The cancer center whose history I have spent three years writing is the same one that, two years from now, will offer patients in this region something that did not exist before: a place to be treated without having to travel 250 to 750 miles from home. I am writing this history, in other words, from inside it.

This post inaugurates a new section of The University Historian dedicated to the full institutional history of Texas Tech Health El Paso, running from the 1969 legislative filibuster through the 2025 Fox Cancer Center groundbreaking. It will appear alongside the continuing UTEP archive, which is the story of a university that opened as a school of mines on the Lanoria Mesa in 1914 and grew into a public research university serving one of the most bilingual, binational regions in the country. Together, these two histories form the institutional backdrop against which A Journey Here is set, and they deserve to be told in full.

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The U.T. Board of Regents chairman implores John Barry to rescind his resignation as president of the College of Mines. –U.T. President’s Office Papers

2018

Diana Natalicio announces her retirement after 45 years as a faculty member and 30 years as president. – University Communications

Want more #UTEP history? Be sure to subscribe to the Mining UTEP’s History newsletter. Click here to see the latest article.

Citing pressure from community athletic advocates and local teachers over toughened academic requirements, President John G. Barry resigns. He dates his resignation retroactive to May 16. Charles Puckett replaces him as acting president. -U.T. President’s Office Papers

1964

A convocation is held to kick off a three-day series of events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of UTEP (then known as Texas Western College of the University of Texas). -Prospector

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Several of the findings were documented in the peer-reviewed journal Southwestern Historical Quarterly and the Texas Handbook, published by the Texas State Historical Association. Others appeared in the Encyclopedia of UTEP History and the UTEP History Sourcebook.

No. 1: Gwendolyn Toppin graduated from Texas Western College in 1957, making her the first Black student to graduate from a formerly segregated Texas public college or university.

On August 25, 1957, Texas Western College of the University of Texas etched its name in Texas civil rights history. On that day, Gwendolyn Lila Toppin of Anniston, Alabama, walked across the stage of Magoffin Auditorium. With one hand, she shook hands with President Dysart Holcomb, and with the other, she clutched a diploma, signed by the University of Texas System Board of Regents, which conferred upon her the degree of Bachelor of Arts.

Toppin holds the distinction of being the first Black undergraduate to receive a bachelor’s degree from a formerly segregated four-year public university in Texas. In September 1955, Toppin transferred to TWC from Alabama A&M, joining its first cohort of Black students. Following the completion of a master’s degree in education, Toppin joined the El Paso Independent School District, where she remained until her death in 1981.

In the annals of Civil Rights history, James Meredith is generally credited with being the first Black individual to attend and graduate from a Jim Crow college or university. In 1963, six years after Toppin, Meredith graduated from the University of Mississippi. The year before, his successful enrollment at the Oxford institution broke the color barrier in a state that, like Texas, had a history of segregation in higher education. His admission to the university encountered significant resistance, leading to federal intervention to ensure his enrollment and safety.

Toppin’s achievement was far less dramatic. TWC, the UT board of regents, and the media in 1957 took little, if any, notice of Toppin’s milestone. At the time, the nation’s attention was focused on UT Austin and the challenges faced by Barbara Smith, a Black singer who had been prevented from performing in an integrated performance by the school’s president. Even though Thelma White’s historic lawsuit against TWC rendered null and void the clause in the Texas constitution prohibiting segregated colleges and universities, Jim Crow Texas legislators insisted that UT Austin continue its segregationist policies regarding student housing and gatherings. (Ironically, Toppin, a theatre major, had appeared on the Magoffin Auditorium stage two years earlier in the first desegregated performance on a Texas university or college stage. This historic first also went unnoticed.)

Toppin’s journey began in 1955 when Thelma White initiated legal action against Texas Western College and the University of Texas System, demanding the immediate desegregation of the state’s public universities and colleges. A pragmatic UT System board of regents acknowledged the need for desegregation but feared backlash from Jim Crow legislators who threatened to cut the university’s funding. The regents instead proposed the immediate desegregation of Texas Western College while requesting additional time for UT Austin. Federal Judge R. Ewing Thomason, in a historic ruling terminating segregation in Texas, sanctioned a one-year delay for the flagship Austin campus.

This postponement enabled UT El Paso to take the lead in statewide desegregation efforts. In the fall of 1955, Toppin was among the thirteen Black students who comprised the first desegregated class admitted to a baccalaureate program at a previously segregated public college in Texas. Thelma White, however, chose not to attend UTEP. She opted to remain at New Mexico State University after being denied admission to TWC. UT Austin would not admit its first desegregated class until 1956.

Three decades later, UT Austin sought to address its historical record regarding segregation. In February 1987, regents recognized engineering student John W. Hargis as the UT System’s first Black baccalaureate. UT Austin honored Hargis – who had graduated two years after Toppin – by naming a building on the Austin campus after him. Subsequently, they discovered they had made an error. In 1958, a year preceding Hargis, Edna Humphries Rhambo had obtained her bachelor’s degree. The regents acknowledged Rhambo with a reception but allowed Hargis's name to remain on the building. Despite having acknowledged Toppin as its first Black graduate as early as 1973, UTEP made no effort to correct the historical record.

For most of its history, UTEP operated in the shadow of UT Austin, acknowledging its subordinate status to the UT System’s Austin flagship. Gwendolyn Toppin, however, merits recognition for her role as a pivotal figure in the history of Texas civil rights and the University of Texas System.

El Paso Times, 26 Aug. 1957

This brief historical sketch of UT El Paso’s mining program describes the school as the leading Hispanic-serving university in the United States during the early 20th century.

The Mining School Movement

UT El Paso’s mining program traces its origins to the early 20th century, a time when mining schools were being established across the United States in response to the growing demand for mineral resources. This trend began in Europe in 1765 with the founding of the Freiberg School of Mines in Germany.

The mining school movement reached America when Columbia University established the first mining school in 1864, laying the foundation for a wave of similar institutions. Texas entered the fray with the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (today’s Texas A&M University) offering a short-lived mining program in 1876. However, the most significant development came with the founding of the State School of Mines and Metallurgy in El Paso in 1913, which later became the University of Texas at El Paso.

