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Nogales postcard

Once-friendly wall casts shadow of agitation, menacing power

A view in Nogales, along the border of Mexico and Arizona, USA

"Bajale buey!" the man shouted from atop his post, not 200 feet from where we stood. The red hoodie concealed his eyes; it was impossible to know whether he was talking to us or an unseen friend on the other side of the wall.

"Bajale buey, ahorita!" he shouted again.

If he was talking to us, we weren't listening. My friend and I continued to climb up the hill, following the physical path of a wall that had, in a previous life, been used in pieces as a transportable landing pad for U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. We were only a half-mile from the main U.S. Customs building, and yet, in that short walk, we had entered a different world.

The pharmacies, restaurants, hotels, and "massage parlors" that greet a visitor to Nogales, Mexico had given away to rolling hills and makeshift homes as we climbed higher. We passed holes in the wall as wide as a human torso; we stepped over piles of litter and garbage branded with the logos of McDonalds and Taco Bell.

As we drew closer to the man in red, it became apparent that he wasn't talking to us, but coordinating the movements of someone over the wall on the U.S. side. He stood in the back yard of a home perched atop the next hill, looking directly down upon our current position. It was a clear day, and his position must have afforded him a complete view of both sides of the border. A walkie talkie crackled in his hand.

"Can we come up to your home, take a look at your view?" I shouted up.

"For $20 you can come up and use my bathroom," he replied.

"That's O.K.," I shouted back, "Thanks, but no."

"Bajale buey, bajale ahorita," he responded. This time he was talking to us. "If you go any further, men with guns will rob you."

Alberto Alvaro Rios knows the border wasn't always this way. An ASU English professor, Rios was born in Nogales in 1952. Although he has dabbled in fiction and written a memoir, Rios sees himself as a poet of the southwest, one defined by the U.S-Mexico border.

"When I was growing up," reminisced Rios in a recent interview, "Nogales, Arizona had about 8,000 residents. In the '50s and '60s, you had a transient population of about 40,000 a day. There was an entire ghost population; you were always meeting new people. Transport back and forth, for both sides, was a quite thing. Border guards didn't do much of anything but sit there, reading their newspapers, waving people through without even looking up."

"Now, you have about 25,000 on the U.S. side and 350,000 on the Mexican side. There is the sense that the pressure on one side is building and building, and yet, instead of looking for a real solution, we have decided to just build a new wall. If the border were a dam, it would be approaching critical mass; it would be on the verge of breaking and flooding everything in its path."

When Rios was a child, the border was an attribute that united people, blending languages and cultures.

"Growing up in an environment that featured such a free flow of culture made everywhere seem like school," says Rios. "Everyone was exchanging, and you couldn't help but be influenced by two languages, two cultures, even three, as there were a lot of Yaqui Native Americans around as well. Words became localized. Words became Nogales words, Sonora words. This is really something that came to define my art later in life."

"Now, the fence works like a line drawn in the sand: don't cross this line, or else. That line is a dare, and crossing the line - the border - turns into crossing lines generally. This provocation and reaction is always trouble, and border residents live in this state of agitation constantly. Crime, meanness, inappropriate behavior, inordinate shows of power, territorial stances - the whole mix, which is very much there now, never leads to good."