Walls separate neighbors, cultures

By Carl Heintze

In Douglas, Arizona, there's a peculiar fence that runs for a mile or more in a straight line. The fence is made of steel bars coated with bright gold paint. The top of the fence inclines at a 45 degree angle northward.

The fence marks the border between the United States and Mexico. On one side lies the town of Douglas, until recently famous as a copper mining town. On the other side lies Agua Prieta, literally Dark Water.

Like Juarez and El Paso, Douglas and Agua Prieta could be the same town. They are at least contiguous, butt up against one another as tightly as Santa Clara and San Jose, but, of course, they're not the same place. They are as different as night and day or, let's be plain, Mexico and the U.S.

Douglas is rife with strip malls and shopping centers, gleaming gas stations and trim houses, most of them fitted with air conditioning.

Agua Prieta seems more desolate, with signs in Spanish; there are what may kindly be called shacks and, most noticeably of all, there's dust, lots of it.

The dust is blown back and forth by the wind because, despite it's name, there is no excess water in Agua Prieta, black, blue or green, and almost no grass or trees. Indeed, dust is the thing most Americans remember about Agua Prieta, if they go there. Now and then some of the dust blows across the fence into Douglas, past the Wal-Mart and K-Mart and Wendy's and McDonalds.

In short, Agua Prieta is a border town, a place looked upon with ill favor by both Mexicans and Americans. It harbors all the ills and all the hope that all Mexican-American border towns hold.

And lately that's become all too evident in both places because Douglas-Agua Prieta has become the focus for more and more attempts at crossing the border illegally from Mexico to the U.S.

During an average month more than 30,000 Mexicans are caught and deported back across the border into Agua Prieta or somewhere further south by the U.S. Border Patrol. Most, of course, don't attempt to scale the menacing fence which marks the precise location of the border. Instead they try east or west.

No one is quite sure why Douglas has become the center of illegal border crossings. This hot spot seems to shift from one place to another along the border, depending on the vigilance of the Border Patrol and the whim, or wish, of Mexicans trying to get into the U.S. for better jobs.

Probably the efforts of Mexicans will soon shift somewhere else. All anyone knows is that there are lots and lots of Mexicans seeking to make it across the fence somewhere into the land which they see as filled with promise.

Despite recent good times in Mexico, partly because of the NAFTA (the North American Fair Trade Agreement), work in Mexico is still a sometimes thing for many Mexicans. There's more of it in the U.S. at better wages than there is, even among the hundreds of plants that have sprung up farther south, in Mexico in places such as Chihuahua to assemble U.S. consumer goods. These factories daily receive truckloads of parts from the U.S. They process them into finished goods. The finished goods are then sent back north over the border to the United States for sale to hungry U.S. consumers.

But it's not exactly a two-way street.

The trucks heading south drop off their U.S. drivers at the border and pick up Mexican ones. The reverse happens on the way back. Mexican drivers take the trucks north, but at the border they are barred from moving their tractors farther. U.S. drivers take over again with U.S. rigs and drive into the U.S.

Nor can Mexicans buy the articles they have put together. They are meant for U.S. consumption, not to be sold in Mexico.

There is one item which is exported north by Mexicans directly, however, which they don't want, but the U.S. does. And that's drugs. Mexico remains the chief channel these days by which Colombian and other Central and South American cocaine, heroin and marijuana move north.

South of Douglas and Tijuana and Juarez are periodic checkpoints, where Mexican police look for drugs (and immediately confiscate any vehicles carrying them.)

But it's an open question how much they find and destroy. Which brings us back to the fence at Douglas. The fence, of course, is on U.S. land. The Mexicans didn't put it up and the reason the top is canted northward is that if it were the other way, southward, it would be invading Mexican territory.

Somehow that seems symbolic. It's as if we are trying to wall ourselves in and wall out the 97 million people on the other side of the fence.

It's a symbol not only of where the border lies but of the remaining unsolved and perhaps unsolvable differences between neighbors north and south. It's not the Maginot line or the West Wall which once separated Germany and France, but it is the kind of fence about which the American poet Robert Frost once wrote: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall ..."

On the other hand, the same poem says, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Well, maybe.

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