Sun City Books

Sun City Books occupies a profound geographic and cultural position in downtown El Paso, where the Franklin Mountains meet the Rio Grande and the United States and Mexico face each other across a narrow stretch of water. The store was founded in 1999 by a Juarense-American couple who crossed the border daily for decades and wanted to create a literary space that reflected the binational reality of life in the Paso del Norte region. The bilingual inventory is not an afterthought but the store's core identity, with Spanish and English titles shelved together and many readers browsing comfortably in both languages. The border studies section is one of the most comprehensive anywhere, covering immigration policy, border art, maquiladora economics, and the human stories of crossing and being crossed. The Mexican literature section features both canonical and contemporary voices, from Octavio Paz to Valeria Luiselli. The rare books room houses early Rio Grande Valley maps, border survey documents, and first-edition works by El Paso literary legends like Cormac McCarthy, who wrote much of his border trilogy while living in the city.