Marta Todd lives happily with her husband and an adopted stray dog on the Texas side of the Rio Grande. They are content with their small town, Zapata (pop. 5,089), their RV home on the edge of Falcon Lake, and the eBay business they run out of a nearby storage container. A cool breeze is always blowing off the water, rustling the tall grass and the palm trees that shade the trailer park. Weekend campers and anglers flock in and out, but the Todd family stays put.
She was raised on the Mexican side of the river, however, where things are different, she tells me. She avoids visiting her hometown, Reynosa, but sometimes it can’t be helped. Family comes first on both sides of the border, and Todd has relatives living on the other side. So she goes, and despite scorching temperatures year-round, drives with the windows rolled down and the AC off. She’s listening for gunshots. If she sees people running or hears “fireworks,” she knows to find cover quickly. Cartel violence has calmed down significantly throughout Mexico, but not in the Rio Grande Valley, the southernmost tip of the United States. Todd’s been caught up in three gunfights in recent years and has had several nephews kidnapped and forced into work for drug gangs.
For me, she personifies the Texas half of our border with Mexico. I just spent two months pedaling the nearly 2,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. If my first month, trekking on the Mexican side from Tijuana to Juárez, was characterized by optimism and an appetite for risk, my second, riding from El Paso to Brownsville, was characterized by stagnation and small-town charm.
Texans Like the Isolation
I started my second trip in the westernmost corner of Texas, where El Paso and its Mexican counterpart, Juárez, are straining toward each other with the wave force of concrete and urban sprawl. Similar to the like poles of two magnets, they are kept just apart by the force of the Rio Grande. I pedaled southeast, sticking as close as I could to the river. It was a civilized country at first. High peaks in nearly every direction disguised the economic power of the El Paso-Juárez border machine. Millions of gallons of clear river water run through trenches along the rural highways, making farms and orchards possible in the middle of the desert. Interstate 10 fulfills a similar purpose, bringing tourists and truckers to a series of small towns—Clint, Fort Hancock, Sierra Blanca, and Van Horn. I stayed at a motel/gas station in Clint the first night and found myself next door to the most clichéd honky-tonk bar I could ever have imagined—cowboy hats, boots, and Wranglers. But I had to bail on I-10 as quickly as possible. The nation’s southern cross-country route is famous for its cheek-flapping 80-mph speed limit, and at that point a Styrofoam bike helmet is just a bucket for your brains.
It wasn’t until I turned onto Route 90 and pedaled a few hundred miles south on that small, two-lane belt of asphalt in the middle of nowhere that I saw the real desolation of the border. Ghost towns, some of which appear only on maps, outnumbered the spots where I could get food and water. You can expect to find fewer than 10 people per square mile along most of the border in West Texas. Biking in northern Mexico should have been an equally lonely proposition, but the Mexicans I met were curious to know who was crazy enough to be pedaling through their remote towns and keen to help me find food and shelter. The Texans were more likely to keep to themselves. Those I did manage to hunt down were always yeehaw, thumbs-up to be living away from everything and everyone. As a woman I met in Valentine, Texas (pop. 134), said of her town: “Well, it’s not the big city like El Paso, so it’s not lonely!” Jumping in the car and driving for hours to run errands in a “big city” like El Paso, San Antonio, or Brownsville is commonplace all along the border.
My friend Devon Powley took a week of his vacation to bike Big Bend National Park with me, and he was the one who noticed how many of the people we met had never been outside Texas. Raúl, for example, had lived his whole life in Marfa (pop. 1,981) and had never traveled beyond Austin. Charlene, the driver of Marfa’s “Tipsy Taxi,” who took us over to the next town, Alpine (pop. 5,905), to get our bikes repaired, had never been further than Dallas. If someone tells you they’re “headed up north,” there’s a good chance they’re referring to one of those two Texas attractions.
Our bikes needed some working over as we prepared for the rigors of Big Bend, and that gave us plenty of time to chat with the mechanic, John Belsbury, known far and wide as the “Alpine bike man.” He is not just the only bike mechanic in Alpine, as the nickname implies, he’s pretty much the only one in the region. His nearest competitor is 150 miles away. John moved to Texas 35 years ago and still refers to himself as a “carpetbagger.” He was born in Greenfield, Indiana, in 1954. “My little farming community got eaten up in the smear of eastern Indianapolis,” he says without rancor, and he’s visited home only a few times since leaving for college. He finds it hard to shed a tear for central Indiana—which he describes as cold, flat, humid, and “boring, you know?”—having discovered this great thing called Texas.
