From Compromise to Cancer Center: A History of Texas Tech Health El Paso

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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