Founding of the State School of Mines and Metallurgy

El Paso's location near mineral-rich regions made it an ideal candidate for a mining school. Although the town initially attracted settlers with the promises of irrigation and mineral wealth, the development of an adjunct mining support industry took center stage, including what was then the second-largest smelter in the world.

By 1914, thirty mining schools and degree programs were already well established across the United States, with the El Paso school among the last to be created. Advocates in the city, believing in the potential of West Texas as a mining hub, lobbied for a dedicated, state-funded institution.

The Texas legislature responded with Senate Bill 183, establishing the State School of Mines and Metallurgy, placing it under the control of the University of Texas System Board of Regents. This decision mirrored the national trend of creating specialized mining schools, with El Paso following in the footsteps of states like Colorado, Missouri, and South Dakota.

However, not all local stakeholders supported the new school. Prominent figures such as William Burges and Robert Holliday, both University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) alumni, opposed the project. Burges went so far as to label the school a “mistake,” reflecting skepticism about the need for another mining institution in the United States, let alone public higher education in El Paso. (Both Burges and Holliday would later have buildings named after them on campus.)

Early Years and Development

The school's charter emphasized research, a pioneering move for public higher education in Texas. The University of Texas System Board of Regents initially sought to appoint William Battle Phillips, director of UT Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology, as the school’s first dean. However, Phillips declined, recommending Steve Worrell, a UT Austin graduate with a background in chemistry who worked for Phillips. Worrell became the first dean and had only five months to establish the new institution, which opened its doors in September 1914.

Worrell crafted an ambitious curriculum modeled on Harvard University’s graduate mining program but adapted to meet the unique conditions of the Southwest and Mexico. He also introduced a semester system, differentiating the school from the quarter system used at UT Austin.

From the outset, all mining engineering students were required to study Spanish, a notable characteristic that set it apart from other mining programs nationwide. This alone made graduates sought after by companies re-establishing mining projects in Mexico following its revolution. However, it also made the school highly attractive to Hispanic students from the U.S. and abroad.

Initially, the Texas School of Mines, as it became known, considered its Engineer of Mines degree comparable to the professional EM offered by Harvard’s School of Mines. The key difference was in admissions. Harvard applicants were required to possess an undergraduate degree to enter its professional schools, including law and medical schools. However, the University of Texas System still allowed high school graduates to apply to their professional schools, even medical school. By 1920, the UT System had revised admission requirements to all professional schools. The president of the Texas School of Mines, Robert Vinson, replaced the EM with a BS in mining engineering. Mining students were now required to take humanities courses other than Spanish.

The EM remained in the catalog as a post-baccalaureate degree. When a student, Horace Deans Bevans, completed the necessary requirements, the Board of Regents rejected the faculty’s recommendation to confer him an EM. The following year, the regents had no choice but to confer the degree, given that it was in the catalog under which Bevans had matriculated. The regents revised the catalog to eliminate the EM, but grandfathering students who entered the school before 1932. Six (6) students received this post-baccalaureate EM from 1934 to 1954, including Eugene Thomas, who later served as dean of mining and engineering and interim president.

From 1916 to 1968, UT El Paso awarded 49 Engineers of Mines and 397 Bachelor of Science in mining engineering degrees.

Mining Heritage

Throughout its history, UT El Paso’s mining roots have been represented by three distinct archetypes: the scientific engineer, the hard rock miner, and the Western prospector. Each symbol reflects distinct aspects of mining and its associated values, emphasizing shifts in how the university and the region viewed the mining profession over time.

The scientific engineer represented the formal, academic, and technological side of mining, highlighting the institution’s focus on education, research, and engineering expertise. Early images of the school frequently showed students working with transits as they surveyed sites. Others portrayed them as working in labs or with data.

The hard rock miner emphasized the manual labor and grit involved in mining. The hard rock miner works underground, extracting valuable minerals through sheer physical effort. It reflects the hands-on, practical aspect of mining and the perseverance and toughness of those who worked in the industry. Toward the late 1920s, yearbook graphics featured hardline art deco images of mining as an industry, with muscular laborers working complex machinery in mines or factories.

The Western prospector symbolized the adventurous, entrepreneurial spirit associated with the early mining days of the American West. This figure is often seen as a risk-taker, exploring untapped lands in search of mineral wealth. The prospector embodies the independence and optimism that characterized the early settlers who came to places like El Paso in search of fortune. From the beginning, the school adopted the accouterments of the lone prospector, including a mule, which became the school’s first official mascot, and the pick and shovel, which can be found carved into several historic campus buildings.

UT El Paso’s identity and its relationship to mining have oscillated between these three symbols, reflecting different facets of the mining industry—technical expertise, physical labor, and entrepreneurial exploration. Each symbol shaped the university's mining heritage and how it has been represented to the public. Today’s Paydirt Pete incorporates elements of all the identities: the resolute eyes of the scientific engineer, the hard rock miner's bulging muscles, and the prospector's clothing and pick. Only the Mississippi riverboat gambler hat appears out of place. But then, mining can be a risky business.

A Hispanic-Serving Mining Institution

Raul Barberena, class of 1917, was one of the nation's first Hispanic mining school graduates. A member of the inaugural class that arrived at the school in 1914, the Mexican national was also the first Hispanic instructor hired by the University of Texas System.

One of the distinguishing features of UT El Paso was the presence of Hispanic students since it opened. From its inception, the institution served as a vital educational pipeline for Hispanic and Mexican national students interested in mining engineering.

As many as half of each graduating class included Hispanic students, many of whom went on to work for American mining companies such as Asarco. The school's influence extended beyond Texas, with graduates contributing to mining operations in Mexico, Central and South America, and even the Philippines. One mining alumnus reportedly joined Francisco “Pancho” Villa’s marauding band, which “appropriated” horses and supplies from many Mexican mine sites where fellow alumni worked.

