Border Confessions
(an essay I wrote a few years ago and have been revising)
I moved to the U.S.-Mexico border in the summer of 2000. We drove from Chicago, where I had just graduated from college, to El Paso, and before even seeing the big bridges and crossing gates that separated our new city from Juarez, Mexico, we moved into an apartment complex with large steel gates that opened only with the swipe of a card.
Borders in the borderland.

It was not clear whom the gates were meant to keep out other than everyone who did not pay rent to live in the complex. But it struck me as strange that a complex, which was not on the high-end of apartments, deemed it necessary to keep all non-residents out. And it seemed even stranger that the gates didn't really work. I wondered if there would be gates on these same apartments if they were in Chicago or Albuquerque or Detroit and decided that it wasn't likely. After living on the border for a while it became clear to me that first, the gates were for show and second, they were really meant to keep Mexicans out.

Late at night and early on weekday mornings, trucks and old vans with Mexico plates are found by the dumpsters in our parking lot, their drivers picking through the trash. They must wait until some resident or another comes home or goes to work and the gate opens, providing an opportunity to hunt for whatever treasures these apartment dwellers may have cast off – old mattresses, holey t-shirts, cardboard boxes. But before they can come and hunt through my trash, they have to pass through the border checkpoints to enter my country, a much more rigorous ordeal than sneaking into the apartment complex.

Their dumpster diving makes it impossible for me to ignore the reality of living along the border with Mexico. The men in their beat-up pick-ups bring the border to my doorstep. They serve as constant reminders of the poverty that lurks beyond the fences and the lines in the dirt that mark the separation of two worlds.

When people come to visit my husband, Neil and me, we have a spot we like to take them called Monument One. It is technically a park, but in all practicality, it’s a plot of desert with rocks and dirt and a few trees. What’s significant about this place is its location on the international border. The U.S. touches Mexico in this strange little corner where the Rio Grande River stops marking the boundary and monuments take over, drawing a dotted-line from El Paso to San Diego. Other than the white concrete monument that looks much like a smaller version of the Washington Monument, nothing is remarkable about the park. There is dust and some small plants and trees - typical desert landscape. On one side of the park, the Rio Grande trickles along, its brown waters passing unceremoniously between nations. On the other side of the park a desert hill offers cover for Mexican bandits who may decide to sneak up on unsuspecting tourists or local hikers.

Standing at Monument One, you can straddle the border, the only spot in the region where you can do that, because there is no fence. On weekends and national holidays, people from Anapra, Mexico, an impoverished suburb of El Paso's sister city, Juarez, come to this park and have barbeques and picnics. They drive their cars into the river and wash them, blast music from car stereos and sit under the trees that offer shade on the Mexican side of the park. I have never seen these people even approach the white obelisk marking the border. Haven’t seen them set foot in my country. They must know the Border Patrol is watching, that the officers even interrogate U.S. citizens driving away from the park – it’s happened to us more than once. But, on most days, a visitor to the park can’t see any law enforcement. Instead of manning the park with people, the U.S. government installed cameras perched on poles 60 feet up, watching at all times, even when human eyes might get tired, shut momentarily.

When Neil and I go to Monument One, we look at the monument, which is painted white with a black ‘1’ on it, but depending on the week may also be covered with various graffiti. Then we step one foot over the international boundary, which is clearly marked with a brass line in the cement. What is remarkable about this spot is how truly unremarkable it is. There are no big fences, often there aren't any visible law enforcement agents and many days we have been the only people there on either side of the border. It is just us, the river, the dust and a brass line in cement. I like to walk back and forth over the line and then keep one foot firmly planted on each side. Whenever I do this, I get a small rush. I’m in another country. Similar, I think, to the feeling you get on road trips when you enter another state. First Arizona says goodbye and then five seconds later, at 80 miles per hour California welcomes you. “Bye Arizona. Hello California,” my brother and I used to say when our parents would point out these signs. I used to try to notice the moment when our car was in both states at once, just to know what it felt like to be in two states simultaneously– not much different. And it is virtually the same with straddling two nations, because even when I have one foot on either side of the line, I am still just standing in the desert.

