Symbol or functional barrier? In Thursday’s debate Donald Trump was still ranting on about murderous, drug-addled illegal immigrants. Joe Biden wasn’t quick enough on his feet to say you built this long wall, you mean it doesn’t work as a deterrent?
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b20a1b1-9e08-4e12-88ed-0872457305e4_2304x4096.jpeg)
[Editor’s note, this is a corrected version of original post]
When I traveled the border in 1998, the issues were the same but the wall wasn’t there. Today it is a stark feature on the landscape as I found when I met a dear friend in Columbus, NM three and a half miles north of the border crossing at Palomas.
To get there from Nogales Arizona, my previous port of call, the final leg of my route took me along NM Hwy 9, one of the great two-lane black top drives in America. Nearly 90 miles of road running through open cattle range with razor back ridges at the horizon 40, 50 miles away — it’s hard for a city dweller visiting New Mexico, to tell — so much empty space is disorienting but in a good way. Empty space also means you can drive fast.
When I traveled this road in 1998 I knew that the ridges to the south were Mexico but now it is the border fence that tells you where Mexico is. For the final half of the drive the wall is five or ten miles to the south.
My friend Howard and I walked into Palomas. It was grey and humid. The previous evening an epic storm had heralded the arrival of monsoon season in the region.
We walked through the Mexican border station. In a courtyard with a gate leading into the town a guard was on duty. I said buenos dias and the fellow asked in good but heavily accented English where are you from? So began an interesting conversation.
He was wearing a uniform of a private security firm which seemed odd and we asked him about that. He laughed
Every year a new company gets a contract for security and every year I get a new uniform with a different company name and logo on it.
The fellow, I am reluctant to tell you his name, was from Sinaloa and straightaway told us he had spent quite a lot of time in the US.
Where?
Chicago, I like Chicago.
Not too cold?
No, Denver is cold.
He had spent a long time in the Denver area working construction and making good money. He met a woman, has a daughter with her, but they are in the US and he is not.
Left unsaid — and it would have been rude to ask and foolish to expect a truthful answer — was, if you had a well-paying job in construction in the US and a family, why are you doing security in Palomas?
Without being asked he volunteered he had come back to Mexico to take care of his sick mother, but the question of how he got into the US to work in the first place he didn’t explain.
Do you know how much I make doing this job? 7000 pesos every two weeks.
Howard did a quick calculation, a bit over $350. So roughly $175 bucks for a six-day week guarding the border, although truth be told, Palomas is a pretty quiet place. The people walking from the US were for the most part retirees in town to get medical treatment or have lunch at the Pink House, a restaurant and Mexican tchotchke emporium.
We asked the fellow if there was much trouble at this section.
No, he said. But Juarez is bad.
Juarez an hour east through the desert, where bodies are frequently found, victims of cartel violence, is where the guard’s mother lives now. He doesn’t like to go there but has no choice.
The wall went to a vanishing point at the horizon. I wondered if the guard thought it worked as a deterrent. A moment passed, then a slow, rueful smile, and he said,
There are a lot of hungry people from the south, when people are hungry nothing can stop them. They find a way.
But not here in Palomas. The guard and my friend spoke about New Mexico. Somehow the subject of low-riders came up. These customized cars are a part of Mexican-American culture and the low-rider capital of the state is in Espanola not far from where Howard lives.
Are there many low-riders on the Mexican side of the wall? he asked. The guy, laughed.
“Too many potholes.”
We walked into town and other than the main drag there the streets had potholes. It was a poor town. Unfinished houses, a plaza with mostly elderly men hanging around killing time. Some younger ones called out to the two gringos. We walked over to the wall. Howard noted its similarity to a Richard Serra sculpture but on an epic scale.
The Ramon Espinoza Villanueva Primary School is adjacent to it. The gate was open and we walked in. The building and the playing areas, old and crumbling, signified poverty. The slats of the wall rising above the one-story school signified something else.
What is it like for elementary school kids to have this monstrosity looming over them? How does it affect their understanding of the relationship between their country and America? Just behind where this video was filmed is the school’s basketball court and a soccer pitch.
Maybe 8-year olds don’t think about the world that way but I found it disturbing that they are in a way imprisoned on their side of the wall.
We followed our noses to the local stockyard and found a chink in the wall. There was an open gate between a cattle pen on the Palomas side and one on the Columbus side of the border.
Howard asked if I could think of any two countries which share a border that have such fraught relationships that this kind of barrier has been erected.
Not in post-Cold War Europe, certainly. In the Kurdish part of southeastern Turkey there has long been a fence with guard towers separating the country from Syria and Iraq. I saw it on my first rpeorting trip there in 1996.
During the Troubles in Northern Ireland there were areas where the British Army had erected long barriers with watchtowers but nothing like the US-Mexico wall and it didn’t stop weapons being smuggled through to the IRA.
But this border wall isn’t there to protect Americans from an army or an insurgency trying to take over the US government.
Like the border guard said,
When people are hungry nothing can stop them. They find a way.
This is the last of my files from the Southwest but I hope it isn’t the last reporting trip I take to the US as it prepares for an election that really does have the potential to alter the trajectory of American history. As an American who been living abroad for nearly 40 years I see things in the US through a different lens than people who live in the country day to day. That lens can yield insights that journalists working in the country’s Mainstream Media can’t see. But the road is more expensive than it has ever been. So please, if you value my work:
And if you can’t afford to make a donation then help by spreading the word about this newsletter to 10 people you know. And then encouraging them to share with ten others.
loved this report - what a wild place. the mural at the school - sin violencia - is heartbreaking