Texas in 1932 - El Paso, Ysleta, Franklin Mountains

C.R. Dockum drew this pictorial map of El Paso del Norte in 1932, printed by the Rocky Mountain Bank Note Company in El Paso itself rather than by an eastern publishing house. Pictorial maps like this one were a distinctly early-20th-century form, trading strict cartographic accuracy for illustrated vignettes, decorative borders, and a compass rose that oriented the viewer as much through storytelling as through geography - a style built for display and conversation as much as for navigation. Dockum's is a scarce example of the genre, and it captures El Paso, Texas, and its sister city Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, directly across the Rio Grande, at a moment when the two border cities functioned as one interlocked economic and cultural region. By 1932, El Paso had grown into the dominant commercial center of the Trans-Pecos, its fortunes tied to copper smelting, the railroad, and its position as the busiest crossing point on the entire US-Mexico border.

The map singles out the A.S. & R. Smelter, the enormous copper and lead smelting works that anchored El Paso's industrial economy and shaped its skyline for decades, along with the missions and the international bridge that physically tied El Paso to Ciudad Juarez across the river. Vignettes bordering the sheet depict scenes of the region's earlier history, from Indigenous life to the area's Spanish colonial missions, set against the map's central subject of two rapidly growing 20th-century border cities. The Rio Grande itself, called the Rio Grande del Norte in the map's own title, is the organizing feature of the whole sheet, the line around which both cities' commerce, mining, and agriculture were built.

It's a natural gift for an El Paso family, a Texas transplant with ties to the border region, or a collector drawn to the illustrated pictorial maps that flourished in the American Southwest between the world wars. Where most of the store's Texas sheets are conventional 19th-century atlas maps, this one stands apart as a 20th-century pictorial view - closer in spirit to a tourist souvenir than a survey map, and rarer for it. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.