Pollard Rodgers, a graduate of the class of 1941, later reflected on the school's role in educating a significant number of Mexican mining engineers, underscoring the institution's regional importance. This focus on serving Hispanic communities in the United States and abroad became one of the school’s enduring legacies.

Decline and the End of the Mining Program

By the mid-20th century, the mining industry underwent significant changes, leading to a decline in interest in mining education. UT El Paso’s mining program, which had once attracted a steady stream of students, saw enrollments plummet in the 1950s. By 1962, the number of students in the mining program had dwindled to just ten, making it financially unsustainable for the university to continue offering the program.

External factors also contributed to the program’s decline. In 1961, the Mexican government nationalized much of the country’s mining industry, restricting American companies from employing foreign-trained engineers. Robert Limón, class of 1943, was among the many Hispanic mining engineers recruited by American firms at graduation. In his career with Asarco, he managed several mining operations throughout Mexico. Limón lamented that the “Mexicanization” of the mining industry reduced job prospects for UT El Paso’s graduates in Mexico, further diminishing the program's appeal.

As UT El Paso approached its fiftieth anniversary in the 1960s, the university undertook a strategic review of its curriculum. The resulting plan, Mission ’73, recommended transforming Texas Western College of the University of Texas, as it was then known, from a regional teaching institution and feeder school for UT Austin into a comprehensive university in its own right. As part of this transformation, the mining program was discontinued, and the School of Mining and Engineering was restructured as the School of Engineering. The final mining degree was conferred in 1968, marking the end of an era for UT El Paso’s mining program.

Legacy and Rebirth

Despite the closure of the mining program, UTEP’s legacy as a mining school persisted. Between 1916 and 1968, the university conferred 49 Engineer of Mines degrees and 397 Bachelor of Science degrees in mining engineering. The institution’s impact on the mining industry, particularly in the Hispanic world, was profound. Many graduates went on to occupy key positions in the industry, especially Mexico, where they played a significant role in shaping the country’s mining operations.

In 2018, fifty years after the last mining degree was awarded, UTEP achieved a new milestone. The university became the first former chartered mining school to attain R1 status under the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, designating it as a top-tier research university. This achievement underscored the institution's ability to reinvent itself and adapt to changing educational and economic landscapes.

Today, UTEP stands as the only chartered mining school from its era to have transformed into a comprehensive research university. Its history as a Hispanic-serving mining school remains an integral part of its identity, even as the university has broadened its focus to include a wide range of disciplines. As UTEP continues to evolve, it is well-positioned to play a leading role in the reinvention of mining engineering for the 21st century, building on a legacy that stretches back over a century.

Bibliography

• Mining Program, Vol. 22 of the Source Book of UTEP History, (El Paso, 2020).

• “Degree Programs,” Encyclopedia of UTEP History, (El Paso, 2022).

• “Engineer of Mines,” Encyclopedia of UTEP History, (E Paso, 2022).

Archives

• Faculty Minutes, C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections, University Library, UT El Paso.

• Newspapers.com.

• Scholarworks.utep.edu.

• UT Presidents Office Records: College of Mines, Briscoe Center for American History, UT Austin.

• UT Board of Regents, “Minutes,” C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections, University Library, UT El Paso.

1969–1979: Founding and Regional Development

Texas Tech Health El Paso was born not of ambition but of necessity and political compromise. When the 61st Texas Legislature placed the Texas Tech University School of Medicine in Lubbock in 1969, El Paso was a medically underserved city of 350,000 people — a quarter-million more than the next-largest city in the region — with a physician-to-population ratio half the national recommendation and specialty care effectively unavailable to most residents. The decade that followed brought steady progress: affiliation agreements with local hospitals, the gradual assembly of a teaching faculty, and the launch of the region’s first residency programs. By 1979, when the El Paso campus was absorbed into the newly created Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, the institution had moved from legislative mandate to functioning reality — a fragile but irreversible foothold in one of America’s most medically neglected communities.

1969

After a filibuster by El Paso representatives, the 61st Texas Legislature established Texas Tech University School of Medicine in Lubbock as a multi-campus institution with regional academic health centers in Amarillo, the Permian Basin, and El Paso to address physician shortages in West Texas.

1972

El Paso is formally designated as a regional academic health center of Lubbock’s Texas Tech University School of Medicine, establishing a permanent medical education presence in a region where the physician-to-population ratio was half the national recommendation.

1973

Affiliation agreements with R.E. Thomason General Hospital (now University Medical Center) and Hotel Dieu Hospital establish clinical training sites for TTUSOM Lubbock students in El Paso, expanding access to specialty care for county hospital patients.

1974

Twelve physicians transfer from R.E. Thomason General Hospital to the TTUSOM Lubbock faculty, forming the core teaching staff. Ariel Rodriguez, M.D., is appointed the first Associate Dean.

1975

The first residency program in family medicine begins, expanding graduate medical education opportunities in West Texas. Third-year medical students start clinical rotations in El Paso, adding medical personnel to serve community patients.

1976

Partnership with William Beaumont Army Medical Center strengthens residency training capacity. Multiple community health facilities enter into affiliation agreements, expanding access to diverse clinical training sites. Construction begins on the Regional Academic Health Center Building at 4800 Alberta.

1978

Residency positions expand to seventy across nine specialty programs, broadening the pathway for physicians trained in the region and expanding access to specialty care for residents.

1979

El Paso’s Regional Academic Health Center became part of Lubbock’s newly created Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, thereby expanding its mission beyond medicine to include additional health professions education.

1980–1999: Expansion and Diversification

Having established a presence, the institution spent two decades deepening it. The opening of the Regional Academic Health Center Building in 1981 gave the campus its first permanent home. The assumption of outpatient clinic operations from R.E. Thomason General Hospital in 1985 transformed the institution from a training program into a direct provider of care. Satellite clinics spread across El Paso’s neighborhoods in the 1990s, nursing education arrived through a pioneering partnership with UT El Paso, and mobile screening units carried breast cancer diagnostics into communities that had never had them. By 1998, when the institution marked its twenty-fifth anniversary, it had evolved from a political compromise into an indispensable part of El Paso’s health care infrastructure — one that was beginning, deliberately, to grow its own future workforce from the community it served.