After spanning the border, we usually cross over completely and walk down to the river, which is always filthy and surrounded by picnic trash. Chicken bones, napkins, old clothing left behind when its owners shed their t-shirts and pants to jump into the water. Sometimes I feel like we’re on an archeological dig and we have to come up with theories about Mexican culture based on the artifacts they have left behind. “Ah hah, chicken bones and clothes. This means they can eat well and can easily afford new clothes since they left them here.” Of course, the truth is that the Anapra residents are often scared away from the park in the middle of picnicking either by the border patrol or, more likely, by Mexican bandits. And, while the U.S. government can afford to clean up trash left on the American side of the border, Mexican infrastructure is not developed enough - nor does it have the resources - to collect trash at parks in its poorest colonias.

I don’t really know why we walk all the way over to the river every time we visit, but we do. One time, we saw a man washing a red, white and green bus that was probably used to transport factory workers home at the end of their shifts in the middle of the night. Women had been disappearing, so the companies splurged on buses and drivers to protect their workers. But sometimes the buses still dropped them off too far from their homes for safety. The man with the bus was wading in the water and scrubbing the painted metal with an old rag. We took a picture.

We actually have several pages of pictures from Monument One in our photo album. Most of them show us with our out-of-town visitors with one foot in each country or all of us crouching in front of the monument so we don’t cover the part that says it is the international boundary. I think we have enough of these pictures, but I imagine if we get any more visitors, we’ll have to keep repeating this process. If we go on a day when the people from Mexico are picnicking and playing, maybe our visitors will feel the way we often do, like aliens, when we walk down to the river and the stares of the people drill holes in our backs. Or maybe it’s our own discomfort that we project onto them that drills the holes. Whatever the case, the disparity makes it impossible to feel comfortable there. Maybe our out-of-town friends will leave feeling like the border is evading them because it is difficult to conceptualize the entirety of two nations when you are standing in a field looking at a white concrete monument. Maybe they will go home feeling that it’s not really as simple as the line on the map, even if it is only a line in the dirt.

Not far from my apartment complex, wealthy El Pasoans have their homes on the city’s hills and ledges and many of them pretend they can’t see the Third World when they look over the back fence. They build walls to block the view and shop only in the chain stores on the outskirts of town - avoiding downtown, where the blending of two cultures stares them in the face in the form of Spanish language signs and open air markets that are often packed with Mexican citizens shopping for the day and beggars hoping to scrounge a little bit of money to take home to their families.

Many of these El Pasoans who ignore the border are first generation U.S. citizens. Their parents gave birth to them in the public hospital in El Paso after rushing across the border in order to give them better lives. Yet these citizens of the United States have little to no compassion for other parents in Mexico trying to do the same thing for their children.

“There are too many Mexicans in this store,” a co-worker at the bookstore where I work said to me once. She must have noticed my jaw drop slightly as I looked at her brown skin. “They’re just really messy,” she said. And the prejudice extends beyond the bookstore to the local border patrol agents who are sons and daughters of immigrants and have been charged with keeping all the other would-be immigrants out.

The border ignorers control the local newspaper where there is rarely a story about border issues despite the metro section’s title of “Borderland.” The newspaper’s editor has an edict against border coverage, because, according to market research, the readers all live on the West Side and don’t want to know about the border. So as Juarez suffers floods or fires, the El Paso Times runs articles about the first day back to school for El Paso students and the prize-winning gardenia grown by an east-side El Paso woman. When the newspaper arrives in the morning, it is even easier to ignore the border because it’s not written about. But I think that no matter how hard you may try not to look, not to notice what this city butts up against, we all carry the border around with us. It is the burden of privilege that can be made real in no better way than to live in this borderland. It is the always being on the edge of something, the constant feeling of otherness. I carry the border with me even without completely understanding it. After two years of glancing at Mexico every day on my way to work and experiencing border culture, the border still does not make sense to me.

