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2 of 3| FILE - In this Feb. 11, 2019, file photo former Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke speaks to a crowd inside a ball park inside the El Paso County Coliseum in El Paso, Texas. (AP Photo/Rudy Gutierrez, File)

3 of 3| FILE - In this Nov. 6, 2018, file photo, then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the 2018 Democratic Candidate for Senate in Texas, wearing cap, leaves a polling place with his family after voting in El Paso, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

FILE - In this Feb. 11, 2019, file photo former Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke speaks to a crowd inside a ball park inside the El Paso County Coliseum in El Paso, Texas. (AP Photo/Rudy Gutierrez, File)

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FILE - In this Nov. 6, 2018, file photo, then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the 2018 Democratic Candidate for Senate in Texas, wearing cap, leaves a polling place with his family after voting in El Paso, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

Thirty-two-year-old Beto O’Rourke didn’t know what the text arriving to his flip phone meant. But he knew it was from the woman he’d taken to Mexico on a blind date three days earlier, and he figured it was a good sign.

It was December 2004, and O’Rourke and Amy Sanders had parked near the international bridge and walked over the Rio Grande from El Paso to Ciudad Juarez. They got margaritas at the Kentucky Club, a cavernous, 99-year-old bar named for Bourbon distilleries that decamped to Mexico during U.S. Prohibition.

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They had dinner at Martino’s, an O’Rourke family favorite for Sunday lunch. Then they hit El Recreo, an unmarked and relatively quiet watering hole perfect for deeper conversation. Their last stop was the city’s cathedral and its side chapel, Mission Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, where they debated when it was built.

For O’Rourke, crossing the border that night was by design. Sanders was new to El Paso and he wanted to make sure she understood that it and Juarez “are two halves of a larger community” — and that the binational vibe was something she’d be into.

“She felt really good in Juarez, ” O’Rourke told The Associated Press in an interview. “That’s a great test of people for me. If you don’t like that, that’s fine. But we’re probably not going to hit it off.”

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The former Texas congressman is now a presidential candidate, undergoing his own, far more elaborate test of character. But El Paso — and by extension Juarez — remains critical. O’Rourke has made his far-flung, desert city a centerpiece of his public identity, a protagonist in his origin story and a talking point in his stump speeches.

To O’Rourke, El Paso epitomizes the sort of rich cultural mingling and exciting, economic power that is possible when the United States and Mexico don’t live in fear of one another. On the campaign trail, it’s both symbol and sword, wielded to puncture President Donald Trump’s signature calls for erecting more and higher walls along the border. He’ll formally launch his campaign here Saturday, highlighting the border credentials that set him apart in the crowded Democratic field.

“El Paso is one half of the largest binational community in the world, joined, not separated, by the Rio Grande, ” O’Rourke says multiple times a day on the stump. During his star-making near upset of Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz last fall, he often told the story of the blind date to underscore his point. He says of El Paso and Juarez, “We’re really one community, and it’s beautiful. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, defensive about or wall off.”

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He spent much of his border boyhood itching to get out. He did, to an elite East Coast boarding school nearly 1, 900 miles away. He returned home later to find his wife and political career — a career that was fueled financially at the start by El Paso’s wealthiest and most powerful business interests. O’Rourke’s early moves in public office rankled some of the communities he now holds up as models. And, though now he calls for tearing down the border walls that have stood between El Paso and Juarez in some form since the 1970s, O’Rourke voted just last year to approve new border barrier construction.

Such decisions still touch nerves with some in a city that wrestles with divisions over class and ethnicity in ways O’Rourke rarely talks about on the trail.

“He doesn’t support us because we’re barrio people, ” said 90-year-old Antonia Morales who lives in the Duranguito neighborhood, where city authorities have begun decommissioning homes and fencing off streets in hopes of eventually building a sports arena. “But we’re El Paso. This is El Paso’s history.”