1980

William H. Scragg, M.D., is appointed Acting Associate Dean.

1981

The Regional Academic Health Center Building opens, providing 67,000 square feet of space for students, faculty, and residents whose training serves El Paso patients. Robert L. Tuttle, M.D., assumes leadership as Associate Dean.

1984

The Area Health Education Center opens to coordinate health professions education across 108 West Texas counties, a region with persistent provider shortages.

1985

The El Paso Regional Academic Health Center (today’s Texas Tech Physicians of El Paso) assumes operation of the outpatient clinics formerly managed by R.E. Thomason General Hospital, ensuring continuity of care for patients during the transition of the clinics from county hospital district management.

1988

The Texas Tech Medical Center Building (today’s Texas Tech Physicians of El Paso at Alberta) opens its first outpatient clinic, expanding access to healthcare services for El Paso residents. Joseph Brown III, M.D., is appointed Associate Dean and Assistant to the Vice President and Provost.

1991

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) approves a cooperative Master of Science in Nursing Certified Nurse-Midwifery program with the University of Texas at El Paso, the first such program in Texas, addressing critical maternal health needs in the border region.

1993

Annual first-year enrollment increases to 120 students, with all additional students completing clinical rotations in El Paso, expanding the local physician pipeline and increasing healthcare capacity for residents.

1994

The University Breast Care Center (now known as the Texas Tech Physicians of El Paso Breast Care Center) begins offering services through a mobile care unit, bringing breast cancer screening and diagnostic services directly to underserved communities. Gary W. Welch, M.D., is appointed Regional Dean.

1995

Students from Maxine Silva Magnet High School for Health Professions begin clinical rotations as observers in medical center clinics throughout El Paso, creating early exposure to healthcareers for local students and strengthening the regional healthcare workforce pipeline.

1996

Texas Tech Physician Associates, the predecessor to Texas Tech Physicians of El Paso, opens satellite clinics across El Paso, improving healthcare access in neighborhoods previously underserved by specialty care. The Texas Tech University System is created, with John T. Montford elected inaugural chancellor.

1997

Native El Pasoan and TTU School of Medicine graduate Jose Manuel de la Rosa, M.D., assumes the role of Regional Dean. TTUHSC third-year medical students participate in the institution’s first white coat ceremony held in El Paso.

1998

The institution marks 25 years of medical education and patient care in the El Paso community, celebrating the 1973 signing of a pact with R.E. Thomason Hospital that initiated continuous medical education and clinical services for border residents.

2000–2014: Four-Year Medical School

The defining question of this period was whether El Paso would ever have a true medical school of its own, or remain permanently dependent on Lubbock for the first two years of physician training. The Texas Legislature answered in 2003 by authorizing a four-year school. What followed was a decade of institution-building on an accelerated timeline: new buildings, a named school of medicine, a consolidated physician practice group, and finally, in 2009, a first class of forty students beginning their education entirely in El Paso. The period closed with an equally consequential act — the 2013 legislative creation of Texas Tech Health El Paso as an independent university — that transformed what had been a regional campus into a sovereign academic institution with its own president, its own mission, and its own obligation to the Borderplex.

2000

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Lubbock, and its four regional campuses, including El Paso, collectively provide more than 558,000 clinical care visits annually, including nearly 300,000 charity care visits — underscoring the institution’s core mission to serve medically underserved populations across West Texas.

2001

El Paso philanthropists J.O. Stewart and Marlene Stewart donate 11 acres of land to expand the El Paso campus. To promote health, the El Paso campus becomes smoke-free, both indoors and outdoors.

2002

The Paso del Norte Health Foundation announces a $1.25 million scholarship program for students at the El Paso campus who choose to practice in El Paso.

2003

The Texas Legislature authorizes the establishment of a four-year medical school in El Paso, a significant step toward addressing the region’s persistent physician shortage and increasing the number of locally trained physicians likely to remain in the area.

2004

The TTU Board of Regents approves the formation of the Department of Biomedical Sciences within the School of Medicine at El Paso — establishing the research infrastructure that will eventually anchor the L. Frederick Francis Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

2005

The Infinity Campaign launches in El Paso, setting a $25 million fundraising goal to support construction of the four-year medical school. The campaign will ultimately raise $83 million, including a $50 million gift from Paul Foster — the largest donation in the history of the Texas Tech University System.

2006

The Medical Science and Medical Education Buildings are open, providing dedicated facilities for comprehensive medical education.

2007

Patient clinics integrate to form Texas Tech Physicians of El Paso, consolidating clinical services. The medical school is officially named the Paul L. Foster School of Medicine.

2008

Jose Manuel de la Rosa, M.D., is appointed Founding Dean of the Foster School of Medicine. Regional nursing education expands with the opening of a branch of Lubbock’s Anita Thigpen Perry School of Nursing, and Josefina Lujan, Ph.D., R.N., serves as the regional dean.

2009

The first class of 40 medical students begins a four-year medical education in El Paso, marking a milestone in addressing the region’s healthcare workforce needs and ensuring that future physicians understand border health challenges.

2010

The Foster School of Medicine receives provisional accreditation from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), confirming that the inaugural class’s program meets national standards for medical education — a critical milestone on the path to full accreditation.

2011

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) approves a freestanding school of nursing. The Gayle Greve Hunt School of Nursing opens and enrolls its inaugural class, expanding nursing education capacity in a region facing a 40% nurse shortage relative to national averages.

2012

Jeanne Novotny, Ph.D., R.N., is appointed Dean of the Hunt School of Nursing. The TTU Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences establishes a regional branch with seven students, creating opportunities for biomedical research focused on border health issues.

2013

Senate Bill 120 establishes the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center at El Paso (Texas Tech Health El Paso) as an independent university within the Texas Tech University System. Tedd Mitchell, M.D., serves as Interim President. The campus celebrates 40 years of presence in the community.

