ARIZONA ELECTION 2024: NOGALES
Whoever created this sign has never watched Narcos on Netflix
The US-Mexico border is a perennial issue in American national politics. But for those who live right on it, it is not an issue it is a fact of life. It is home.
Not every border town — there aren’t that many along the border’s 1,954 mile length — has an easy domestic relationship with the other side but Nogales has it figured out.
Or it did in 1998 when I first visited the place while making a series for the BBC World Service. The Letter from America style essay I wrote is part of my other Substack, History of a Calamity
It starts:
In Nogales, Arizona, the border is pink. A wall of cinderblock and metal painted pink running between two voluptuously rounded hills that define the town. In the flat canyon between the hills, there’s room in the wall for a pair of railroad tracks and a multi-lane road running into a city on the Mexican side. It too is called Nogales. Nogales, Sonora. Sonora is the northernmost state in Mexico.
Today, the border is still pink, although the color has faded, and as you drive into town you can see how the border fence has been extended along the hills. Other changes that come quickly to the eye: Nogales is expanding north with new suburban developments and the inevitable shopping malls that co-exist with them. As everywhere else in America this has caused the old downtown neighborhood to shrivel. Today Nogales historic center along Grand Avenue is characterized by empty storefronts and for rent signs on the bars for which this city was famous.
One business was still operating as it was in 1998, the Pimeria Alta Museum, a project of the local historical society. And, as happened in 1998, an elderly woman seated behind a desk greeted me and asked where I was from and before long we were having a friendly conversation.
I explained about how my previous adventure in Nogales had started with a chance encounter with someone at the museum who took me under his wing
“And introduced you to everyone he knew in town.” I nodded and she laughed. “That’s just how we are.”
What has changed and what hasn’t changed, I asked.
She turned the question around on me. What did I notice that was different?
A lot less pedestrian traffic. My memory was of downtown Nogales crowded with people who had come in from Mexico to shop, and senior citizens from the US going over into Mexico to fill prescriptions where drugs cost a fraction of what they do in the US, as well as locals doing downtown things.
The lack of people buzzing around was partially explained by the fact that it is late June and the seniors have gone back north to get away from the heat.
The woman at the desk, Sigrid Maitrejean, acknowledged that there was less pedestrian traffic than there used to be and then went on to talk about what hasn’t changed:
The ease with which the two Nogales’ co-exist.
I nodded in agreement as Sigrid Maitrejean spoke about how the rest of the US has no idea of what life along the border is like. They don’t understand — maybe can’t understand, thanks to sensationalized news coverage — what the day to day is like.
While just west of the city, is an empty place called Sasabe which is the current people smuggling route of choice. But at the border crossing in town an enormous amount of legitimate business goes back and forth through the twin cities every day.
The Nogales Port Authority estimates $28 billion in trade goes each way through the Nogales border crossing.
In the first two months of 2024, 451,900 pedestrians went through the border crossing legitimately. Many are Mexican workers who have jobs in Nogales AZ working construction, doing agricultural work but also working in health care.
We spoke about the border as a separate region. That was a lesson I took from my first visit and Sigrid agreed it was the right one. She didn’t use the term “liminal space” but it was clear that from the region’s bi-lingual nature to its laissez-faire attitude to the country literally a few steps away there was something different about living on the line, arbitrarily imposed on the people who live in Nogales on Valentine’s Day 1912, the day Arizona became a state.
Our chat reached a natural conclusion and I said I was going to walk over to Mexico and see what had changed. So I did. I didn’t even have to flash my passport.
There were three things that struck me as different. First was a Red Cross station just inside Mexico. Second, was how well-organized the medical tourism business has become in Nogales Sonora. American health tourists don’t really have to go too deep into the city, the first few blocks after the crossing point is all pharmacies, and dentist offices and other services.
The biggest difference was this:
Where the cars are in the photo, in 1998 there was a tent city along the wall, . People from the south, Chiapas, were living there in plain sight hoping to make contact with a smuggler, a coyote, to get them into the US. If they had ID they could have just walked in and disappeared. In my brief wandering around Nogales I saw no sign of would be migrants in the street.
The election issues along the border are bread and butter issues, according to Genesis Lara, managing editor of the Nogales International, the local paper. Jobs. There are never enough. Much work is seasonal agricultural work. Economic help from government is what people want, she said. Therefore this is solid Democrat country in most respects.
But the Hispanic vote in this area is not a monolith. Lara acknowledged that there is an appeal, particularly to older voters in the Republican’s anti-abortion stand. But the editor thought that for the most part younger Hispanics would stay with the Democrats, and she should know. Genesis Lara is very young herself.
A reminder: I am traveling in the Southwest this week trying to get a feel for the dynamics shaping November’s vote. I want this to be the first of several trips to report from the country of my birth but that takes your support. The road is more expensive than it has ever been. (Note to Biden team: don’t go by the statistics. Inflation is a beast and it’s damned expensive out here). So please, if you value my work:
and please: