Ricardo Chavira Chicano

In 1983, as a reporter for the San Diego Union,  I drove the entire border, nearly 2,000 miles, visiting every border city and town. Photographer Jerry McLard accompanied me.

Here is part of a newspaper series that offers a portrait in many ways different from today’s dystopian stereotype. In other important ways, it describes what is unchanged. I did nearly all the reporting and wrote it in coordination with Marjorie Miller.

Published December 28, 1983

The San Diego Union

Highway 80, a blacktop ribbon of road through scrub brush and hill after

rugged hill, unfolds to the south toward Douglas. The windswept Arizona highway leads to the 2,000-mile border where Mexico and the United States stand face-to-face in a barren land.

 At the border, the highway merges with a trio of narrow Mexican highways that also traverse the arid landscape. But there are more than lonesome roads among the scrub brush. These Mexican and American highways form a network that connects far-apart towns and cities from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, and from Tijuana to Matamoros, Tamaulipas.

 In these remote border cities, far from national capitals, the United States and Mexico meet and merge to form a new society.

 It is a society of people like Elsa Vega and Celia Diaz, who grew up south of the border but now live north. It is people like Barney Thompson and William Arens who married women from Tijuana but live in San Diego. Robert Bracker, whose father built a store in Nogales, Ariz., to serve Mexican customers, or Pablo Hourani, who lives in Bonita and commutes south daily to run his family clothing business. Or Leobardo Estrada of Los Angeles, the grandson of Mexican immigrants whose family extends south to Tijuana.

At the border, a wealthy technological superpower meets a developing agricultural nation; a predominantly Anglo-Protestant people encounters a society of mestizos, Indians, and Spanish Catholics. A 200-year-old, upstart culture on the border meets one with roots that predate Christ. Together, they meld into a new, third culture of the borderlands that blurs the very border from which it was born.

This barren land has been fertile ground, after all, fertile for a culture that has flourished partly because of its isolation. The border culture has had room to grow in the desert. It has grown in Mexican cities like Mexicali, where the land once belonged to American developers, and in Tijuana, which was so isolated that until the 1940s, Tijuanans had to pass through the United States to visit their homeland.

 It has grown in American cities like Laredo and Calexico, where most of the population is Hispanic. The culture of the borderlands is a binational world where Mexicans are becoming more Americanized and where Americans are becoming more Mexicanized. It is an area, sometimes hundreds of miles wide, where families, businesses, languages, and values from the two countries often are entwined as tightly as the chain link fence that attempts to separate them.

While not all cities and the seven million people living along the U.S.-Mexico boundary belong to the binational culture, a border society is distinct from Mexico and the United States.

In parts, the border culture reaches as far north as Santa Barbara and San Antonio, Texas, as far south as La Paz in Baja California Sur, and Chihuahua City, Chihuahua. In a few instances, the borderlands culture crops up like an island far from the international boundary, such as in Chicago — where Mexican immigrants have converted old neighborhoods into replicas of border communities.

 The culture clings to the area along the U.S.-Mexico border, where people might live in one country and work or go to school in another. It is where Americans and Mexicans intermarry and have children who are dual citizens for the first 18 years of their lives, until they choose one country or the other or have dual citizenship.

 It is a region where people speak English and Spanish; a third language, Spanglish, is often a hybrid of the two. It is a society where certain businesses exist simply because the border exists — businesses like currency exchange houses, import-export brokerage firms, and drive-through Mexican car insurance agencies — and where businessmen must learn to operate in two cultures so that after years of doing so they become bicultural.

 The border society comprises towns and cities that experience international issues, like illegal immigration, as local problems. Pollution, sewage, and natural disasters affect Mexican and American border cities equally because such issues do not respect an international boundary.

Society on the border is united by footbridge, ferry, and bus; by bilingual radio and television; by millions of people who legally cross the border hundreds of times each year; and by countless others who cross illegally.