Before I moved to El Paso, when I sat in my college apartment near Chicago thinking about the move, it was easy for me to understand international borders. I pictured the map of the United States that I grew up seeing, the one they passed out in elementary school for us to color, the one that pulled down from those scrolls attached to the top of the chalkboards in all the classrooms of my childhood. The international border is that line at the bottom middle left of the map where instead of the bright colors designating the states, the land below the line is colored light brown to show that it’s not part of my country. Below that line they have a different government, language and currency. Simple. But in El Paso, it is hard to let it be that simple. I am still puzzling over how a line in the dirt can make such a difference. Yet anyone driving east along I-10 can see the difference, the stark contrast. From the comfort of the plush driver’s seat in your car, you see hundreds of ramshackle houses in the hills, across the river. While you listen to Norah Jones on your CD player - cruising along the freshly paved and painted interstate there they are, just beyond the electronic signs warning of upcoming traffic problems. Some are pink, others mint green, others yellow - all looking wind-worn and old. And if you look closely you can see that the roads are not paved - if there even are roads. A little asking around and you will find out that most of those homes lack running water and electricity. And thousands of El Pasoans glimpse these tenements twice a day on the way to and from work, to and from their comfortable homes. Two cultures, two economies, two realities, nudging up against each other in the desert – it’s just too simple for all of its complexities.

After Monument One, we also usually take our visitors to Juarez, the city of more than one million people that is right across the river from El Paso. I say more than one million because nobody really knows how many people live there. Without a census or some other way of counting population, the Mexican government is left to guess. Some estimates put the population of the city as high as three million, which may very well be accurate since people from the interior of Mexico are constantly migrating to the border in search of better opportunities and a better life.

To get to Juarez, you have to walk or drive over one of several international bridges where drug-sniffing dogs walk back and forth between rows of cars and your vehicle may be searched at any time. This entry into Mexico is much less ambiguous than that of the park. Like the signs at the edges of states, each country has flags up and words welcoming you. With such a big production at the bridge -- a small fee is charged, certain items must be declared, searches are performed -- crossing the border there does not confuse. In fact, the bridge is so long and involved that it doesn't even feel like the two nations are that close. It takes at least 15 minutes to walk across and sometimes hours sitting in traffic to drive across the bridge. I sometimes think that by waiting in the bridge lines, people have the chance to transition between the two countries, time to mentally prepare for what awaits them on the other side. Maybe that is one of the reasons the international bridges are so large in scale and surrounded by pomp and circumstance.

On my last trip over the bridge and into Juarez, I wore blue jeans and it was 100 degrees outside. My friend was in town and he said it had been too long since he’d been to a foreign country. “I have just the remedy for that,” I said, and we drove downtown and parked in one of the lots near the bridge, where you pay $3.00 to have your car watched by men who always look a little shady. I have learned that even though they are often very dirty, speak broken English and have missing teeth - and almost always have a bucket of Coronas in their guard booths- these men can be trusted to look out for my pickup truck. I paid that day’s man, a little shorter and cleaner than the man I paid last time I had been down there, and my friend and I headed toward the bridge. The walk is long, but always seems shorter than I am expecting it to be. We went through the first booth and paid our fifty cents and then walked up the long arching bridge, breathing in the hot air mixed with car exhaust. At the middle of the bridge, we paused to note our crossing into Mexico, looked up at the big Mexico and U.S. flags and kept walking. My jeans clung to my legs with sweat.

Once we cleared the last checkpoint and entered Juarez, the weather was the only thing that was unchanged. Signs were all in Spanish; grimy children in tattered clothing begged on the street or tried to sell us chewing gum; the roads and buildings were old and deteriorating; Mexican music blared from storefronts, and the air smelled of cooking meat that was displayed in glass cases along the sidewalk. Of course, most things right on the other side of the border are set up to draw American tourists – inexpensive alcohol medicine you don’t need a prescription to buy, and night clubs with a younger drinking age. Every store accepts dollars. Most shopkeepers and taxi drivers speak English. And the nearby markets are filled with the typical Mexican pottery, glassware, t-shirts and boots. Usually, Neil and I lead our guests the six blocks from the bridge to the Mercado, a large building filled with booths selling things that appeal to tourists. In this warehouse-like structure with bare concrete floors, dozens of makeshift merchant booths and more bright colored weavings and clothing than at any U.S. shopping mall, you can bargain for better prices. But on this day, my friend and I were not in the mood for bargaining. I told him how I usually buy only one item per trip to the Mercado, one item to put in our apartment to remember Mexico by when we move away from the border.

