“The Border is a Beautiful Place”

Viewed from a distance, the border might seem like a hard edge, the outer limit of a nation. But many who live here call both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border home.

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The authorities believe he slipped across the United States-Mexico border sometime during the summer of 2016, likely deep in the night. He carried no papers. The crossing happened in the rugged back country of southeastern Arizona, where the main deterrent to trespassers is the challenging nature of the terrain—not the metal walls, checkpoints, and aerial surveillance that dominate much of the border. But the border crosser was desert-hardy and something of an expert at camouflage.

No one knows for certain how long he’d been in the United States before a motion-activated camera caught him walking a trail in the Dos Cabezas Mountains on the night of November 16. When a government agency retrieved the photo in late February, the image was plastered across Arizona newspapers, causing an immediate sensation.

The border crosser was a jaguar.

Jaguars once roamed throughout the southwestern United States, but are now quite rare. A core population resides in the mountains of northern Mexico, and occasionally an adventurous jaguar will venture north of the border. When one of these elusive, graceful cats makes an appearance stateside, usually via a motion-triggered camera, it gets celebrity status.

“We’ve had positive identifications of seven cats, alive and well, in the last twenty years in the United States,” says Diana Hadley of the Mexico-based Northern Jaguar Project, which works with people in both countries to protect the big cat. One of those cats became known as El Jefe, after he took up residence in 2011 in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson, Arizona. His presence was proof that the United States still had enough wild habitat to support a jaguar.

The new cat was especially exciting because, based on size and shape, observers initially thought it might be female. “A lot of people in Arizona would be very happy to have jaguars from Mexico breeding in Arizona,” remarks Hadley.

In September 2017, the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity released new video of the cat, apparently a male, caught on a motion-triggered camera ambling through the oak scrub forest in the Chiricahua Mountains. He’s been named Sombra, or Shadow, by schoolkids in Tucson.

Such things will no longer happen if Donald Trump builds his border wall. If constructed the way Trump envisions—thirty feet high and two feet thick with deep footings—it would “obstruct all mammals from crossing the border,” says Hadley. It would block not just jaguars but javalina, deer, and other mammals as well as toads, snakes, and other small animals, and birds that can’t fly up and over, like roadrunners and quail. Even bats and insects could be dissuaded by sudden encounters with the massive concrete barrier, she notes. “If he were to construct that wall, [animal] crossing would stop. Period.”

You could be forgiven, in the wake of Donald Trump’s zeal for a “great, great wall” between Mexico and the United States (and dividing tribal Tohono O’odham land), for perceiving irony in the excitement over feline border crossers just as the U.S. cracks down on human border crossers.

But people who live in the borderlands celebrate the jaguar as a symbol of resilience as well as possibility for a region with a shared history and culture. Viewed from a distance, the border might seem like a hard edge, the outer limit of a nation. Many people who live here call both sides of the border home, harboring relationships that become all the more dear amid the vehemence with which they are denied.

In the border town of Douglas, Arizona, images of jaguars were projected onto the metal slats of the border fence this past summer as part of a multicultural and binational celebration with its sister city Agua Prieta, Mexico. Similar events took place at the annual Concert Without Borders, featuring musicians (and chess players) arranged on either side of the iron fence. For her project Borrando la Frontera, or Erasing the Border, which took place in the spring of 2016, artist Ana Teresa Fernández worked with Douglas and Agua Prieta community members to paint the fence blue, so that it blended with the color of the sky and could almost be imagined to disappear.

“The majority of our community along the border see themselves as one,” M. Jenea Sanchez, an artist and wife of the mayor of Douglas, Arizona, attests. “Our binational connections are not only economically driven. We are interconnected by our ecology, family, and culture.” Sanchez, like many others in the region, is committed to celebrating and sustaining border culture. She relies on her professional counterparts just over the border in Agua Prieta, Mexico, a booming town of more than 77,000 inhabitants. Douglas, an old mining center, is a quiet town of 16,600 people.

“Douglas would disappear if Agua Prieta wasn’t there and we weren’t open to them,” she says. “We always try to talk about that connection.”