It is a society where the local economies on each side of the border are often more attached to one another than to their respective mother countries. It is a society slightly scorned by Mexico and the United States for its unconventional behavior.

Even some of the cities have blended. Take Calexico and Mexicali, which are on opposite sides of the border. Still, both were named by the Colorado Land River Company from the words California and Mexico.

 And cities such as Columbus, N.M., and its neighbor Palomas, Chihuahua, have merged in other ways, helping to sustain each other. Many Columbus residents have family in Palomas, while nearly half of Columbus’s schoolchildren are from the border’s other side. Columbus provides the Mexican town with ambulance and fire services. Mexicans commonly use the hospital on the U.S. side, the only one in the area. On the other hand, Palomas is still where Columbus residents go to eat bargain-priced steak dinners and drink hearty Mexican beer. And despite Mexico’s ailing economy, Columbus still relies on Mexican shoppers to spend money in the U.S. town.

 However, this binational blend is not evenly spread along the boundary. The border society is not homogeneous. The border region is the wealthiest in Mexico, but one of the poorest regions of the United States.

Its people are a mix of pioneers who have called the frontier home for generations and a generation of new settlers who arrived yesterday from Ohio or Oaxaca, from Michigan or Michoacan. People living along the boundary line are often oblivious to the new third culture, which may be more pronounced near the Canadian border.

There are fourth, fifth, and sixth cultures, such as that of the Kickapoo native people in Texas, the Chinese of Mexicali, and the Filipinos of San Ysidro, that exist under the umbrella of the border society. There are differences between urban and rural people, the rich and poor, and between Texans and Californians. In fact, those who are totally immersed in the border culture are a minority.

Far more significant are the numbers who dip in and out, whose cross-border experience might be limited to occasional shopping or dining in the other country, whose cross-cultural experience might be limited to Mexicans seeing an American movie or to San Diegans living next door to a family whose mother tongue is Spanish.

Some might be touched by the border only because they work with Americans or employ a Mexican. But inevitably, bits and pieces of the culture rub off — exposure to another language or lifestyle, a conversion from dollars to pesos or kilometers to miles, a sketchy knowledge of the history of another country, a familiarity with its holidays and traditions.

While some people who live in the border culture embrace it as a positive and inevitable change, others are hostile toward it for fear it will degrade their own culture.

The history of the border begins with such antagonism. After a two-year war between Mexico and the United States, the present-day border was drawn up, which cost Mexico nearly half its territory. Mutual hate and distrust poisoned relations, and for years after the conquest, Americans and Mexicans launched cross-border raids against each other.

 Mexico later decided to put up the only barrier it had — people — to prevent Americans from capturing more land by simply moving onto it. In the 1930s, the government made it a national policy to entice Mexicans to move north- ironically, by offering them access to cheap American goods.

More recently, Mexicans in the interior have chastised those northern Mexicans for becoming too Americanized and too dependent on American goods. Today, many Mexicans see the cultural encroachment of the United States in Mexico as a further “occupation” of their country.

 Many Americans, on the other hand, fear that Mexicans are slowly reconquering the Southwest with their cultural encroachment. Just as the border is not homogeneous, neither is it completely unified.

 Conflicts, clashes, and contradictions have developed out of the interaction between two such diverse peoples: Mexicans and Americans. On both sides of the border, neighbors must be mutually dependent. But respect and friendship often have combined with resentment and racism to form a love-hate relationship.

 There is suspicion and scorn on both sides. Americans who value speed and efficiency often huff if Mexican goods break down or service is slow; Mexicans, on the other hand, sometimes turn up their noses at Americans who feel they are rushing through life too fast to appreciate living it. Many Mexicans are envious of American wealth while, at the same time, they are put off by the individualism, egotism, and selfishness that they believe goes with it. They are offended by American haughtiness and bluntness. A mythology has evolved on both sides that leads Americans to believe all Mexican police will demand a bribe or throw them in jail and Mexicans to believe that U.S. business people are always honest and that U.S. authorities will typically deal with them fairly.