He first visited the border region on a motorcycle trip in 1986 to see Halley’s Comet. “I came out here and looked around and said, ‘Oh yeah. Oh yeah.’ This place; it just spoke to me.” I asked him what he liked so much about Alpine. “Well,” he said, after thinking a minute, “everything.” He loves the climate and the isolation, and one of the first things he noticed about the town was how excited everyone was for whatever their kids were accomplishing. The weekly newspaper breathlessly cheers on the high school weightlifter going to state or the most recent student test scores. Alpine is a “very healthy” community, made “interdependent because of all the vast distances,” Belsbury explains, betraying his first career as a psychotherapist in Del Rio.
Devon and I cycled down to the border at Presidio and then along the Rio Grande and slogged through hilly Big Bend National Park over the next three days. Even by West Texas standards, we were in the middle of nowhere. West Texas is defined by the Chihuahuan Desert, the second largest in North America. But where we biked along the border is often more accurately referred to as Far West Texas, or the Trans-Pecos, a mountainous and arid area five times the size of Connecticut. Big Bend provides the most dramatic proof of just how desolate, isolated, and beautiful the borderlands can be. The park is officially recognized as one of just ten places worldwide where dark-sky stargazing is possible, free from all light pollution and smog. Roadrunners and jackrabbits jogged the road ahead of us, and mule deer moved cautiously in the fading light. We crossed the Rio Grande to drink tequila at the famous Boquillas crossing, and we camped in a ditch on the side of the highway before we pedaled north and parted ways in Sanderson.
The Border Is a Region
Cut off from the American mainstream, the border is a culture all its own. Family, as I already mentioned, is extremely important. Walk into any restaurant, and you’ll find mom, dad, grandparents, and siblings crammed into the same booth. Children live with their parents until they find a spouse. They raise their own families and then turn right around to take care of their parents in their old age. Even the most deviant character I met, Marcos Alveras from Nuevo Casas Grandes, an old Mormon colony in Mexico—a guy who joined a rock band, rides a motorcycle, proclaims the virtues of hard drugs, and told me, “The church is freakin’ evil!”—said he loves his mom and dad too much to even think of moving away.
The law is also disregarded down here in all sorts of ways. And it is not just that the border is ground zero for a lot of nasty businesses—drugs, weapons, human trafficking. That has little to do with the way everyday people don’t wear their seatbelts, don’t use their turn signals, but do drive on the shoulder to let faster vehicles pass. Drinking and driving is common. The people I met simply shrugged their shoulders if I mentioned all the casual rule-breaking.
Race is another key to understanding the area. Many of the towns and cities are indistinguishable from those I’d seen in Mexico. Everyone I met on the border, Hispanics and Anglos alike, on both sides, brushed aside race with cosmopolitan disinterest. I witnessed exactly one instance of racial insensitivity. A woman visiting from the Midwest asked me in hushed tones in the only restaurant in Valentine if she and her boyfriend needed to “watch out for the Hispanics down here.” I told her they didn’t have anything to worry about. When the man, who had just finished a joint and a beer, suggested her question might be offensive, she reminded him, “It’s America, I can f—ing say what I want.” Fair points all around, I thought. Both of them were making it abundantly clear they weren’t from around these parts.
A lot of my thoughts about the border came into focus because of a chance meeting in Langtry, a dime-sized town about halfway between Sanderson and Del Rio with a total population of 13. I was standing in the shady spot where Langtry’s hanging tree used to stand (the town’s fame, such as it is, rests on its having been the site of the saloon and court of Judge Roy Bean, who in the late 19th century declared himself “the law west of the Pecos”), resigning myself to bedding down that night without dinner or a shower, when a woman drove up in an ancient Jeep and asked if I wanted a ride to the river. “Why would I want to go to the river?” I asked, thinking she was commenting on my need for a bath and densely failing to realize she was referring to the Rio Grande. “I just thought you might want to go and see it,” E. J. Billings said, not answering my question, but still charming me into the passenger seat. Billings had a grandmotherly air and was obviously worried about a lone biker who seemed to have turned up in Langtry hoping for some sort of desert oasis. On the high cliffs overlooking the river, she mentioned something about some “Tecate journals.” My ears perked up. I had read a book called The Tecate Journals in preparation for my trip. The author, Keith Bowden, spent an epic 70 days canoeing the length of the Rio Grande. He’s a hero of mine. I hadn’t set out to find the guy, but here he was in Langtry, and he was happy to swap notes about the border.
