My Family and the Border
Part One
The war exploded one mile from my great-grandmother’s front door. Belen Gameros, a 35-year-old widow, lived in El Paso’s Segundo Barrio, Second Ward, which was nearly fused with Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. In the spring of 1911, the Mexican Revolution had begun to rage. Belen and her five children were shocked and frightened by the mass violence, but they did not flee. My great-grandfather, Manuel Real y Vasquez, had recently died at the age of 31, leaving her to forge ahead on her own.
Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco led a rag-tag army of about 2,000 and took on a government contingent of better-armed and trained soldiers. The rebel objective was to take Juarez, a logistically important city. Francisco I. Madero was the nominal revolutionary leader and did not fight in the battle.
Combat began on April 7 and ended on May 10. The intense fighting was fierce, much of it at close quarters. The Battle of Juarez was pivotal in ousting dictator Porfirio Diaz. It also marked the rise of Francisco Pancho Villa, who embodied the Mexican Revolution for years.
Belen took in combatants wounded in the fight at some point. It was an extraordinarily humanitarian act. My great-grandmother lived into her 90s and would only confirm that she and other women tended to the injured the best they could. The hurt lay on the floor.
However, my mother knew some facts that she had shared with me. As we affectionately called her, Belita acted as head nurse in her home. Many battle details were unknown, such as the number of wounded and how they managed to get to my great-grandmother’s small home.
The battle was a milestone in my family’s close relationship with the border that began in 1871 and continues today. Collectively, we have crisscrossed the border thousands of times. Often accompanied by my family, I traverse the boundary almost every month.
For us, the Mexico-United States border is not an abstraction and has no political overtones. It has been a concrete part of our lives. Much of my family regarded the border as an unavoidable nuisance worth accepting. Not crossing the international boundary would deny us access to Mexico, our ancestral homeland.
Even today, most of my relatives live no more than a day’s drive from the border. My wife, children, and I have our home just 80 miles north of Mexico. Tomorrow, I will drive to Mexico and return home a few hours later.
The border after the Mexican-American War was not a physical barrier. Once it had been demarcated in 1853, it was wide open for decades and not patrolled, so residents of either country could cross unimpeded. During those years, dozens of my ancestors traveled back and forth between the nations.
All my family, dating to the mid-1700s, lived in Chihuahua state, which borders Texas. Some conducted brisk business on both sides of the border. Chihuahenses looked to El Paso and other Texas cities to buy and sell merchandise and personal items. Mexico City is nearly 1,000 miles south.
In 1915, U.S. Mounted Inspectors began intermittently patrolling the international boundary. The law authorizing the inspectors granted them the power to arrest as they saw fit. However, patrols were irregular.
Manuel and Belen moved from a small town, Aldama, Chihuahua, to El Paso and experience life in a big city. They married in El Paso’s Sacred Heart Church on June 8, 1895. My great-grandfather became a cigar maker. With his earnings, he and Belen bought a small house.
My parents were natives of El Paso, born and raised there in the 1920s and 1930s, and I had many relatives there. I was born in Los Angeles in 1950, but we Chaviras spent so many summers in El Paso that it was like a second home. El Paso has always been a hardscrabble city, and it runs right up against a Mexican city that is legendary or notorious for its rough-and-tumble character.
Jose Chavira and Maria Ramirez, my paternal grandparents, moved to El Paso from rural West Texas in 1929, just before the Great Depression. When hard times hit, Juarez offered economic relief. Food and some consumer goods were much less expensive than in El Paso. Living on the border meant a degree of financial relief.
In 1871, my great-grandfather, Jesus Chavira, was a teenage orphan when he crossed the boundary between Chihuahua and Texas. He immediately found work at the U.S. Calvary outpost in Fort Davis, Texas. Jesus married and had children, including my grandfather, Jose. The Chaviras lived on the family ranch in Shafter, Texas, until the mid-1900s, when Jesus moved to Guadalupe, Chihuahua. Throughout those decades, the Chaviras regularly crisscrossed the border.
My maternal grandmother, like Belita, lived about a mile from Juarez, making it seem like I was almost in Mexico. We often spent weeks at my grandmother Sara’s home. That said, I had to cross the border to feel transported to another world radically different from El Paso.
My family and I usually walked across the Bridge of the Americas, which spans the Rio Grande, the line of demarcation. At the bridge’s edge lay a wonderful, vibrant place, Ciudad Juarez. Downtown El Paso was dreadfully dull and tranquil.
Juaritos, as it was lightheartedly nicknamed, was pleasingly perplexing. I marveled at how walking a few hundred feet took me to a world that seemed like another planet.
The intoxicating aroma of freshly cut mangoes wafted throughout the city’s central market. Women patted corn dough into tortillas and cooked them on large griddles. The crafting of corn tortillas in this manner dates back thousands of years. Cars and smoke-belching buses were everywhere, emitting a steady racket. Juarez was vibrant, with thousands of people hurrying from one place to another.
Sometimes, my parents treated my brother and me to steak lunches at the Florida Café, the city’s best restaurant.
Crossing the border in the 1950s was easy, and it was nothing like the ordeal it is today. It is hard to imagine, but a trolley connected the twin cities. Almost certainly, it was the only trolley that crossed an international border. United States immigration officers boarded northbound trolleys. The agents looked over the passengers and waved vehicles into El Paso. Agents did not ask for passports or any identification. If you appeared authorized to enter the U.S., you rode into El Paso.
My family was attracted to the border and the land nearby on both sides. The U.S.-Mexico border region is typically defined as about 62 miles north and south of the international boundary.
The majority of residents in border counties are Mexican, and it would seem that millions of Mexicans want to live near what was once Mexico. For example, in the Texas-Mexico border region, about 89% of residents identify as Hispanic/Latino. In the Lower Rio Grande Valley, a cluster of Texas border counties, 71–99% of the population is Hispanic.
Border cities like San Diego, El Paso, Brownsville, and Nogales have large Mexican American populations. For example, El Paso is 85% Hispanic and has a significant Mexican American community. Depending on the source and definition, the U.S. border region is estimated to have 8 to 19 million residents.
Living near la frontera, the border is, for many of us Mexicans, a magnet that allows us quick access to both nations. We go to Mexico because of our genetic connections, the inherent gratification and pleasure it offers us, and as an escape from unrelenting racism. Our family and many similar to us return because, as a practical matter, we have to. It is the only nation in which we can legally live.
Crossing the border while being Mexican is sometimes a psychological and mental ordeal. For some feds, we appear foreign and suspect. Our legal right to enter the country is questionable, and hard cop grilling is necessary.
If we enter the United States by car, we may be subjected to “secondary” inspection. This sort of inspection requires us to park in an area where border cops rummage around our vehicle interior. Our trunk must be opened, and we are grilled about our travel and destination. Inspection also requires us to stand several feet away from the vehicle.
It is humiliating and infuriating to be treated as a person suspected of a crime. We must not protest during the inspection because that will engender officials’ hostility and prolong the ordeal.
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 