A Border Ballad

The borderlands are unlike anywhere I’d ever been. “Beautiful” isn’t the word you’d use to describe them. The landscape is harsh and often ugly, and the region is sparsely populated. But when you find people, you find energy and expectation, because anywhere people are allowed to cross from one side of the border to the other, business is booming. Even minuscule towns are turbocharged economic engines. Humble Nogales (pop. 220,000), for example, generated $24 billion in trade last year. A gold rush is on in this wild, wild West.

I was lucky that three friends joined me for this part of the trip, and their fluent Spanish allowed us to escape the tourist traps of Tijuana and Juárez—and all the border towns in between. We didn’t have to stay in motels; people we met on the road invited us into their homes. We ate street food during the day and feasted in small family restaurants at night. I think we succeeded in stealing what every traveler is after—a slice of someone else’s life. I also learned some things about our border and our southern neighbors that surprised me.

They Love Americans—Except Trump

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I thought my blond hair, blue eyes, and lack of Spanish beyond gracias and por favor would earn me derision. I was wrong. I was shown nothing but hospitality as I passed through border towns like Sonoyta, Agua Prieta, and Janos. Life here revolves around the imbalance between the United States and Mexico, yet nobody treated me like an interloper.

One of the first people we met with a story to tell about the border was Juan Luís Zargoza Montano, a handyman at the campground in La Rumorosa, a one-stoplight town located practically at the top of the Sierra de Juárez mountains. The town’s name translates as “the one who tells rumors,” in reference to the way the wind whispers and howls through the rocks. The mountain pass was jaw-droppingly beautiful—an utterly desolate moonscape.

Back in the 1980s, Juan crossed the border illegally and spent 11 years picking apples in Washington state, eventually bringing his family over—wife, son, and daughter. One day, as Juan tells it, a drinking buddy beat him nearly to death and robbed him. When Juan later confronted him and tried to get his things back—his money, his and his wife’s wedding rings, and more—the man threatened to kill him. Juan was quicker on the draw and wounded his assailant with a shotgun, but ended up serving nearly 10 years in prison. He was deported upon release, of course, and a female ICE agent took the trouble to explain to him who makes the rules for men like him.

“What color is this piece of paper, Juan?” she asked, holding up an ordinary document.

“The paper is white, and the letters are black,” he answered.

“No,” she said, “the paper is black and the letters are white.”

Juan cannot legally cross the border and is too old to try to sneak over. His family stayed to work in the States, and he sees them just three days every three or four months. You’d think that he would have strong words for the United States. Instead he told me, “You guys got the door open right here. I see you guys as people. A person is a person. I don’t care if he’s white, black, Chinese.” Sappy, sure, but typical of how we were treated throughout the trip. These Mexicans are our nearest neighbors, and they see us as neighbors.

Most days, I was too busy washing my clothes in a sink and patching flats to follow the news. The State of the Union, the Super Bowl, and the Winter Olympics all escaped my notice. News of Trump, however, came through loud and clear. On the second day of the trip, Trump tweeted that Mexico is “now rated the number one most dangerous country in the world.” This made everyone mad. Mexico is a dangerous country, yes. It had 29,168 murders in 2017: 20.5 per 100,000 residents, which is high but still below that of the rate in countries like Brazil and Colombia. Much of the violence is tied to the drug trade, and the Mexican government responded to Trump with a statement pointing out that violence down south is driven by the insatiable U.S. demand for drugs. And, no, it insisted, Mexicans are not going to pay for a wall as “a principle of national sovereignty and dignity.”

The Mexicans along the border return Trump’s antipathy in spades, but they didn’t blame the average American bike tourist for his statements. They equally see their president, and his ruling conservative party, as working mostly in the service of the United States. As Dolores, the restaurant owner who served us chicken mole in Mexicali, a border town in Baja California, asked me, “If you can’t trust the U.S. president and you can’t trust the Mexican president, who can you trust?”

There Are Better Ways To Cross

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One of the most interesting conversations I had on the trip came in Nogales, a town just south of Tucson. Andrea Valeria works part-time as a guide for the Border Community Alliance, an organization that tries to introduce Americans to the rich heritage of the borderlands. I’d arranged to meet her expecting to make polite chitchat about immigration issues. But she forcefully made the point that illegal immigration is a “cultural issue,” not a political one. Most illegal immigrants originate from the far south of Mexico or Central America, she explained, where the culture regards the high-risk journey itself as honorable. A family saves for years to pay a coyote to take its man across the border to work in the United States. Once there, earning in a day what he used to scrape together in a month, he sends a lot of money back home. These payments, known as remesas, are the bedrock of several Central American economies.

At a migrant shelter in Mexicali, we met a group of Hondurans who fit this profile perfectly. Their families had raised large amounts of money to get each of them across the border—for the coyote, but also for the bribes that have to be paid to the cartels and the corrupt policemen along the way. They rode La Bestia (“the Beast”), the system of freight trains migrants jump to travel the grueling 3,000 miles north through Mexico. It was somewhere, they told us, on the Beast that the group lost two friends. They made the mistake of falling asleep and came down off the train, both losing legs. Regardless of the danger, these men were determined to continue. One swore to us, “If I die it will be crossing the border.”