2014

Richard Lange, M.D., M.B.A., assumes the presidency and the medical school deanship. The Hunt School of Nursing building opens. The L. Frederick Francis Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences receives official recognition, establishing research capacity focused on cancer, diabetes, infectious diseases, and neurosciences affecting border populations.

2015–2019: Academic Program Advancement and Recognition

Independence brought accountability, and accountability drove growth. In the five years following separation from Lubbock, the institution pursued accreditation across every program it offered and received commendation in nearly every case — a signal that the quality of its academic enterprise was being measured against national peers, not merely regional need. New graduate programs in biomedical sciences and nursing multiplied the institutional profile beyond medicine. Planning began for a dental school to address an El Paso County and West Texas dentist-to-resident ratio that lagged well behind the state average. By the close of the decade, Texas Tech Health El Paso had ceased to be defined solely by what it lacked and was beginning to be recognized for what it had built.

2016

A Master of Science program and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Biomedical Sciences received approval, expanding graduate education opportunities for regional students. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board grants preliminary authority to plan a dental medicine program to address severe shortages of dental care providers. Rajkumar Lakshmanaswamy, Ph.D., is appointed Dean of the Francis Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

2017

A Master of Science in Nursing program receives approval, creating advanced practice nursing pathways. The Foster School of Medicine’s Continuing Medical Education program achieves full accreditation with commendation. The Hunt School of Nursing’s baccalaureate program receives accreditation from the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education. The Hospitals of Providence Transmountain Campus opens, providing the medical school with additional residency programs.

2018

Richard C. Black, D.D.S., is appointed Dean of the Hunt School of Dental Medicine. The first Master of Science in Nursing cohort begins study. The TTU Board of Regents authorizes the dental school, addressing El Paso County’s dental shortage, where one dentist serves 2,969 residents compared to the state average of one per 2,019. The medical school receives continued full accreditation. The institution achieves initial accreditation with commendation from the regional accrediting body.

2019

The medical school marks 10 years of operation. The Hunt School of Nursing holds its first white coat ceremony. The institution becomes the official healthcare provider for the El Paso Locomotives FC soccer team.

2020–2022: Pandemic Response

COVID-19 arrived in El Paso in the autumn of 2020 with particular severity, overwhelming hospital systems and placing the institution’s faculty and residents on the front lines of a public health emergency visible to the entire country. The institution responded without pausing its other work: the dental school received its initial accreditation, a new dental oral health clinic opened to serve low-income patients, and the inaugural dental class enrolled — all in the middle of a pandemic. The episode revealed something important about what a health sciences university rooted in a border community means in practice: when the city suffered, the institution did not retreat. It vaccinated health care workers, graduated physicians on schedule, and emerged from the crisis with new programs, new buildings, and a deepened sense of civic obligation.

2020

The Woody L. Hunt School of Dental Medicine receives initial accreditation for its Doctor of Dental Medicine program. Virtual commencement ceremonies accommodate pandemic restrictions while ensuring graduating healthcare professionals can begin serving communities. Construction begins on the Texas Tech Dental Oral Health Clinic to expand affordable dental care access. In December, COVID-19 vaccination of healthcare professionals begins with Moderna vaccine distribution, protecting frontline workers serving El Paso patients.

2021

The Texas Tech Dental Oral Health Clinic opens, expanding dental care capacity in underserved areas and providing affordable services for low-income residents. The dental school enrolls its inaugural class of 40 students who will help address the region’s critical dental workforce shortage. Medical Sciences Building II opens, expanding research and educational space. The Gayle Greve Hunt School of Nursing celebrates 10 years of nursing education. Richard Lange is recognized as El Pasoan of the Year.

2022

A $10 million gift from Rick and Ginger Francis endows the Francis Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, ensuring sustained support for biomedical research addressing regional health disparities. The Department of Emergency Medicine launches a tactical medicine program, including a fellowship, to strengthen emergency readiness and response capacity for the region.

2023–2025: Cancer Center Development and Community Health Expansion

For decades, a cancer diagnosis in El Paso meant a journey — 250 to 750 miles to the nearest comprehensive treatment center, a trip that imposed financial strain, separated patients from family support, and in some cases simply went unmade. This final period of the timeline is the story of a community’s determination to end that condition. With $130 million in state appropriations, $25 million from the Fox family, $30 million from a county bond measure, and a new dean whose career has been spent advancing cancer imaging, Texas Tech Health El Paso broke ground in September 2025 on a 350,000-square-foot cancer center designed to serve 1,100 patients annually. It is the most consequential single project in the institution’s history — and, for the patients it will serve, perhaps the most personal.

2023

The Texas Legislature appropriates $65 million for cancer center planning and construction, responding to community needs where patients travel 250 to 750 miles for comprehensive cancer care. The Fox family commits $25 million to the cancer center, motivated by the burden of cancer treatment that requires extensive travel away from family support systems. The university partners with UT El Paso to form MedFuture, which provides a pathway for local high school students to enter the Foster School of Medicine.

2024

El Paso County voters approve a $396.6 million bond for University Medical Center, with $30 million allocated to the future Fox Cancer Center. The Paso del Norte Health Foundation awards $5 million to recruit cancer specialists, addressing the gap in specialized oncology care in West Texas. The medical school graduates 114 students, 10 of whom remain in El Paso for residency training, marking the first significant contribution to the region’s physician workforce through the nationwide annual residency match program for graduating seniors.

2025

Eric M. Rohren, M.D., Ph.D., is appointed as the Rick and Ginger Francis Endowed Dean of the Foster School of Medicine, bringing nationally recognized expertise in cancer imaging and positron emission tomography to expand specialized oncology care access for Borderplex patients. The Texas Legislature appropriates an additional $65 million for cancer center construction. On September 17, groundbreaking occurs for the Fox Cancer Center and medical clinic, a 350,000-square-foot facility designed to serve 1,100 cancer patients annually, sparing families the financial and emotional burden of traveling hundreds of miles for treatment. The Hunt Family Foundation commits $5 million to establish the Hunt Medical Oncology Clinic within the cancer center.