Bowden took me to another portion of the river, where feral hogs crashed through the underbrush in the trees below. Ancient people once lived in the surrounding cliff-side caves, he said, and archeologists have found perfectly preserved tools and mummified bodies. We watched the sunset over the Rio Grande and chatted over some Tecate. I asked him what the rest of America misunderstands about life on the line. “I can answer that one pretty quick,” he said, draining his can. “The border is not just a line in the middle of the river, it’s a region.”
Laredo, for example, where Bowden spent his career teaching English at the community college, “has much more in common with and does a lot more business with Nuevo Laredo than anywhere in the American interior.” Nuevo Laredo has the same estranged relationship with the rest of Mexico. This is why you can find American football in Tijuana and pay with pesos in Brownsville. All of the problems associated with the border, Bowden said, start with the extreme differences between Mexico and the United States. International borders rarely provide such a stark contrast. “This is unique, in the sense that you have the first world and the third world on either side of this river: different languages, different customs, different laws, different purposes,” he explained.
It’s not uncommon to meet people from families that have lived on the border since the 1800s, he said. Those caught in the grind between the United States and Mexico learn to pick and choose the rules and norms that they find convenient. “Border people aren’t absolute rigid rule followers,” Bowden went on. Their mentality is “If it doesn’t suit me I’m going to follow the Mexican way” or “If I don’t really like what the Mexicans are doing I’m going to do it the American way.”
The Region Is Poor
Small towns and big ranches defined my trip through West Texas, but all that changed when I crossed the Pecos River, which marks the definitive beginning of South Texas. It might as well have been a different state entirely. Green grass and short trees replaced the harsh desert landscapes I’d seen for hundreds of miles. Small cities such as Del Rio, Eagle Pass, and Laredo are thriving thanks to the cross-border traffic. Over 2 million semis cross annually from Mexico into the United States at Laredo, where the busiest trucking corridor in the country, I-35, gets going.
Most cities along the border are poor by national standards, but the problem is especially acute in the Rio Grande Valley. In fact, the four counties that make up the Rio Grande Valley—Starr, Hidalgo, Willacy, and Cameron—are among the poorest 100 counties nationwide, with an average per capita income of $13,981. Over 45 percent of children live below the poverty line in these counties.
Frank Garcia, the manager at the hotel where I stayed in Del Rio, was the only person I met on the trip who admitted to liking the idea of Trump’s wall. He remembered a simpler time when “it was not uncommon for you to get hungry and just run across the border at 3 a.m. to get some hot dogs.” Today, that’s no longer possible—or even advisable—thanks to the drug trade. “It gets dark, you better get out of there,” he warned me. Frank was born in Brownsville and has spent most of his 62 years living in different places on the border. “I think a wall is good as long as you have doors where you can come in legally,” he said, referring to family and friends who spent years waiting in line for legal admission to the United States. Crime, however, isn’t what most concerns Frank. In Del Rio, he said, “You either have a mansion or a shack. The economy here is not good. Minimum wage here is not all that uncommon.”
The cost of living is low on the border, but so are the economic opportunities. Texans work low-wage jobs at places like Walmart for decades. The high school-dropout rate is high. Few people go to college, and even fewer succeed in earning a degree. Sure, build that wall, said Frank, but “I don’t think closing the borders is gonna help the homeless. It’s not gonna help the unemployed. There are people here, generations, that have lived off the government.” None of his young housekeepers has a college degree, he told me, but they all already had babies to take care of.
Everyone I talked to in the Rio Grande Valley thinks something has to change. The border is a blend of Mexican and American cultures, but the American side is far more pessimistic about the future. In Mexico, I met people who were putting themselves through school, working 80 hours a week, and, in extreme cases, risking their lives for a shot at a better life north of the border. In southern Texas, the people were more content to stay where they are—even if that means being stuck.
