El Paso/Juarez - Chiara Azzaretti

We just got back from El Paso yesterday, and even though a weekend in Texas sounds much less dramatic than three weeks in Guatemala and Mexico, being there for a short time did a lot to change my understanding of the border. The experiences I've had in the Tucson border region have been wide-ranging and valuable, but having them doesn't mean I automatically understand the border as a whole, especially in places like El Paso that are so dramatically different.

The difference that struck me immediately was the close proximity of El Paso to Ciudad Juarez. I had seen the two cities on maps and heard stories of past Border Studies students crossing between them daily, but knowing those things didn't prepare me for actually seeing the border. From the view in the Franklin Mountains (which is the only way Border Studies students can see Juarez these days), the two metropolises appear to be colliding as they both expand along the Rio Grande river and into the desert. The border wall is constantly visible along the highway, along with the Border Patrol, who showed up in under five minutes when our group stopped to have a discussion by the Anapra section of the fence. Even the desert itself (which around El Paso is the Chihuahuan, not the Sonoran), with its lack of saguaros and a Saturday-afternoon dust storm, seemed more foreign to me than I had expected.

In Tucson, “the border” often remains an abstract concept. In El Paso, there is no way to think of it as something vague and distant. Just as I had on the travel seminar, I often had the feeling that I was seeing firsthand many of the issues I'd been studying all semester. There was economic inequality in the contrast between what we could see of Juarez and the suburbs and mansions of El Paso, and we saw the arbitrary nature of borders in the fact that a citizen of either US or Mexico could be arrested for stepping over a line in the middle of a public park. Over and over again, people we met in El Paso reminded us that while we were visiting one of the safest cities in the United States, Ciudad Juarez was experiencing an average of eight murders per day – a fact that made questions of privilege and injustice immediately apparent.

I'm grateful for the space I have as a Border Studies student to learn about these issues and examine my own place in the systems that created them. However, I'm also grateful that I got to spend time in El Paso, where the border is a constant physical presence. Many of the people we met there were working in direct, pragmatic ways against the way these systems affect their communities, whether they were providing lodging for migrants, establishing a community center that fights post-NAFTA unemployment, or working to make low-cost childbirth available to mothers from both sides of the border. I often felt uncomfortable and overwhelmed by learning about the border in El Paso, but the trip also provided a reminder not to get lost in thinking about everything on such a large scale that I lose sight of the need and value of smaller-scale, more concrete work.