After an impassioned plea by the dean of engineering, John W. Kidd, the faculty “unanimously and enthusiastically” approves his motion not to require faculty to wear academic regalia at graduation. He argued that a suit and tie were more than suitable as they represented “good democratic clothes.” –Faculty Minutes

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Most alumni today recognize the miner or prospector as UTEP’s mascot. That would be expected for a school whose nickname is the Miners. Yet, for the first eighty years of its existence, UTEP’s official mascot was the burro. Students selected the hardy pack animal as this mascot April 1919. Photographs and prints of prospectors from the era frequently included burros. Ruth M. Augur, the school’s registrar and a classically trained artist, created the first caricature of a pack burro later that year, which she placed on the school’s first seal. Students that year secured a live burro to parade at football games and M Day celebrations. Over the years, various burros were housed on campus or at homes of supporters. By the 1950s, students had named the burro Dynamite. When the University of Texas Board System of Regents codified mascots for its components in 1970, it designated the burro for UTEP.

Despite its official designation by the regents in 1970, the school’s athletics program in the 1960s sought a different mascot for use in their promotional materials. The program experimented with caricatures of miners and prospectors adopted by other mining schools during the 1950s that were seeking graphic identities based on a person rather than an animal. The earliest of these, “Joe Miner,” first appeared in a 1952 issue of Engineering Day, the Missouri School of Mines (today’s Missouri University of Science and Technology, or MST) magazine. According to archivists with the school, it may have been modeled on a porcelain miner figurine that an artist named William Quinn donated to the school.

Other prospector caricatures with features similar to Joe Miner soon emerged. South Dakota School of Mines and Technology introduced “Shiftless Sam” in 1953. In 1955, Texas Western College student Alfred Ortiz drew his version of Joe Miner for the student publication El Burro, which he named “Pablo.” These early incarnations were followed in 1957 by Joe Miner II, who carried a drafting T-square rather than a shovel and was featured on the cover of MST’s yearbook that year. Joe Miner II then went on to make an appearance in most every mining school yearbook over the next decade, including Texas Western’s, which featured him in 1959. TWC placed Joe Miner II on various merchandise items, as did the other mining schools, throughout the 1960s.

In 1962, Marshall Meece, a civil engineering student at Texas Western College, drew his own version of a mascot that replaced the grizzled prospector based with a true hardhat miner. His smiling, barrel-chested parading miner carried just a pickaxe instead of a shovel or T-square of earlier incarnations. In 1974 UTEP painted an updated version of Meece’s caricature on the Sun Bowl field. That same year students and alumni named him “Paydirt Pete,” and both name and caricature were trademarked in 1981. Another UTEP student, Bernie Lopez, created a new caricature, which the University adopted in 1984. His rugged unsmiling miner also wore a lantern helmet; however, he now held the pickaxe in a more rough-and-tumble, menacing, hard-charging fashion. In November 1999, after Paydirt Pete transformed into to the pickaxe-wielding, rugged mustachioed miner that he is today, the regents officially recognized the miner as UTEP’s official mascot, finally putting the long-forgotten burro mascot out to pasture.

Research Notes

P. J. Vierra, "Costumed Mascots," in The Miners History Sourcebook, Abridged (El Paso: UT El Paso, 2022).

P. J. Vierra, "Mascots," in The Miners History Sourcebook, Abridged (El Paso: UT El Paso, 2022).

-The Encyclopedia of UTEP History

Sun Bowl Drive is closed temporarily for the construction of UTEP’s first multi-level parking garage. – Prospector

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The day before commencement, campus held the particular stillness that follows the end of a semester. Classes were over. The classrooms and labs were empty, but the sidewalks belonged to the seniors of Texas Tech Health El Paso’s four schools, in caps and tassels, white coats and spring dresses, and suits and ties, claiming spots in front of sand-colored, Spanish Revival buildings with red tile roofs for photographs they will keep for decades.

I was walking. It was a warm May afternoon, and the desert willow trees along the campus paths were in bloom, their pink-purple trumpet flowers arriving just as Chihuahuan Desert’s heat began to settle in. The palo verde trees still wore their spring yellow. Just as colorful were the students gathered near El Intercambio, the campus art installation at the heart of the inner quad, where nursing students adjusted mortarboards and tassels while medical students laughed at each other’s medieval soft velvet tams. You could read the whole of medicine in their hoods: kelly green for the physicians, red for the nurses, yellow for biomedical researchers, lilac for the dentists.

I watched them the way writers do: with attention, and the odd awareness of knowing more about a scene than the people in it.

I saw hope. As a former college instructor, I recognize the particular exhaustion and joy of a class at its moment of completion. These are people who made a deliberate choice, at some point in their lives, to devote their careers to other people’s health. They will spend the next thirty or forty years in rooms like the one I sat in on April 14, when I received my diagnosis. Some of them will treat patients like me. One of them may change how cancers like mine are treated.

That thought stayed with me. Because I have cancer. And one form of it could, in the right future, disappear almost entirely.

Mine is classified as head and neck: a category that includes cancers of the mouth, throat, tongue, larynx, and the surrounding lymph nodes. The NIH recognizes more than 200 distinct cancers; head and neck accounts for about four percent of all U.S. diagnoses, with an estimated 71,000 new cases in 2024 alone.1

Every year, an estimated 3,200 El Pasoans are diagnosed with cancer, and approximately 67 are diagnosed with oral cavity or pharyngeal cancer, the category that includes my tumor.2 El Paso’s rate runs below state and national averages, a pattern consistent with the Hispanic health paradox, but oral cavity and pharyngeal cancer rates are rising among Texas men. The HPV-driven surge reshaping the national curve has not bypassed this city.

One to two El Pasoans are diagnosed with throat cancer each week. That week in April was mine.

My cancer began at the base of my tongue. I have named the tumor Boris.

Boris likely started growing in mid-2024. The cells of my throat encountered an error they could not repair: a protein signal that told them to divide without limit and to survive without consequence. Healthy cells divide when necessary and die when instructed. Boris’s cells broke both rules. My immune system should have shut him down. Boris persuaded the immune surveillance system there was nothing to see here. Move along. Over two years—silently, painlessly—Boris grew to roughly the size of a large grape. Then he issued instructions to a neighboring lymph node.

