The Border Life

After my time in Seattle, I continued my journey by train to El Paso. I was intrigued to experience life at the border, and it was indeed intriguing.

I had seen pictures of El Paso before, where it looks like the border separates two different worlds from each other – poor and rich, "developed" and "developing". But I ended up experiencing El Paso and its Mexican counterpart Juárez a lot differently. Crossing the border did not feel like a sudden step into a totally different world, rather, crossing the border rather seemed like a gradual process to me.

Let me explain: In El Paso's neighborhoods further away from the border, I was greeted in restaurants and shops mostly in English. That's also where the standard chain restaurants and coffee shops are mostly located, where the houses are bigger on average and people walking by foot are a rare sight. But as I walked further south closer to the border, I would hear people increasingly speak Spanish or Spanglish in the streets, some signs are in both English and Spanish, but mostly just in Spanish. In the neighborhood I lived in, there were fewer American flags displayed outside the houses than colorful Christian decorations. There were a lot of family-owned, small businesses around there: corner stores selling cigarettes, soda and eggs, restaurants offering Mexican food, and hair salons on the ground floor of residential houses, where a haircut is $8 (although the many buildings slowly falling into ruins also made evident, that these businesses are having an increasingly hard time). Initially residential buildings also house law and doctors' offices, as well as churches. In the Segundo Barrio, directly at the border, there were also actually people on the street walking home with their groceries. The music played in the restaurants gets more Latin American, and the televisions in bars or restaurants showed Mexican soap operas or news shows rather than some US-American sports channel. Businesses often advertise with murals (or just with their name painted on the wall) rather than with neon signs. The architecture in the Segundo Barrio also often reminds of the small one-story adobe brick houses that the first tribe members had been built in the region before the arrival of the Anglo-Americans.

Many of these elements I recognized again after I actually crossed the bridge over the Rio Grande into Juárez: the small businesses, the murals, the music, the TV shows, the language of course. And then, once I strolled a little more through Juárez, I also found the large fast food chain restaurants again, and the fancy mansions with actual green gardens (which not many people have since it requires constant irrigation in this area).

It should probably have been obvious to me, but I was nevertheless surprised that El Paso and Ciudad Juárez felt in many regards very much like one unit to me. It makes sense though, considering that crossing the border is an everyday thing for a lot of people in El Paso. I met a student for instance, who walked from his home in Juaréz every day to the community college in El Paso. Or one 20-year old, who crossed the border regularly to go to the bars, because the drinking age is only 18 in Mexico. Most people probably come to the US side to work, but I also talked to a doctor living in El Paso and practicing in Juárez. So it should not be a surprise that the cultural ties are very strong, and even people living in the US for many generations still probably maintain a closer relationship with Mexican culture on average than people living further removed from the border. Some of course also work actively to keep the distinct border culture alive, like my AirBnB host, who is currently working on her autobiography about her life as a resident of the border, and who also writes poetry in a mix of Spanish, English and Nahuatl.

(And I'm not even getting into the historic factors of the struggle about Texas and border disputes in the area that were only settled in the 1960s.)

All that being said, I also want to mention some differences that were noticable to me when crossing the border, even just for a short time. Just after crime rates had been dropping in Juárez for a few years, the city made it onto the list of the 50 most violent cities in the world again this year (although the murder rate is still a lot lower than in 2010, when Juárez was ranked the one most violent city and dubbed "the murder capital of the world"). El Paso on the other hand, is a very safe city with very low crime rates. When I was in Juárez (only during the day), I felt mostly safe, but two sad byeffects of the drug war stood out to me: A lot of buildings, and not only the big, fancy mansions, but even small residential houses are protected with high walls or fences, often crowned with a lot of barbed wire. Besides, I saw quite a few "Missing" posters showing young womens' faces posted onto walls and street lamps.

I didn't intend on ending another blog post on such a negative note, but yet it happened again... Maybe some low quality pictures of some of my favorite El Paso / Juárez murals can cheer you up again!