Chamizal
Last year, El Paso was named the safest city in the United States, while Juarez ranked among the most violent in the world. The year before that, San Diego, which also shares its border with a violent Mexican town, earned the title of safest city in the US. It’s hard not to think that in these metropolitan areas, crime, rather than being delegated to the “wrong side of the tracks,” has been pushed to the wrong side of the border. When we talk about immigration policy in the United States, we often refer to Mexico as “our backyard.” The backyard is where you hang your dirty laundry, a place hidden from view. In that respect, can tidy El Paso be viewed as a front yard of sorts, the place for keeping up appearances? And if so, what’s inside the house? But perhaps these metaphors are too blunt; the border is, after all, much blurrier than it appears.
Over two million people live in the metropolitan area of El Paso-Juarez. From the highway it seems as though the two cities could be one, but drive up to the Franklin Mountains, where the lone star of Texas glows blue at night, and you’ll see the bright white scalp of the Rio Grande, parting the two cities with a winding border. One especially prominent curve in the Rio Grande sticks out like a large hump from Ciudad Juarez: this is the area ceded to Mexico during the Chamizal Agreement of 1963. In the 1800s, it was decided that the Rio Grande would serve as the border between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez; no one knew then that the river would steadily shift southward. As the boundary shifted, El Paso encroached on what was formerly Juarez, and the territory became hotly disputed. It was known, for a long time, as No Man’s Land, a zone for smuggling and other gray market activities. Finally in 1963 the United States and Mexico reached an agreement on the border, and soon afterward, cheery and green memorial parks were built on either side.
Last summer, we visited the Chamizal neighborhood in El Paso, a small area–its own boundaries much-disputed–of South Central El Paso. Chamizal abuts the border–at rush hour, traffic for the Free Bridge spills over into the neighborhood, and Border Patrol agents can be seen idling their cars on side streets. Many residents there are recent immigrants. Many of them are not legal. Many of them have not been able to see their family for years, though they live only a few short miles away.
While the nation turns its attention to immigration reform, it is important to hear from the people these policies will most directly affect. But life on the frontera, though in some ways defined by concrete boundaries and ironclad law, is a much blurrier thing than the national debate can grasp. Family ties stretch across riverbeds and chain link fences, and morality is not starkly black or white but hazy, like the dust storms that swirl across the desert with no care for the border.