The head of our dental clinic named this second tumor Natasha. Natasha is what I felt on April 1. Boris, I still cannot feel.

I began researching the differential diagnosis in early April, using an AI tool I deploy for doctoral-level work. I call it Clio. The name is not a designation of personhood. AI has no sex, and the possession of language, however fluent, does not make a large language model human. What Clio has is speed and range. It walked me through lymph node differentials, cranial nerve anatomy, and the conditions that could explain a neck mass in a 64-year-old male. The output was accurate, a starting point I confirmed against primary sources. Clio, like any research assistant eager to please, needs guardrails.

The most common cause of oropharyngeal cancer today is human papillomavirus (HPV), a virus so prevalent the CDC estimates virtually every sexually active person contracts at least one strain in their lifetime.3 HPV-related head and neck cancer has been rising for two decades as tobacco-related cases declined.4 HPV-positive oropharyngeal cancer carries a five-year survival rate of 80 to 85 percent; HPV-negative disease runs closer to 50 percent.5

This cancer is largely preventable. Gardasil 9, approved through age 45, protects against the HPV strains driving virtually all oropharyngeal cancers. A 2025 study found measurable reductions in oropharyngeal cancer incidence among vaccinated populations under 45, the first real-world evidence that the vaccine is already bending the curve.6

The students posing near El Intercambio yesterday are my heroes. They will spend their careers in exam rooms, research labs, operating suites, and dental clinics. Every HPV vaccine conversation they have with a parent, a teenager, or a hesitant patient is a Boris that does not get born. A Natasha that never arrives.

That is not an abstraction. That is the work.

I read the science as a writer. The next entry begins where the science got personal.

* * *

Dr. Vierra is a writer with Texas Tech Health El Paso. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author, writing as a patient and a journalist, and do not represent the official position of Texas Tech Health El Paso. Clinical decisions should be made in consultation with a qualified healthcare provider.

* * *

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How to follow A Journey Here. This Substack is its own section of The University Historian. To get only these cancer‑journey entries by email, click “Subscribe,” then go to your subscription settings (or visit theuniversityhistorian.substack.com/account). Under “Emails enabled for,” leave A Journey Here checked and uncheck the other sections. You can change this at any time.

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For one year, I played a patient.

Not in any dramatic sense of stage and screen. It was in the classroom. I was a standardized patient at Texas Tech Health El Paso, an actor trained to sit across from medical students and present scripted symptoms so that future physicians can practice what cannot be learned from a textbook: how to take a history, how to conduct an examination, how to look at a person and say what the evidence suggests. I did it because I believed in it. Medical education requires practice, and practice requires a body in the room willing to be examined, questioned, and occasionally misdiagnosed.

I was good at it. I gave the students something real to work with.

I did not expect the simulation to become real—that I would find myself in an actual emergency department, with an actual first-year medical doctor, known as a resident, on the other side of the table, facing symptoms not scripted for me.

The resident I met with was in the middle of his twelve-hour shift and ten months out of medical school. (They’re called “residents” because new doctors used to literally live at a hospital as part of their training after graduation.) As a writer for the university’s Office of Institutional Advancement, I am used to interviewing residents. I know what the first year looks like from the outside—the rotations, the supervised handoffs, the accumulated weight of patients, each someone’s first.

This resident was a native Texan who had chosen El Paso in “The Match”—the annual ritual in which newly minted physicians learn where they will spend the next three years or more, perfecting their skills before they can practice on their own. As a medical student in East Texas, he had traveled to El Paso to intern at University Medical Center of El Paso and, based on that experience, decided this was where he wanted to be. El Paso County is a federally designated Health Professional Shortage Area. Here, Texas's physician-to-patient ratio is already 26 percent worse than the national average, and nearly half of Texas residents who complete residency elsewhere leave the state. He was deliberately choosing here over somewhere easier.

Between his patients, as I waited for test results, we talked about his education and life as a first-year resident in El Paso. The last conversation—the one at the end of his shift—was the one neither of us wanted.

My journey to UMC’s emergency department had begun two weeks earlier, on April 1, when I found a lump on the left side of my neck.

I noticed it the way you notice something you have been half-noticing for a while—the morning it finally refused to be ignored. Dense to the touch, tucked near the jawline. No pain. No fever. I am a writer, which means I am professionally, if not overly, skilled at rationalizing. I went about my life. I went to work. I gardened at home. I read and wrote. The lump stayed.

I opened a conversation with Clio, an AI assistant I developed as a research tool. I named it after the Greek muse of history. I treat Clio the way I treat any capable graduate assistant—highly useful, rigorously trained, but requiring consistent verification. I reviewed every source Clio cited, as I would for any research assistant, whether carbon- or silicon-based.

I asked Clio to work through lymph node differentials, cranial nerve anatomy, and the range of conditions that could explain a neck mass in a 64-year-old male with my symptom profile.

Clio’s response: A lump in the neck is a common clinical complaint. The overwhelming majority of such lumps are benign, most commonly representing enlarged reactive lymph nodes responding to nearby infection.

In its own sycophantic way, Clio tried to reassure me. But there was no infection. Within days, new symptoms arrived in a cascade along the left side of my face. First, my ear felt permanently plugged, as if I had been on an airplane that never landed. Then a high-frequency tone appeared and seemed to grow louder. Pressure along my jawline. Stiffness in my neck. Hoarseness that crept in gradually enough that I almost convinced myself it was allergies. Then one morning, the left side of my face felt numb. Not painfully, just quietly, the way a limb feels when you have slept on it.

That is when I went to UMC’s emergency department.

The resident ordered a CT. As we waited for results, he took my history—when the symptoms had started, how they had progressed—and performed a neurological examination. His supervisor, known as an attending physician, arrived and examined me as well. I was struck by how precisely the attending’s exam mirrored the resident’s: the same sequence, the same questions, the same hand gestures, but with the ease of someone for whom the sequence had become second nature. Residency, I remembered, works by absorption. The resident was learning the attending’s economy of motion the way I once learned to present symptoms to students believably—through repetition, through the body memorizing what the mind could not fully anticipate.