 U.S. police along the border patrol America’s underbelly. It is 1,900 miles of largely unprotected boundary that is vulnerable to anyone determined enough to enter or to bring something into the country. Even in an era of sophisticated electronic surveillance, millions of people and billions of dollars of narcotics find their way north. At the same time, firearms, stolen cars, high-tech equipment, and laundered drug money flow south.

It is that permeability that scares Americans. Mexicans, meanwhile, have heard horror stories about discrimination in the United States. For that reason, some are wary of going north. Americans continue to picture the Mexican border as replete with good-time towns of sleazy, honky-tonk bars where anything is for sale for the right price. Some of that does exist, yet Americans played a prominent role in the creation of Mexico in the ’20s and ’30s during Prohibition.

 While spending their dollars for fun, Americans developed a double standard, frowning on Mexico for being “that kind of place.” Mexicans invoked their own double standard, profiting from the indulgence while disapproving of Americans for acting as they would not act at home.

Misconceptions and misunderstandings about border life still exist, but they are not unique to the border. They exist away from the border — in Mexico City and Washington, D.C., among other places. For all that border residents criticize each other, however, they are becoming more tolerant of each other and more alike. U.S. border residents who do business in Mexico learn to temper some American straightforwardness with a bit of Mexican graciousness. Mexican business people learn to speed up their timetables to meet Americans’ habits, so a 2 p.m. lunch in Tijuana becomes a noon lunch in San Diego. American hostesses who invite guests from south of the border learn to time their evenings accordingly because one never knows how long it will take to cross the border.

 Many border Mexicans want their children schooled in the United States to learn English but send them to Catholic schools to make sure they preserve traditional values of family, religion, and respect. A few Americans send their children south to learn proper Spanish. Tastes have changed along the U.S. border. From California to Texas, tacos and burritos have become as American as apple pie — so American, in fact, that the way they are prepared is foreign to many Mexicans from the interior.

While Mexican restaurants are just now becoming an expensive fad in New York, the shopping mall or hotel center along the border is rare, and there is no Mexican restaurant- fast food or fancy.

 Products from both countries intermingle effortlessly on supermarket shelves for people whose tastes include chili peppers and Idaho potatoes, tortillas, and grits. Some holidays are heartily celebrated on both sides of the border. Cinco de Mayo has become the St. Patrick’s Day of the Southwest in the United States. Border Mexicans have become attuned to American holidays such as July 4, Labor Day, and Memorial Day, if only because they mean added business over long weekends.

Hundreds of thousands of Mexican fans vigorously support U.S. sports teams in the borderlands. While Mexicans head north to see football and baseball, Americans head south for bullfights, cockfights, and jai alai. For residents of the binational society, the border is united by cooperation among peoples through charity and neighborliness, among businesses through joint ventures, and governments through joint projects.

 Despite the rugged terrain of scrub brush and fear, the border is not a barrier but a network of relationships and opportunities: The people who straddle the boundary guarantee that the border society will continue to grow in the desert.

Today’s militarized and demonized border is a reflection of Mexico-United States relations. Its existence for many Americans is a dire threat. It is a place where bad people and bad things happen.

It is a growing nightmare for xenophobes. It is the conduit for the loss of white America. 

It is safe to say that most Americans have never visited the border. Thanks to the mainstream media, rightwing loudmouths and their political allies, the border is depicted as a chaotic, dangerous zone.

Staunchly connected to this inaccurate image are the spate of brutal ICE quasi-kidnappings. Beefy young men, geared up for battle, their faces covered by balaclavas, are ICE’s goon squads. They routinely use excessive force in apprehending migrants who do not attempt to resist. The goal is to terrify undocumented migrants. However, they are chilling to even those of us who are citizens. Masked men who do not wear uniforms, nab people, and whisk them away is what dictatorial governments do.