etra ON THE FENCE
While physically separated, the sister cities of Nogales — one in Mexico and the other in Arizona — enjoy a shared history and common ground.
PLEASE don’t write another story about drugs,” Sigrid Maitrejean, a volunteer guide at the Pimeria Alta Museum inside the old city hall in Nogales, Ariz., beseeched me in a playful tone. It was not the only time during my three-day visit to the region that people would make a similar plea: enough of the endless media stories and political rhetoric about the supposedly dangerous U.S.Mexico border, which only serve to keep visitors away.
Residents of this town of 20,000 wanted me to see the Nogales they see: a place steeped in layers of rich history and culture, which maintains a uniquely special relationship with its namesake and sister city across the border, Nogales, Sonora. And indeed, in the two Nogaleses — or Ambos Nogales, as locals refer to them — I found the most quintessential of all the border cities.
I love the concept of twin cities on the border. Maybe it’s because I grew up in one, or because I’m a twin. I love the idea of two worlds that coexist and intermingle, and in fact, depend on each other for survival.
The descendant of families that were already living in the Texas border region when the international boundary was drawn up in 1848, I grew up almost in two countries, spending Sundays across the border immersed in the Mexican universe of my abuelitos and tías and primos. We didn’t talk about it like we were visiting another country — we went to el otro lado, the other side. I liked that my sisters and I could choose what we loved about each of our two upbringings and creatively mix languages and systems of meaning.
There are 16 sets of sister cities that line the 1,950-mile U.S.-Mexico border, and as a journalist who has focused on the region, I’ve experienced all but two of them. While I’d been in Nogales before to report on immigration and the border wall, what I learned on this visit is that calling Ambos Nogales “one town in two countries” may be a slight exaggeration, but it’s a very apt metaphor. And this is what makes it a fascinating place to visit.
“This is one city,” Maitrejean said. “This is one place that was cut in half. That’s essentially what happened.”
That explanation is more or less true.
THE WALL
In 1841, when the territory was still part of Mexico, a family by the last name of Elías received a land grant from the government it established as Los Nogales de Elías,a name derived from the walnut trees that blanketed what today is known as the Santa Cruz River Valley.
The Spaniards had used that mountain pass in the previous two centuries when they explored the Pimería Alta, as northern Sonora and southern Arizona were known, west to California, and it’s believed indigenous groups had traveled the same path for millenniums. Nogales, then, had formed part of an important northern migratory route long before the United States became concerned with border walls.
The land, not part of the original territory gained by the Americans at the end of the Mexican War, was acquired in 1853, through the Gadsden Purchase, to build the southern transcontinental railway line. Foreseeing the boon in international commerce that intersecting railroads could bring, Russian brothers Jacob and Isaac Isaacson set up a trading post in 1880, which was renamed Nogales by the U.S. Postal Service soon thereafter.
To support the new trade, a community emerged on the Mexican side of the line that people also referred to as Nogales. Unlike the Texas border, however, where the boundary is defined by the Rio Grande, Arizona’s is a land border, and in Nogales, the border was an unobstructed street called International, half of it which technically lay in one country, half in another. Around it, a seemingly singular town spread north and south.
But managing an international division, it turned out, wasn’t simple. The first fence on the U.S.-Mexico border went up here — after the Mexican government called for it.
The U.S. government had grown wary after the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, and relations had tensed as each side accused the other of banditry and incursions. The United States set up a military camp in Nogales, Ariz., and Gen. John J. Pershing was dispatched to chase after Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. The Sonora governor put up an 11-wire fence, which got torn down four months later.
In 1918, after the two cities went to war for a day because a U.S. guard shot a Mexican citizen at the border crossing, authorities on both sides agreed to construct a permanent chain-link fence between them.
But as life resumed, the fence became a technicality, not a reflection of how people related across the line. During Prohibition, Mexicans built saloons that straddled the border, so that patrons could drink on the correct side of the building.
Maitrejean remembers how this existence endured as she was growing up. In the 1950s, a Mexican shop on International Street would put up a huge blackboard to transmit the World Series as nogalenses watched the games excitedly from the U.S.
side. On Cinco de Mayo, city leaders would build a platform over the fence and crowned a binational queen as a joint parade marched across the border.
parts Eventually, of Mexico migration from other greew through the area, and stricter U.S. enforcement followed. “The border crossing was getting more difficult,” said Maiurse, trejean, “and, of course they put up our horrible Vietnam landing-mat fence in the ’90s, that was really the end.”
Made of 10-foot panels of corrugated steel that the U.S. Army had used to land helicopters in the Vietnam War, that was the fence that locals most resented, for it blocked their view to the other side. Then in 2011, the federal government replaced it with a rust-colored steel bollard fence, encased in concrete footing with 4-inch slats between the bars. Now, the two Nogaleses could see each other again, somewhat. Soon, families that didn’t have the right paperwork to cross started coming to either side on weekends to catch up with each other across the bollards.
Today, Jessy Zamorano, the owner and operator of Baja Arizona Tours, is struck by how her clients, many of whom are from the Northeast or Midwest, react when she takes them to the fence. “Women are very much more sympathetic,” she said. “They will look at it, and some find it quite shocking and obtuse. But many of the men say, ‘Build it higher.’”
When they spot some of the families reaching between steel bars to