In Brownsville, I talked to Alan Govea, a bike mechanic who’s working toward a degree so he can become a high school history teacher. (Yes, when you bike a couple of thousand hard miles, you end up meeting a lot of bike mechanics.) “I want to be able to change some of the thinking that we have here,” he told me. “Most people don’t leave, man. To them, there’s no world outside the valley.” He’s also frustrated by how others take advantage of the safety nets. “There are people who live over there but who have government assistance from here, as far as food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid. That’s some of the changes that people want to see.” Alan’s dad was from Mexico and earned his U.S. citizenship. The way that border people flout the law always frustrated his father—“They think they’re untouchable now that they’re in the U.S.” Govea hopes that will change, but also sees that friction as part of life on the border.
Keith Bowden had a similar view of the students he taught at Laredo Community College. “Laredoans, they don’t do many things. There’s a lot of family, work, family, buy rims for the truck, work, family, buy new rims for the truck. They don’t travel. They love the Dallas Cowboys or they hate the Dallas Cowboys.” The American Dream, Keith said, “is a belief that if you do A, B, and C there’s going to be a reward. There’s no belief in that in Laredo. Or very little. They go more by the Mexican model,” which he summarizes as “What’s the point? If God wants me to be successful, God will make me successful.”
Those living on the American side of the border are, by every concrete measure, wealthier than those living on the Mexican side. Their attitudes, however, are completely the opposite of expectations.
About That Wall
There are 650 miles of pedestrian and vehicle fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border. When I could, I made it a habit to bike along the wall. Sometimes this was as easy as a right turn off the highway and a short ride between fields of onion and cabbage to the rust-brown barrier. The wall is always a graffiti canvas in Mexico, but it’s all business on the Texas side. Twenty-foot tall steel beams, perfectly symmetrical, can be found in fits and starts. They are often a significant distance away from the actual border. Mainly this is the Rio Grande’s fault; it creates soft marshlands unsuitable for wall building and randomly changes course. Wide gaps in the fence allow farmers to drive their tractors to their valuable acreage on the other side.
Trump’s wall came up a lot in conversations down here. On the Mexican side, people understood the need for border security but were sick of the way Donald Trump belittles their country. On the American side, people didn’t see much point in spending billions on something that is never going to be effective. Marta Todd summed up the most common opinion neatly: “I’m glad we have the border patrol, because if not it would be a really bad mess. But about the Trump wall? It’s not gonna work.” Actually she found the whole idea rather amusing. Several times I heard a Mexican joke about the wall that is a pretty good summary of the way people think on both sides of the fence—“I wish they’d go ahead and build this wall so we know how much to charge people to cross it.” As long as Mexico is poor and the United States is rich, enterprising people will find a way.
Seeing the region first-hand made it clear that building a 1,900-mile wall is a waste of time and money. And everyone seemed to know this already, including Trump’s local supporters. Heavily populated areas like San Diego, Nogales, and El Paso already have their fences, put up in the first years of this century, and these have brought enormous benefits. Instead of tens of thousands of people wading across the Rio Grande or running through rough, dangerous terrain to commute to their jobs in the United States every morning, they apply for work visas and border-crossing cards that allow the holder to travel anywhere within 25 miles of the dividing line. These fences have made the border a more dignified place to live and work.
There are places, though, that could benefit from increased security. Apprehensions have dropped steadily all along the border over the past decade, with the exception of the McAllen-Brownsville area. Assaults on border patrol agents there have risen dramatically. A wall might help, but the return on investment would be far lower than with the original fences. It’d be difficult to build more barriers in Texas, anyway, because the federal government doesn’t own the land along the border like it does in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Texans own it, and they took President George W. Bush to court over his 2006 Secure Fence Act.
Increasing the number of border patrol agents would be cheaper and would likely help more. But even this idea has its problems. In December 2017, President Trump signed executive orders directing Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to bring on 15,000 new recruits. Yet a Department of Homeland Security study found that neither of the agencies charged with guarding the border could demonstrate a need for additional agents. Neither can even maintain the minimum level of personnel mandated by Congress right now; agents are quitting faster than they can be hired. Despite recruitment efforts, the size of the border patrol has shrunk every year since 2011.
There’s also the problem of corruption. Most CBP agents, of course, are on the straight and narrow, but the few that go rogue do a lot of damage. Last year, James Tomsheck, a former head of internal affairs at the agency, said his “conservative” estimate is that 5 percent of the agents are compromised—leading him to believe that the largest police force in the country is also the most corrupt law-enforcement agency within the federal government. The people that I talked to along the border were uniformly grateful for CBP’s presence, but many also had a story or anecdote about agents on the take.