I had spent a year teaching medical students how to be in that room. Now I was in the room without a script.

After several hours of waiting for test results, the resident walked in and closed the door.

I found myself thinking about what I knew from the other side of the standardized patient table. The students who did it well were the ones who could tolerate the uncertainty of a silence, who did not rush past the hard sentence to avoid the discomfort of its landing. I wondered whether he had practiced this. I hoped someone had let him practice this.

Before sharing the test results, he asked what I had been thinking and what had brought me in. I told him. He listened the way residents do when they listen well: completely, without rushing to the next sentence.

Then he said he wanted to be straightforward with me: the results were more serious than he had hoped. He paused to let this sink in. He described how the CT had found a mass at the base of my tongue, roughly the size of a grape. Some of the lymph nodes on the left side of my neck were involved, indicating that some cells had spread into the lymphatic system. He said it was likely squamous cell carcinoma—the most common type in this part of the throat.

He asked what questions I had, even if they were not fully formed. And then he waited for whatever I would say next, which is the step most residents do not execute correctly, because the silence is genuinely hard to hold. When I had said what I could, he told me he had already contacted specialists and what I needed to do next.

I reached out to shake his hand. He will be a good doctor. He handled my silent pauses correctly.

Before he came into the room, I was the cancer writer—the observer, the one on the outside of the experience, translating it for everyone else. When he walked out, I had changed chairs. I was, for the foreseeable future, a cancer patient. My objective now was to become a cancer survivor.

But I am still a cancer writer. I just have a different point of view.

The good news, if there is any, is that the road to becoming a cancer survivor exists. Squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck is a disease with a real treatment protocol and a real survival rate. The survival rate, however, varies by stage. Until that is known, my five-year survival rate ranges from 50 percent to 95 percent.

Outcomes improve with earlier-stage disease, surgery, modern chemoradiation, and a care team that has done this before. A 50 percent chance of beating this is not the number I would have chosen. For now, what matters is that the road runs through surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, and whatever the next two years bring. People walk this road every day, and most of them arrive on the other side.

I have spent three years covering this institution’s cancer programs—the physicians, the researchers, the Fox Cancer Center rising from the ground beneath two towering yellow cranes on Hope Court, the people this community calls cancer warriors. I have written about cancer from the outside for long enough to know exactly what I did not understand about it. I am about to understand it differently.

This series is that understanding made useful. I will write about what is happening to my body in language anyone can follow. I will write about the medicine, not as a patient passively receiving it, but as a researcher who has spent months reading the literature and who intends to keep reading it. I will write about what it is like to navigate a serious diagnosis at a moment when the comprehensive cancer center this region has needed for generations is two years away from opening.

I will not always write about hope. Some entries will be harder than that. But the orientation of this series—the direction it faces—is toward something worth reaching.

That journey here begins.

How to follow A Journey Here. This Substack is its own section of The University Historian. To get only these cancer‑journey entries by email, click “Subscribe,” then go to your subscription settings (or visit theuniversityhistorian.substack.com/account). Under “Emails enabled for,” leave A Journey Here checked and uncheck the other sections. You can change this at any time.

How to follow the whole archive. If you want both the illness series and the institutional history — entries on UTEP’s past, Texas Tech Health El Paso, and the Fox Cancer Center, along with historiography and method — simply keep all sections checked. You’ll receive every new post from The University Historian in your inbox.

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The El Paso Chamber of Commerce announces plans to establish a $1 million endowment to benefit the College of Mines. –El Paso Herald  

2004

The women’s softball team takes to the diamond for its first practice. –University Communications

Want more #UTEP history? Be sure to subscribe to the Mining UTEP’s History newsletter. Click here to see the latest article.

The student government votes to endorse the sale of beer and wine in the student cafeteria. It will be another two years before the administration allows alcohol sales. –Prospector

2009

A dorm advisor reports the odor of marijuana wafting from the ground floor of a Miner Village apartment. Responding police officers find no suspect. –Prospector

Want more #UTEP history? Read Mining UTEP’s History, a collection of in-depth articles on the institution’s past. Click here to see the latest article.

The English department hires Marjorie Lawson. The spouse of a Fort Bliss soldier, she is the university’s first Black faculty member. –Joseph Ray Papers

Want more #UTEP history? Read Mining UTEP’s History, a collection of in-depth articles on the institution’s past. Click here to see the latest article.

The U.T. System regents pay the architectural firm of Trost & Trost $4,027.45 for their Paso del Norte campus building designs. The payment included a deduction for the cost of the original Bhutanese revival designs prepared by the rival El Paso architectural firm of Gibson & Robertson. –U.T. President’s Office Records 

1918

President Robert Vinson, at the behest of the regents, strongly rebukes Dean Steve Worrell for his mismanaging the school’s budget. The regents will use this incident to assume greater control of the institution the following year. –U.T. President’s Office Records

1961

The first of 40 Peace Corps candidates arrive on campus for training. Most of the cohort will serve in Tanganyika (today’s Tanzania). –New York Times

1970

President Joseph R. Smiley announces the formation of an ad hoc committee of students and faculty to review recent increases in the athletic program’s budget. Athletics was the only program to receive a budget increase for the upcoming year. –Prospector

1985

Baseball records its final out, as the university drops it as an intercollegiate sport. It is replaced by tennis. –Prospector

Want more #UTEP history? Read Mining UTEP’s History, a collection of in-depth articles on the institution’s past. Click here to see the latest article.

The Texas Legislature alters the tuition fee structure for UTEP. Effective in the fall, the flat fee will be replaced by a variable fee based on semester hours enrolled. -Prospector

1986

The U.T. System Board of Regents authorizes the university to permit up to three annual non-university events in the Sun Bowl. –Prospector

Want more #UTEP history? Read Mining UTEP’s History, a collection of in-depth articles on the institution’s past. Click here to see the latest article.