by Andrew Rice
El Paso and Ciudad Juárez lie together uncomfortably like an estranged couple, surrounded on all sides by mountains and desert. The cities are separated by the thin trickle of the Rio Grande, which flows through concrete channels, built to put an end to the river’s natural habit of changing course and muddying boundaries. One side is Texas; the other, Mexico. The border’s way of life — its business, legitimate and otherwise — has always relied upon the circumvention of this dividing line.
The cities are so close that you can sit on a park bench in El Paso and watch laundry wave behind a whitewashed house on a Juárez hillside. Thousands of commuters come across from Mexico every morning, waiting in a long line at the Paso del Norte bridge, snaking back up the seedy Avenida Juárez, past military checkpoints where hawkers wave tabloids full of tales of carnage. The recent war among various gangs and drug cartels has made Juárez one of the world’s most dangerous cities, while across the way, El Paso remains calm, even eerily prosperous. It consistently ranks as one of the safest cities in the United States. This grotesque disparity has, in some ways, torn the cities apart. Few El Pasoans venture across the bridge anymore, if they can help it, while much of Juárez’s middle and upper class has decamped to the other side of the border, taking their money, businesses, even their private schools with them, forming an affluent community in exile.
I spent a lot of time in El Paso this winter and spring as the Mexican Army mounted a fragmentary campaign against the cartels and as American politicians of both parties exploited the spectacle for their own purposes. In Washington and Austin, the capital of Texas, in the faraway realm that borderland residents call the interior, conservatives were raising the specter of “spillover violence,” while President Obama was boasting of an unprecedented border fortification. In reality, spillover was notable for its scarcity — when stray bullets from a Juárez gunfight improbably flew across the border and struck El Paso’s City Hall last year, it made international news. But that’s about the only physical damage the city has suffered. And the federal security buildup — symbolized by an 18-foot, rust-colored fence that runs along city streets and through backyards, part of a 650-mile, $2.8 billion border wall — was regarded around town as a threatening imposition. Some two million people are linked at this spot, by ties of blood and commerce, and its fluid social ecosystem still retains something unique and emblematic and perhaps worth saving. If scholars of globalization are right that we are moving toward a future in which all borders are profitably blurred, here is the starkest imaginable expression of that evolution, in all its heady promise and its perverse failings.
On a frigid morning in February, I met with Linda Arnold inside a small brick storefront in El Paso. “Unless you are right here, I don’t think you can get how intertwined this community is,” Arnold told me. A midwife with frosted blond hair who favors jangly jewelry, Arnold was running a small business called the Casa de Nacimiento, catering to a specific subset of border-straddlers. At that moment, sweating through labor, were three women who had come over the bridges from Juárez with legal visas. The distance, about a mile and a half from the Rio Grande, was geographically negligible but enormously consequential. Giving birth here would deliver their children a precious advantage: it would make them Americans.
Arnold isn’t an immigration zealot, or even an ideological liberal, despite the hippie-ish connotations of her profession. “We’re not going to sit around here and chant,” she said as we spoke in her office, which contained a sculpture of a womb and a portrait of her own son, a soldier in uniform. “This is a business, not a commune.” What Arnold was offering for sale at Casa de Nacimiento, for $695, was a future untroubled by the border’s impediments. Any child born at Arnold’s birth center would possess American citizenship, courtesy of the 14th Amendment, and with it the ability to cross freely back and forth.
It is El Paso’s way to make the most of the border’s inequities. Arnold moved to town in 1985 with an impassioned commitment to natural childbirth and an entrepreneur’s hunch about an untapped market. Mexican women had a long tradition of crossing the border to give birth, and Arnold soon made herself one of the busiest midwives in the state. Back when she started, getting over the border was as simple as wading across the Rio Grande or paying a ferryman a dollar for a tow on an inner tube. “They would come in with their jeans still wet,” she said.
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