“The U.S.-Mexico border, in so many ways for me, is the center of the universe,” he told the cheering crowd.

O’Rourke, who describes himself as a lifelong fronterizo — Spanish for “border resident” — didn’t always feel such pride. Like many young folks in the brain-drained border zone, he grew up wanting to leave El Paso, he said. It wasn’t until he left and returned as an adult that he began to rethink the significance of growing up in a city that produced the bands At the Drive In and Mars Volta (O’Rourke has personal connections to both), where Elizabeth Taylor spent her first honeymoon and where Mariano Anzuela wrote Los de abajo, one of the defining novels of the Mexican Revolution.

“Kids like me had internalized what the rest of the country thought about us,” O’Rourke said. “That we weren’t supposed to amount to much. That we were just a dusty border town.” That’s wrong, he contended. The towns and cities of the U.S.-Mexico border are “a place for the ambitious,” for those who want to “take a chance and bet everything on bigness and on greatness.”