Within a stone's throw from Mexico
I no longer live in physical sight of the border as I did my first year in El Paso. I've traded in my apartment on the hill overlooking much of Juarez and Sunland Park, New Mexico for a house further up the West Side of the Franklin Mountains. Now, I have to walk three minutes up the hill near my house to see into Mexico.
Still, the fastest route to work is along Paisano Avenue, a road that literally borders the Border. Every morning and evening, I drive within a stone's throw of Mexico and the shantytowns that make up northern Juarez. The only things standing between us are a chain-link fence, an occasional Border Patrol SUV, and the anemic Rio Grande - once great but now turned into a trickle by damns and irrigation.
When I get into Downtown El Paso and before I get to the professional district, I drive through areas of town that forcibly remind me of cities in developing nations. Flea markets, ramshackle businesses, and masses of moving people crowd each side of the street. When I finally do get to work, I am still no more than a mile from the border. A fifteen-minute walk and I would be across the bridge into another world.
It is important to note that there is a war going on down here, not as fierce as that in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the casualties are mounting. Take that fifteen-minute walk across the bridge on Santa Fe Avenue and you leave one of the safest cities in America and enter a city that has had more than 560 slayings since the beginning of the year (New York City - six times the size of Juarez - had less than 500 homicides in all of 2007). The majority of killings are drug-related, and include beheadings, dismemberments, shoot-outs in the streets, and people being gunned down in front of nightclubs and cafes. Two cartels are vying for control of the obscenely lucrative drug trade, and the Mexican government has called thousands of troops in to take out both cartels (or help one cartel eliminate the other). These cartels are so well-entrenched, funded and powerful that they put out emails and youtube videos touting their killings and warning Juarez businesses to pay up or suffer the consequences.
My job in El Paso involves combating the drug trade, and while I am sufficiently behind the scenes to not be a direct target, I know people who are. So far the violence has stayed south of the border, but its proximity nonetheless results in economic, social and political repercussions. Most people who live here have family on both sides of the border as well as economic interests in property and business. While politicians in Washington, D.C. talk of a wall dividing the two countries, 20,000 people pass back and forth over the border here every day.
I told my wife today that living in El Paso felt to me as much like living in a foreign country as living in Belgium or Japan, places I spent several years growing up. Thinking back, that is perhaps not true. More analogous perhaps is my time in Hawaii, where I felt very much on the borders of America but still America. There, as I here, I am in a land that is part of the United States but very much possessed of its own independent culture. I am excited about living another year here, and I look forward to deepening my understanding of the issues that are continuing to shape people's lives here as well as the rest of America.
Still, the fastest route to work is along Paisano Avenue, a road that literally borders the Border. Every morning and evening, I drive within a stone's throw of Mexico and the shantytowns that make up northern Juarez. The only things standing between us are a chain-link fence, an occasional Border Patrol SUV, and the anemic Rio Grande - once great but now turned into a trickle by damns and irrigation.
When I get into Downtown El Paso and before I get to the professional district, I drive through areas of town that forcibly remind me of cities in developing nations. Flea markets, ramshackle businesses, and masses of moving people crowd each side of the street. When I finally do get to work, I am still no more than a mile from the border. A fifteen-minute walk and I would be across the bridge into another world.
It is important to note that there is a war going on down here, not as fierce as that in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the casualties are mounting. Take that fifteen-minute walk across the bridge on Santa Fe Avenue and you leave one of the safest cities in America and enter a city that has had more than 560 slayings since the beginning of the year (New York City - six times the size of Juarez - had less than 500 homicides in all of 2007). The majority of killings are drug-related, and include beheadings, dismemberments, shoot-outs in the streets, and people being gunned down in front of nightclubs and cafes. Two cartels are vying for control of the obscenely lucrative drug trade, and the Mexican government has called thousands of troops in to take out both cartels (or help one cartel eliminate the other). These cartels are so well-entrenched, funded and powerful that they put out emails and youtube videos touting their killings and warning Juarez businesses to pay up or suffer the consequences.
My job in El Paso involves combating the drug trade, and while I am sufficiently behind the scenes to not be a direct target, I know people who are. So far the violence has stayed south of the border, but its proximity nonetheless results in economic, social and political repercussions. Most people who live here have family on both sides of the border as well as economic interests in property and business. While politicians in Washington, D.C. talk of a wall dividing the two countries, 20,000 people pass back and forth over the border here every day.
I told my wife today that living in El Paso felt to me as much like living in a foreign country as living in Belgium or Japan, places I spent several years growing up. Thinking back, that is perhaps not true. More analogous perhaps is my time in Hawaii, where I felt very much on the borders of America but still America. There, as I here, I am in a land that is part of the United States but very much possessed of its own independent culture. I am excited about living another year here, and I look forward to deepening my understanding of the issues that are continuing to shape people's lives here as well as the rest of America.
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