Adrienne Smith, the Constant Traveler: Bridging the Border

By Adrienne Smith

Jul. 13, 2016: I happened to be in El Paso on the day that the Supreme Court, in a tie vote, essentially blocked President Obama's immigration plan.

Feeling the urge for a road trip, I had driven the 325 miles from Tucson to El Paso, past beautifully barren, mesa-fringed desert, past the sad sight of the milking cows crammed together in their own waste in Las Cruces that I wrote about a few years ago, until arriving at my destination.

First stop, my favorite eatery at H & H Car Wash, a beyond-unassuming little luncheonette attached to said automobile launderette, where I scarfed down the most wonderful cheese enchiladas smothered in spicy red sauce.

But I was here for more important stuff, i.e., a look at the bifurcated world of El Paso/Ciudad Juárez.

El Paso itself is a small city of roughly 680,000 people, which, however, makes it bigger than city-proper Boston or Atlanta. It is the 20th largest city in the U.S. But it is, quite simply, in the wrong place, at the far southwest corner of Texas, placing it far closer to Phoenix and Santa Fe than to the capital of its own state, Austin.

An immense 80.7% of its residents identify as Hispanic in one way or another.

It is the home of a large military base, Fort Bliss, and several federal border control agencies, as well as a thriving private industrial sector.

Add to this that the local branch of the University of Texas, constructed in a striking Dzong, or Bhutanese, style, was rated the seventh-best national university in the nation by Washington Monthly magazine in 2013.

The city also contains the country's largest urban park, the Franklin Mountains State Park, from which can be seen the sparkling hugeness of Ciudad Juárez at night.

El Paso has also been the home, at one time or another, of Wernher von Braun, Sandra Day O'Connor, General John Pershing, Anthony Quinn, Debbie Reynolds, Willie Shoemaker, and Stevie Nicks.

And, to top it off, El Paso is one of the safest large cities in the country.

But, past the electric and brown metal fences and the Rio Grande River, Ciudad Juárez is a totally different smoke.

Juárez, with a population of more than 1.3 million residents, is the largest metropolitan area sharing a border with the U.S. A staggering 40% of its citizens live below the poverty line.

At one point in recent years, Juárez was considered the most violent city in the world. In 2011, 3,000 people were murdered there, most deaths relating to drug wars. Happily, through government initiatives, only 414 people were murdered in 2014.

Despite this, the U.S. State Department has issued stern warnings about travel to Juárez.

Finding, surprisingly, that I could cross the border without a passport by taking the Santa Fe Bridge walkway, I determined to explore the other side. I chose 8:00 am as a reasonable time to go when, presumably, the bad guys would be asleep. The walk was incredibly easy. I paid $.50 at a makeshift tollbooth, trotted along a covered walkway over the Rio Grande and down into Juárez, passing a long, long line of cars waiting to be admitted to El Paso, which were being surveyed by U.S. border agents walking around with leashed German shepherds.

I arrived at the main street of the city to be greeted by multiple pharmacias, whose goods were priced way lower than in the U.S. I walked for several blocks, felt I'd done my part, and returned to the border crossing.

In this homeward direction, I only had to pay $.25 and push a button that, if it turned red, would make me subject to a Mexican customs exam, and I walked onward with a huge crowd of locals. At the other side, I was scrutinized far more carefully, first by a U.S. Customs agent and then by sending my purse through an X-ray machine.

I wondered why there had been so much one-way traffic into El Paso and discovered that many Mexican residents are allowed into the U.S. on a daily basis, including U.S. citizen children who go to school in the city and daily workers who have a Trusted Traveler card. The cards are sold to Mexicans who pay $122 annually and can demonstrate that, because of residence and family in Mexico, they are sure to return each night. Others, who cannot afford to buy the card, must stand in a far longer line and hope for the best.

Some pregnant Juárez women have even staggered over the border while in labor to give birth to U.S. citizens. But the clinic that would help these women, the Casa de Nacimiento, recently closed after delivering an estimated 13,400 babies.

The yearly traffic into El Paso from Juárez is astronomic: 7.1 million pedestrians and 13.1 million cars in 2014.

Somehow, all this seeming chaos works, making the Trumpian Mexican-paid wall seem foolish in the extreme.

Pictured here: Ciudad Juárez border walkway.

Photo by Adrienne Smith

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