Valeria hears such stories all the time. She knows there’s a better way to cross. Like all the members of her family, she maintains a visa that allows her to legally work in the United States and cross back and forth. When her visa expires every six months, she gets it renewed. No, they don’t pass these visas out to just anyone. And no, there aren’t enough every year for everyone who wants to get to the United States—in 2016 the Department of Homeland Security issued nearly 4 million visas for temporary workers and their families, while the Border Patrol captured 563,204 trying to cross illegally.

Living and working in a booming border town like Nogales and waiting for legal permission from the U.S. government, even if it takes years, is the best, easiest, and cheapest thing migrants can do for themselves, according to Valeria. Rent in a border town costs a tenth of what the coyotes and the cartel demand, and if you are caught illegally in the United States you forfeit the chance to ever receive a visa or citizenship status. Why not work legally while you wait? They’ll eventually call your number (expected wait time is between three and six months right now), and the company you work for can sponsor you for a visa at any time. Simple, right? Valeria called it the true American dream: Live in Mexico, Work in the United States.

She has seen this cultural misunderstanding at work in her travels. In Nogales, she doesn’t know anyone who would consider crossing illegally. But when she tells people further south that she lives on the border, they immediately want to know how she gets across. When she explains the power of her visa, they don’t believe her. “They would much rather go the hard way, in a dangerous way where your life is in jeopardy. Why? Because they’ve been doing it for generations.”

Those That Cross Don’t Plan to Stay

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Andrea Valeria is emblematic of another thing that became very clear as I rode along the border: Mexican immigrants actually prefer to live at home.

I read a lot of Peter Skerry in preparation for this trip. A political science professor at Boston College, Skerry has the unusual ability to discuss immigration issues without taking sides or beginning to froth at the mouth. One of his big arguments is that most immigrants do not plan to stay in this country and do not see citizenship as their primary goal. “Illegal immigrants,” he said in 2014, “who are overwhelmingly from the Latin countries to our south—Mexico and Central America—they don’t plan to stay here. They plan to come here, work hard, save money, send it home, buy themselves land, build themselves a house, and go back. That’s really hard for Americans to appreciate. They want to think that everyone comes here and is dying to be an American citizen. It ain’t necessarily so.”

As a patriotic American, I did find that hard to appreciate before my trip. I wanted illegal immigration to be all about high-minded ideals—truth, justice, and the American way. But the lure of the border is money, on both sides. We met two young Mexican women in Mexicali. Neither of them likes the city, and both would rather be back home in the south. But living on the border is necessary for the sake of their engineering careers, and they are well compensated for the inconvenience of living in Mexicali by a Mexican firm making airplane turbines for the U.S. market. Both women are in their late 20s with no family obligations, and they will eventually move back south, to the Mexico that feels like home. Northern Mexico isn’t really Mexico, they explained to me. The culture is diluted by the close proximity of the United States, which pulls everything toward itself.

I saw this phenomenon at work in Juárez, the twin city to El Paso. The Rio Grande begins to define the border for the first time here, and it is further enforced by rows of fences, concrete moats, spotlights, and cameras. Our host Carlos briefly worked in the United States installing home computer systems, but he quickly moved back home to Juárez and doesn’t plan to ever leave. I asked him why, and he said it wasn’t something he could easily describe. He found life in the United States awkward and uncomfortable. I imagine he felt like I felt during my time in Mexico—constantly wondering what was going on. He is clearly happy where he is. Carlos has tattoos and piercings galore, and he’s shaved his head except for a single long braid. He teaches a how-to class on graffiti and is working on an amateur rap career.

Between 2009 and 2014, the number of Mexican Americans who chose to move back to Mexico outpaced the number of Mexicans moving to the United States, according to a 2016 Pew study. While 870,000 people moved north, approximately 1 million people moved south. Sixty-one percent said they did so to reunite with family or start one of their own. Statistics can tell only part of the truth, especially when it comes to illegal immigration, but these numbers indicate that what motivates people to cross the border is complicated and changing.

Reckoning with Trump

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With Trump as president, it’s not hard to understand why, according to Pew, just 30 percent of Mexicans say they viewed the United States favorably in 2017, the lowest number since the study began in 2002. Just 55 percent now believe the country’s economic ties to the United States are a good thing, down from 76 percent in 2009. Yet that bitterness wasn’t much in evidence as I biked the border. Pew notes that within 200 miles of the dividing line, the number of Mexicans who view the United States favorably rises to 41 percent.

The country goes to the polls on July 1 and the relationship with the United States is already a big issue in the presidential race. The frontrunner right now is Andrés Manuel López Obrador, affectionately known as Amlo, and he has promised to “put Trump in his place” if elected. Essentially a left-wing populist, he’d happily help Trump rip up NAFTA. He wants Mexico to turn to countries like China to create a more diverse range of trading partners—the country currently sends 80 percent of its exports to the United States. Mexico is the world’s 11th-largest economy, and Amlo thinks it high time for the country to emerge from under the shadow of its northern neighbor.

Radical candidates rarely win elections in Mexico, but many of the people I met are weary of the U.S. influence in the country. They don’t care for Trump, but, ironically, many Mexicans who believe their own democracy to be corrupt see his 2016 victory as an encouraging sign. In a world where Trump can win, many wonder, why not Amlo?

When I get this cast off in a couple of weeks, I’m jumping back on the bike to ride the Texas portion of the border, from El Paso to Brownsville. I suspect the world will look different from the other side of the fence.

Grant Wishard is an editorial assistant at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.