Nogales: What it Was, Is and Ought to Be
A new city emerged from the emptiness of the Sonoran Desert as our van passed under the interpretive sign, “Int’l Border”. A border city of rolling hills topped with clusters of tin roofed homes of the same vernacular style came before us, a small side lying in the United States and another in Mexico. Despite the almost indistinguishable Spanish-speaking community that existed across the two sides, a visible division stood in between: a series of mesh-lined rusted steel posts running miles across the landscape. The people who lived on both Nogaleses are undeniably the same, but their lived experiences represent a stronger divide than the physical border that separates them.
The subject of border control and the visible attitudes towards it was prevalent in our experience in Nogales and in Davidson’s book Lives on the Line. Once we crossed the border, we met with a local resident, Manuel, near the border wall where he told us the story of Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, a sixteen year old Mexican boy who was shot by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in 2012. According to Manuel and the New York Times Report, Ten Shots Across the Border, the boy was shot through the fence by agent, Lonnie Swartz who claimed that the boy was hurling stones at him. Other narratives such as drug smuggling were tied into this story but they were never substantiated. Certainly this is not the only occurrence of border violence, but none has received as much attention from both Mexico and the United States with the same level of fervor. Davidson traces the outcome of an earlier case involving the shooting of Dario Miranda by a Border Patrol agent Michael Elmer in 1992 (pp.86). Agent Elmer was acquitted (p.97). Although both killings existed within an international context, what the Miranda and Rodriguez cases reveal is the prolonged laxity of accountability in the U.S. Justice system towards the Border Patrol.
What made the Miranda case different from the Rodriguez case became clearer once we explored what existed around the scene of the crime. Murals of Jose Rodriguez, crucifixes, and provocative exclamations such as "chinga la migra!" decorated the border wall adjacent to the site of his death. Davidson said that the Miranda case had angered Mexicans to protest, but few took action in the United States in response to Elmer’s acquittal (p.98). According to Manuel, this time the people spoke on both sides and demanded that the United States government not overlook this case, as David Luz, a Nogales resident, put it, “as if they had killed a dog and not a man” (p.97). Even though there was an already visible war zone at the wall, President Trump's recent calls for increased militarization occurred two days before our trip to Nogales.
Asylum Seekers in Nogales
When Manuel took us to a Grupos Beta Center in Nogales, we met people from not just Mexico but all over Central America. One man I spoke briefly with was originally from El Salvador, but he was never going to return. His reason: “they want to kill me”. The man with an ASU vs. Boston College Aloha Bowl baseball cap said that he had lived in the United States for twenty years before he was deported. My classmate, Shiloh and I were not sure whether or not he was going to try to cross the border to see the daughter he talked about; we did not want to ask. The news and my twitter feed two days ago had been full of Trump’s comments on a caravan of migrants heading North through Mexico from Honduras, El Salvador and other Central American countries. On Twitter, Trump rallied his conservative base with his prophecy of “drugs and crime” and proclaiming, “Our country is being stolen” (Trump, April 2, 2018). I would not have thought that we were going to encounter some of the people Trump was referring to during the trip. After learning more about the caravan it became clear to me that I was not engaging with migrants of the “criminal” variety, but rather they fell under what should be a new class of migrant-- refugee. Many were not escaping just poverty, but also murder.
A Picture of Inequality
Economic problems in Nogales evolved from high unemployment in the 1960s and 70s to peso devaluation in the 1990s and now to extreme wealth inequality. The expression of a place being “on the other side of the tracks” screamed at me in Nogales’ Industrial Park. Atop a hill at the edge of the industrial complex, I looked over a cliff to see scores of impoverished settlements in the Colonia Colosia, a neighborhood where many factory workers lived. My complete line of sight was filled with hills of self-built homes with cracked-open roofs separated by a dirt road grid. I can tell who lived there longer by the amount of visible additions added to the homes. This also meant that once they got there, they were stuck, for there was not much upward mobility.
Davidson shows that the maquiladora boom did in fact address Mexico’s unemployment crisis, but it fueled other economic problems. People like Yolanda were able to leave rural communities and gain more independence for their lives in Nogales, but border industrialization did not “lift Mexicans out of poverty” (p.35). For the most part wages remained terribly low for decades. According to our guide Manuel, for a full day’s work s maquila worker earns about four U.S. dollars (seventy-two Mexican pesos). This means that roughly half-a-day’s work can them you one dozen eggs at 31 pesos. It is clear that solving the unemployment problem did not address the fact that the Mexican government does not enforce more equitable wage standards. When we drove around the industrial park we also noticed that the majority of companies were U.S. based, often recognizable brands like Masterlock. Davidson states that the rise in American factories followed the 1994 NAFTA agreement and the peso devaluation of the 1990s. Manuel said that the Mexican government will not cross the United States’ government, and the truth is if more just wages became a demand, companies can threaten to relocate to places like China where labor is cheaper. Many companies have already left Mexico for this reason.
Looking Ahead to the Future
The social and political exclusions that are evidenced throughout Nogales seen through a lack of represented interests of the majority and limited access to more suitable living conditions can be traced to an economic source. The doctrine of free-trade that followed NAFTA did not usher in the economic revival that many initially expected. Instead, the opening for increased participation in a larger economy was replaced by an intensified system of capitalist exploitation. Together, my experience in Nogales kept me asking myself “why?!” and “how can we fix this?”. The truth is, the problem cannot be solved simply by abolishing NAFTA or removing the maquiladoras, for such a solution will only lead to more displacement. Regardless of the solution we pursue, we cannot be blinded by the idea that Mexico can handle it on their own, for no amount of steel walls can erase the fact that the U.S. is heavily intertwined with the destinies of many Mexican citizens and their nation. Togetherness, that is what I ultimately reasoned we needed after sipping mango juice and munching on frijoles pintos in the patio behind Manuel’s daughter's house after a long day.
Work Cited
Davidson, Miriam. Lives on the Line: Dispatches from the US-Mexico Border. U Arizona P 2000