Essential English phrases

El Paso's own name for itself, from the pachuco culture that grew up here in the 1930s and 40s and spread to Los Angeles. 'Chuco Town' on a mural or a T-shirt means this city and nowhere else.

The University of Texas at El Paso's teams, and by extension UTEP itself — whose campus is built in Bhutanese Dzong style, the only one of its kind outside Bhutan, after a 1914 magazine article persuaded a founder's wife.

The official nickname, and close to literal — El Paso averages around three hundred sunny days a year. It is on the buses, the beer labels and the city's own letterhead.

The four pieces of El Paso, divided by the Franklins and the Rio Grande. The Westside is the affluent side under the mountain, the Eastside the newer sprawl, the Lower Valley the old agricultural corridor along the river, and Northeast the part next to Fort Bliss.

Going over one of the bridges into Ciudad Juárez, or coming back. Used as a plain verb with no drama — 'I'm crossing after work' — by a very large share of the city. The return leg is the one with the queue.

The US Customs and Border Protection trusted-traveler programme for the land border. Members use dedicated lanes and cut the northbound wait dramatically. In El Paso it is treated as an ordinary household admin task, not a frequent-flyer perk.

Loop 375's road over the Franklin Mountains, which split the city in half. Directions are given as 'over Transmountain' or 'around', and the choice can be twenty minutes either way.

Rolled tacos sitting in a thin tomato broth under a heap of shredded cheese. Outsiders are baffled; El Pasoans are not interested in your opinion. A local institution and a genuine shibboleth.

Roasted New Mexico chile, sold by the sack from rotating roasters outside supermarkets in late summer. The Hatch valley is a couple of hours up the road and the smell of the roasters is how the city knows it is August.

El Paso is on Mountain Time and every other big Texas city is on Central. Your 9am is Austin's 10am, all year. Newcomers miss a meeting exactly once, and the calendar invite is nearly always to blame.

Short for maquiladora — a factory on the Juárez side, usually assembling for export back into the US. Hundreds of them employ hundreds of thousands of people, and a great deal of El Paso's professional work exists to serve them.

The North American monsoon, roughly July to September, which delivers most of El Paso's tiny annual rainfall in short violent storms. Arroyos that are dry ditches for eleven months move fast enough to carry a car.

El Paso's city services line and app for potholes, bulk pickup, code complaints and stray animals. 911 stays for emergencies; 311 is the one you will actually use.