Postcard From A Border Town
It only costs 50 cents to cross the bridge from El Paso, Texas to Juárez, Mexico.
It only costs 50 cents to cross the bridge from El Paso, Texas to Juárez, Mexico.
As you get closer and closer to the border, one country appears to seamlessly bleed into the other. Spanish is a first language, but shops sell American flag trinkets and cowboy hats and it doesn’t feel like you have to pick one over the other until you see the actual border, the manmade border that separates one country from the other and arbitrates who can and cannot come across. It strikes me how manufactured it is, toll booths and turn styles meant to regulate and control what should be a fluid cultural exchange. It used to be like this—sister cities, where many people live on one side of the border and work on the other, had family and friends and livelihoods the way anyone might move freely and live between two cities just twenty minutes away from one another. But in recent years, there are more and more stories of children and young people who can cross and mothers and fathers who cannot, of restrictions that define life with 3-4 hour wait times and invasive searches and questioning that leaves many opting to live their lives on one side and avoid the other.
At the moment, even these prolonged crossings are impossible for most. Only US citizens and permanent residents are permitted to cross in both directions, a policy justified as an effort to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. As if one’s nationality determines their ability to catch and spread a virus.
I quickly found that I couldn’t tell anyone that I was going to Juárez without getting a lecture about how it is dangerous. I knew that organized crime had been bubbling beneath the surface for a long time, but learned that in recent years it has become so bad that it earned Juárez the dubious title of being the world’s most dangerous city at times. Still, whether or not this came up in conversation depended on who the warnings were coming from. Some warnings came from well-meaning types, who assume that every American abroad is a target despite (or perhaps because of) the privilege that they carry. But others came from journalist friends based along the border, who are more accustomed to gauging which risks they can navigate and which they cannot. They have friends who have lost family members to organized crime, and have themselves lost friends to journalism.
It is difficult to hear what they have to say because I never know what to think of travel warnings. I am as self-conscious about adhering to them as I am about ignoring them. I have seen the ways that they shape Americans’ perceptions of the Middle East, the ways that they can stereotype a people, a culture, a nation. I am aware of the way that they ignore the beauty of a place, the magical ways that people celebrate and find joy and ensure that life goes on no matter what. I want to see every place for the beauty and magic that its inhabitants create, not the fear mongering that renders this invisible.
Maybe I’m critical of the way that these warnings create a generalized fear of others, the way that they create borders in our minds. Maybe I’m skeptical of a country that issues travel warnings for its own citizens, but denies asylum to those fleeing the same exact threats.
In many ways, Juárez is a city like any other. At the other side of the bridge, people are shopping, eating, going to work and going about their lives. It is strange to think about how this could turn at any moment, that a pleasant afternoon in a restaurant or an ordinary day at work can be interrupted by an armed gunman opening fire and murdering half of the restaurant in broad daylight. It is even stranger to think about the way that the border functions to keep this particular kind of crime from reaching the United States—and yet, rips apart so many families in the process.
It is telling to see how many people are fleeing exactly this kind of violence and others. Across Juárez are migrant shelters with people from as nearby as Guatemala and Honduras and as far-flung as Iraq and Cameroon. While many have been able to pass through Juárez as a stop on the way to their final destination in the past, more and more are the victim of Trump—and now, Biden’s—policies. A group of young men from Nicaragua tell me that they fled persecution to ask for asylum only to be handcuffed by ICE, thrown on an airplane and dropped at the border. A man from Honduras has been at the shelter for more than two years—he had to stay in Mexico while he waited to plea his case, while his wife moved around Honduras trying not to be killed by gangs. He tried to get asylum for his family in the United States, but was told that his wife was not in danger as she is still alive.
It is striking to see how much of the world’s pain is waiting just beyond our borders, how many lives could be different if they were given a chance that wasn’t so mired in bureaucracy that it leaves people living in limbo. It is surreal to see El Paso in the distance, tangible yet out of reach—a place where people can project their fantasies of what will happen the day that they can someday cross, and leave the dangers that they have survived behind them.
But most surreal of all was paying 50 cents to walk back across to a country that often pretends these people don’t exist at all.