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Of the two cities, Juarez has long been larger, founded where the 400-year-old Camino Real (The Royal Road) pushed its way from Mexico City into what would become U.S. territory. El Paso sprang up to trade with its larger, more-established neighbor to the South.

By the time Robert Francis O’Rourke was born a fourth generation Texan in 1972, El Paso was an industrial hub known as the blue jeans capital of the world. Levis, Guess and other brands sewed pants at local factories. White families like the O’Rourkes were in the minority; 57 percent of the population was Hispanic according to the 1980 U.S. Census.

O’Rourke grew up in a well-to-do, hillside neighborhood of red-tile-roofed homes. They offered sweeping views of central El Paso, as well as the moonscape-like slopes of the Franklin Mountains, the Rockies’ southernmost tip. His family bought its home from a man who had installed a massive, rectangular swimming pool for physical therapy exercises. El Paso gets 300-plus days of sunshine a year, and the family spent as much time in and around that pool as possible.

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Juarez is right there, visible from nearly anywhere in El Paso, including O’Rourke’s street: Concrete canals section off a Rio Grande that is usually little more than a brown puddle. Low-slung, concrete homes and storefronts are flanked by bulbous foothills. A sea of lights cuts the desert darkness at night.

“It just didn’t feel like another country, ” said Rep. Veronica Escobar, a fellow El Pasoan who replaced O’Rourke in Congress after he vacated his seat to challenge Cruz.

Juarez felt almost like an El Paso suburb. Its youngsters crossed by the thousands to go to El Paso schools, joining college students and commuters heading to work. Even El Pasoans who may not have spoken Spanish— or the local mixture of English and Spanish known as pocho — would leave their downtown offices during lunch breaks and walk across the bridge to shop at department stores, pick up groceries or go to doctors or dentists who charged less than their U.S. counterparts.

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Back then, no passport was needed, there was never a line to get into Mexico. Wait times to return were rarely onerous — especially for those willing to leave their cars and walk.

“It was exotic and thrilling, ” said Mary Polk, a neighbor and close friend of O’Rourke’s parents during his childhood. “We had this wonderful other community right there and we all grew up with that knowledge and that feeling.”

Despite such obvious, binational affections, some Mexicans resented having their “otherness” highlighted, then and now. O’Rourke has observed the classist undercurrents permeating the El Paso-Juarez relationship, even as he also has perpetuated some of the same stereotypes.

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In a 2011 book he co-authored, O’Rourke described Juarez as “a place to take visitors to gawk and be entertained and then go home. You drank beer for 50 cents a bottle, bought some trinkets at the market and maybe walked by a cathedral.”

But then he continues: “El Paso has the tall downtown bank buildings, the ordered system of freeways and streets, the manicured lawns in distinct subdivisions. Juarez has the street life, the staggering swings between rich and poor and the invigorating chaos of 350 years of ad hoc construction and twisting streets.”

The O’Rourkes were part of the city’s elite. The future presidential candidate’s mother ran an upscale furniture store, Charlotte’s, founded by her own mother. His father, Pat, was a Democratic El Paso County commissioner and county judge. He switched parties and ran as a Republican during an unsuccessful 1992 congressional election.

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O’Rourke’s mother, Melissa, says her son, the eldest of three kids, became fluent in Spanish listening to household maids and Mexican friends. O’Rourke, who played soccer growing up, recalls heading into Juarez for classmates’ birthday parties. He was called “Beto, ” a common nickname in the region, as a baby.

“El Paso’s the largest village in the world, it’s remarkable and it’s only kind of scary, ” joked Howard Campbell, a cultural anthropology professor at the University of Texas at El Paso and a friend of O’Rourke. “It’s hard to misbehave without somebody seeing you.”

Campbell said, “There’s a great deal of intimacy and mix between Anglos and Mexicans. ... It’s not like you had this white community and this brown one.”

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O’Rourke now describes El Paso as where “Texas meets the rest of the world” and the nation’s new Ellis Island, but as a teenager he felt isolated and longed to get away