We walked past shops and pharmacies stocked with drugs that anyone could buy without a prescription. We paused to look at a beautiful old cathedral and bought apple soda called Manzana Lift in a market where they didn't understand our words, but gladly accepted our money. We ambled by an important-looking building and my limited Spanish allowed me to translate. “I think that’s city hall,” I said. We kept walking. Eventually we stumbled on an outdoor market selling all sorts of things: sneakers, purses, herbal medicines and most surprisingly, pets. I heard a rooster crowing and we followed the sound to a hot corner of the market where there were scrawny-looking bunnies, chickens, cats and dogs in wire cages panting in the heat. After getting slightly lost on some side streets and walking past a semi-hidden pool hall filled with pool tables and men who were drinking and smoking in the early afternoon on a weekday, we walked back to El Paso and headed home to nurse our sunburns and heat headaches and wash the grime from our skin.

Neil and I take our guests to Juarez even when they don’t want to go. “How can you come all the way here and not set foot in Mexico?” we ask. And we mean it. It’s not that we force cultural experiences on our visitors, we just convince them that they want to go to Mexico and then we take them. If our friend or relative seems to be enjoying the Mexico experience after the Mercado, we walk to a market in a more local part of town where less English is spoken and where in the middle of the afternoon outside of bars along the way, 14-, 15-, 16-year-old girls stand in mini skirts, boots, heavily applied makeup that melts and drips in the hot sun, and sell their bodies to feed their families. “See, they are always here,” we remark in low tones. The girls stand with their backs against the wall and look down as men ogle them and women walk by with heads turned away. Usually, I feel nauseous. I want to rescue them, take them home with me and feed them and put them into sweat pants and running shoes and let them watch cartoons on my couch. Why we make ourselves look at the little prostitutes almost every time we visit Juarez is beyond me. Maybe for the same reason that I sometimes get sucked into violent murder movies on television as I am flipping through channels. Morbid curiosity. But maybe, by looking at the girls, I am trying to remind myself of the problems caused by poverty, of the desperation just a few miles from where I sleep at night. Of course, similar desperation exists in the ghettos of my own country but the poverty in Mexico is not only in ghettos. While we have systemic poverty in the U.S., Mexico has widespread systemic poverty. Why am I fixated on Mexico’s poor and not so concerned with the poverty in the U.S.? As politically incorrect as this answer is, I am afraid it is mostly a matter of proximity.

Neil and I do not go to Mexico very often when we aren’t showing it to somebody else. It is our tourist attraction, our Grand Canyon, our state park, our Disneyland. I realize that even those prostitutes and the poverty and the begging toddlers are part of the tourist attraction. “See how different it is here?” we ask. “See how lucky we are? But look at how neat this Mexican culture is.” And I could feel guilty about this, about mixing my tourism with psychological voyeurism, but I have come to think that it is acceptable to show people from out of town what exists on the other side of the border: the souvenirs and the young whores. Yet, as I show Mexico off like it’s mine and remark on the sadness of the poverty and the prostitution and the police corruption, I often wonder whether I should do something to try to help. But as soon as I ask myself this question I am always struck by the magnitude of the problems and I feel hopeless to effect change. I think this feeling of helplessness is what causes many El Pasoans to turn their backs on Mexico, to pretend they do not live along the border, to close their eyes to the poverty. If all of us didn’t do this to some extent, we would go crazy.

Every morning, about ten miles from my little apartment, thousands of cars sit in traffic at the international bridge that spans between Mexico and the United States. Mexican students wake up at four and five in the morning in order to get through the gridlock and make it to their classes at the University of Texas at El Paso on time. My next-door neighbor, who has an engineering degree from the University of Michigan, rises before five every morning to make it to her job at an auto parts manufacturing plant in Juarez, fulfilling her dream to work in a Spanish-speaking country. Older El Pasoans walk across the same bridge and pay fifty cents to pass into Mexico where they buy prescription drugs and get their teeth filled or capped for a fraction of the price it would cost them in the United States. Older Mexicans walk over the bridge into El Paso to go shopping for the things they cannot buy in their own country or to see their children who somehow became U.S. citizens. Mixed in with the students, the tourists, the businesspeople, are the drug smugglers and the people smugglers, the criminals who somehow manage to live at this crossroads as if there are no laws.

I live in this community too, walking across the border on occasion for entertainment, driving by the colorful adobe houses on Juarez’s western hills each day on Interstate 10. Perhaps I came closest to finding an answer to what it really means to live here on the edge of something during my first November here, while I was working as a reporter at El Paso’s daily newspaper. One morning, one of the many editors handed me a faxed press release about a Catholic mass on the border in celebration of the Day of the Dead, or Dia de Los Muertos, a Mexican holiday celebrated by many El Pasoans. I took the piece of paper and headed toward the little New Mexico town where the event was taking place.