As a child, Sanchez remembers simply running across the border from Mexico to visit her aunt. “I guess it was illegal,” she shrugs. But while she was in high school, she says, the border underwent major changes. President Bill Clinton, building his tough-on-drugs-and-immigration program, passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.

Along the Arizona-Mexico border, miles of new steel fencing were extended out into the desert from the urban centers of towns like Douglas, Nogales, and Naco, along with almost eighty miles of high-intensity lighting. The number of border patrol agents increased more than sixfold from 1993 to 2004, to a total of about 1,770. Undocumented border crossers were forced to seek passage in more remote areas, and the desert became a lethal deterrent. Deaths along the Arizona border alone, according to official U.S. Border Patrol numbers, went from 104 in 2001 to 271 in 2005.

Sanchez remembers a third wave of border fortification after the attacks of September 11, 2001. George W. Bush more than doubled border security funding, from $4.6 billion in 2001 to $10.4 billion in 2006. That’s when he signed the Secure Fence Act, which called for 700 miles of pedestrian and vehicle barrier fencing. Fence construction and fortification continued under the REAL ID Act of 2005—the Department of Homeland Security waived the Endangered Species Act, the Wilderness Act, the Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act, and dozens of other environmental and cultural protections constituting the largest dismissal of law in U.S. history.

The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement and fears of drugs and crime created another kind of fence. After NAFTA, Mexican border towns like Nogales, Ciudad Juárez, and Agua Prieta boomed with factory jobs but struggled with lack of infrastructure, including everything from drinking water to security. Small businesses on both sides of the border suffered. Tourists from the United States became reluctant to cross to shop for Mexican services and crafts, and a weak peso meant that even the lure of U.S. department stores faced challenges in enticing Mexicans to take on an increasingly burdensome border crossing.

Ben Aceves, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, is what many call a “border kid.” He grew up in Southern California, about two hours from the border. “My family is from Mexicali, on the Mexican side as well as El Centro on the United States side,” he says. “My great-grandpa worked on the railroad in San Diego, and both my parents grew up there. We go to Mexico every summer for family holidays.”

But traversing the border has changed for Aceves, who works on public health projects in the border region. “Sometimes, it feels like a crime to cross,” he says about his recent interactions with customs officials. “I feel intimidated. I was born here, was educated in a U.S. university, I pay taxes—you don’t get more American,” he says. “But even I feel intimidated, like even I could be deported.”

"You don’t get more American...but even I feel intimidated, like even I could be deported.”

Celina Valencia also grew up along the United States-Mexico border, in Ambos Nogales, or Both Nogales—Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona. “I didn’t realize they were two different spaces until I was older, like twelve or thirteen,” says Valencia, now an epidemiologist at the University of Arizona. “I grew up poor and we moved a lot. One house would be in Nogales, Arizona, and the next would be in Nogales, Mexico.” Food and haircuts were cheaper in Mexico, she explains, “so we moved back and forth almost daily.”

“People from the United States have always gone to towns in Mexico for their health care,” says Jill de Zapien, associate dean at the University of Arizona’s Rural Health Office. “It’s a cash economy of people buying medical care because of affordability, or some technology that they might have access to in one place but not the other.”

While NAFTA has ensured a massive stream of produce and other Mexican products into the United States, however, the more informal traffic—people on a day of shopping, or seeking a manicure, dentist visit, or other service, or just hopping over to see relatives—has dropped steadily. In October 2006, according to U.S. Department of Transportation data, 1,370,816 personal vehicles, passengers, and pedestrians crossed from Nogales, Mexico. In 2016, that total dropped to that 851,713.

Bracker’s Department Store, in Nogales, Arizona, is one of the most recent casualties , shutting its doors in October after ninety-three years of operation. “Physically we are in the United States, economically we are in Mexico,” Bruce Bracker told a local TV station. “At least 80 percent of our customers come from northern Mexico.” They had stopped coming.

These losses are the types of prices local border dwellers pay for the country’s fight against illegal immigration, and its embrace of free trade. How much more damage can Trump’s proposed border wall do to these communities that have already lost so much?

“¡Michelle Acosta Gonzalez! ¡Presente!”

“¡Mujer Desconocida! ¡Presente!”

“¡Roberto Bautista-Lopez! ¡Presente!”

Each member of the small group takes turns holding aloft a small wooden cross and announcing the name written on it. Many crosses state simply “Desconocido” for a body never identified. After pronouncing the name on the cross, the speaker then lays it along the edge of the road leading to the border customs checkpoint in Douglas. It’s part of a weekly commemoration, led by the binational group Frontera de Cristo, of those who lost their lives in the deserts around the border.

Although border apprehensions have been dropping, deaths are not. Hundreds of people are continuing to die along this border from exposure and other migration-related threats as border control continues to push migrants to attempt ever more treacherous crossings. According to the Missing Migrants Project, more than 300 migrants have died crossing the border just this year, about a third in the Tucson-Douglas area.

Jocabed Gallegos, who coordinates the Mexican programs for Frontera de Cristo, has helped make crosses for thousands of the migrants who have died along the border. Gallegos trundles out a different wagonload of 180 crosses each week, rotating them to commemorate each of the dead. She says 6,000 people have died along the border since 2000.

Passersby give the small group curious glances, but few stop to ask questions. Perhaps many of them already know. The Douglas community was deeply affected by the 1997 drowning of six undocumented immigrants who had been caught by a flash flood in a storm drain after crawling underground for blocks from Agua Prieta. The town created a memorial, which is where Frontera de Cristo begins its ceremony every week.

“Frontera de Cristo is always in motion, responding to what is happening,” Gallegos explains. And recently that has meant creating programs that help people in the border region believe their lives have meaning and value. Of particular concern, she says, are young people in Agua Prieta who are being targeted by drug cartels as both drug runners and users.

Frontera de Cristo started a community center in Agua Prieta, offering youth classes on conflict resolution, self-esteem, and hygiene. The center serves coffee grown and roasted by Café Justo, a cooperative started by Frontera in 2002. “We are creating economic opportunities so people don’t have to migrate,” Gallegos says. “The first year we sold 400 pounds of coffee. Last year it was 30,000.”

Frontera also runs a cooperative teaching “sustainability skills”—how to grow food, harvest water, and raise livestock in the desert—to women who arrive in the borderlands from elsewhere. “All I knew is how to work in a factory. Here I learn how to work for us and not just for others,” one participant told Gallegos.

Jenea Sanchez, working on a mural project with Frontera de Cristo, met several of the women who were part of the cooperative, and was inspired by the women and their work.

She created seven-foot-tall portraits of several of the women, and is using their stories to create what she’s titled, “The Mexican Woman’s Post Apocalyptic Survival Guide in the Southwest.”

“It’s about food, shelter, livestock, but also surviving la migra,” she explains. “It celebrates the women’s stories and their survival skills in the desert. My work makes visible their survival, and asks: At what point do you decide that, because of hunger or violence, you are going to attempt to cross the border? We need to consider, as fellow human beings, what drives a person to make that decision?”

According to the Migration Policy Institute, the number of border walls worldwide has exploded recently, growing from around fifteen when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 to nearly seventy today. Large numbers of people are fleeing terrorism, war, and climate change. Neoliberal economic policies, like “free trade” and austerity budgeting, are creating wealth disparities that force people to uproot. While walls may temporarily block these flows, history indicates that people will search for other ways of crossing when they have to—even if they might die trying.

And border walls erase border culture. Listening to the stories from border kids like Sanchez, Aceves, and Valencia, and hearing the dedication of people like Hadley and Gallegos, you feel their pride in border culture, and hear their belief that it can yet be a welcoming place for people and animals. Those who live on the border are working to stitch it together with every trip they make, every conversation they have with people on the “other side.” Each crossing is a small act of resistance.

“It’s saddening to see people who’ve never been on the border try to pass policy about it,” Aceves says. “I don’t even know what they see. I wish they’d come see how beautiful it is.”

Mrill Ingram is The Progressive’s online media editor.