It was not more than five minutes outside El Paso but as with many parts of the border, I had to drive my car along a dusty clearing near a railroad track to get there. Later it made sense to me that there are no real roads leading to that place. I imagined that the U.S. government kept it that way on purpose to protect most of us from seeing what the border really is: a large chain-link fence with barbed wire at the top. What I saw when I arrived is cemented in my memory. About two hundred people on the Anapra, Mexico side of the fence and one hundred people in Sunland Park, New Mexico were singing and praying together through chain links. The people wore mostly black with a smattering of color and, like the shiny fence, everyone seemed out of place in the expansive field of dust and small gray desert plants which could never sustain the amount of life it contained that day. The people were speaking all in Spanish, but a few of those gathered on the U.S. side explained to me that the people at the mass were praying for friends and relatives who had died trying to cross the desert to get to a better life in America.
These people were celebrating a holiday but they were also trying to make a statement. They wanted the fences to come down so that border crossers wouldn’t be forced to journey into the uninhabited desert where they often meet their death. Border Patrol officials maintain that the tall fences and vigilant guarding of the border, all part of a plan called Operation Hold The Line first implemented in the late 1990’s, have decreased crime in El Paso, and that having agents so near the river at all times has prevented many drownings. I don’t know who is right. But the man who developed Hold The Line while in the Border Patrol was elected to congress and now chairs the Hispanic Caucus. Recently, USA Today named him as a possible Hispanic presidential candidate. The people in Anapra protesting his policy have to gather in the dust, invite the media and hope they are heard.

I stood there in the fine deep-brown sand that afternoon puzzling over borders, realizing that similar to the dark line drawn on the map, the border between one of the most wealthy and powerful nations in the world and one of the poorest and weakest is a chain-link fence. The border mass was short but amazing. Two folding tables were pushed against each other with the wire fence between them and they served as a makeshift altar. There was a priest on each side and the men took turns reading prayers. The Spanish floated upward and spread across the desert in every direction. Children shared apples through the fence. Adults swayed in the moment holding white wooden crosses with names of the dead painted on them. Everyone and everything was covered in a thin layer of dust. Some women mourned quietly, several men allowed tears to slip down their cheeks. When the solemn praying was complete four or five men in paper mache masks for the Day of the Dead began to dance. I watched, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. What defines a nation? Who decided this fence would be precisely right here? Why didn’t they put it 15 feet to the left? It amazed me that some line decided by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 could make such a difference. I realized that being born a mere 5 feet to the left or right of a certain line in the dirt could change your entire life experience. You either live on this side of the fence and bring fruit and toys for the children on the other side, or you live in Anapra and hold your arms outstretched as the Americans dump bags of food and gifts over the top of chain links.

I wrote a story about the mass for the next day’s newspaper. Like most stories about the border, the editors decided to run it on the inside of the local section, the part of the newspaper read by the smallest number of people each day. I was shocked when I received at least ten e-mails from readers voicing strong opinions about the border and the fences and the Mexicans dying in the desert. Some of the messages I got did not make sense, others were from angry U.S. citizens who want Mexicans to stay out and others were from people who sympathized with the mass attendees. One e-mail even said, “Go back to your own country.” What country do they suggest? I wondered. Would moving out of Texas suffice? Aren’t all U.S. citizens somehow descendants of immigrants? I grew up hearing sayings like, “The United States is a melting pot” and in fifth grade I memorized the inscription on the Statue of Liberty about the tired, hungry, poor and huddled masses all being welcome here. My naïveté allowed me to believe those myths until I was 21 and moved to the border of this great nation, where it became clear to me that only some of the tired, hungry and poor are really welcome here.

I don’t really think that everyone should be allowed to enter this country. Nor do I believe that we should offer public services to everyone who wants to walk across the border from Mexico. I have seen the strain on the health care system and the legal system that has been created by caring for the indigent in El Paso, most of whom are Mexican citizens illegally in the U.S. But as a nation, we are in the strange and sad position of ignoring the plight of our neighbors because there is no easy way to help them. Their struggle is a spectacle to us, at best a lesson, but we border-dwellers continue to witness the poverty and the desperation, and then turn our backs on it every day.