I often heard people distinguish the old border patrol and the new. The old agents were generally mean and racist. Kenneth Halfmann, a trapper for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who grew up in Sanderson, said he remembers driving with his father-in-law on his ranch and spotting a five-foot rattlesnake on the side of the road. The older man told him to get out and kill it. Kenneth did, but was surprised to find that the snake didn’t have a rattle on the end of its tail. It had been removed. The next day he was describing this snake to a group of border patrol agents. “That was probably mine,” one of them said, explaining how he cut the rattles off and released the snakes because “It’s a hell of a lot easier . . . to do a toe tag than it is to do the paperwork, give them free meals, and ship them back.”
The force is drastically different today. Latinos now hold over 50 percent of border patrol jobs. I had nothing but positive interactions with the force, and CBP officers frequently rolled down their window to offer me water or packets of electrolytes as I cycled the torrid region. And I found plenty of reasons to think our border security is working well.
I rode the Old Mines Road, a 114-mile gravel track between Eagle Pass and Laredo. It took two days to bike and gave me the strongest sense I have of what it might be like to cross the border illegally. Thick, tall underbrush lined the road on both sides, creating a suffocating jungle trench. It was impossible to tell where you were. Sand and gravel made pedaling difficult, but also revealed wherever snakes had crossed the road. I saw a burned and bullet-riddled shell of a Mercedes pushed off to the side in one spot. Dump trucks lumbered by at regular intervals to a nearby fracking operation. I was close enough to Mexico that I could hear trucks on the highway, but was never able to see the Rio Grande. Ranch and game fencing separated me from the trees, so there was no shade. Fortunately, I spotted a blue barrel on the side of the road with a faded Red Cross flag. Inside were jugs of water and on the lid, phone numbers, GPS coordinates, and warnings in Spanish about the area’s dangers and how to call for help. A border patrol agent later told me there were several such barrels on the road, charitably stocked by a local church. In a rare moment of clear thinking, I took an extra gallon and tied it to my handlebars. It was a good thing as my estimate of how far I had to go was way off.
The second day was even hotter than the first. It reached 93 degrees, making it one of the worst days I endured in over two months of cycling. I got on the bike at 8:15 a.m. and didn’t reach Laredo till 12 hours later. Every few yards it was obvious someone had jumped the fence, bending the wire down with a foot. Articles of clothing and empty bottles littered the road. Midday, I came over a hill to find a border patrol agent with six men in his custody. They were all standing in the shade of a CBP vehicle’s raised trunk. Two white and green pickups and a van soon arrived in a cloud of dust to take the men away. The Mexicans smiled and waved for my camera. The agent told me he was relieved to have found this group. A trucker had spotted them near the road and called it in. The men were lost and had wandered around for three days without water. They had only survived because they found a trough of water meant for cattle. One member of their group was still out in the brush, either lost or refusing to come in. The agent, one of many specially trained EMTs in the CBP, feared the man was already dead.
The success of border security over the last couple of decades has pushed migrants away from urban areas toward far riskier routes through the desert. At least 294 people died crossing the border in 2017, even though the number of migrants apprehended dropped overall. Experts believe that calculation of the dead is far too low. Most areas of the border experience eight to ten months of summer temperatures, and last July was especially horrifying. Ten people were baked to death in a semi-truck packed full of migrants from Mexico and Central America.
I got in contact with a ranch owner whose employees I met on the Old Mines Road. Stewart W. Stedman lives in Houston but owns and operates the Faith Ranch, a 40,000-acre cattle and game ranch that’s been in his family since the 1930s. He is quick to describe himself as a conservative, but one frustrated by the current immigration debate. People are always running through his ranch, and the border patrol agents giving chase by trucks, helicopters, and horse are “ubiquitous.” He doesn’t really mind the cat-and-mouse games on his property, but he does wish the United States would enforce its immigration laws differently. Instead of spending so much energy on the border why not punish the employers who hire illegal workers? Like most Texans, he sympathizes with those who come here to work. If you reduce the demand for illegal labor, he said, people will stop attempting to cross altogether.
“My wife calls me a liberal when I talk about this,” he admitted, but he would rather his tax dollars were spent on a border patrol that chases more bad guys and fewer people looking for work. “And I’m all for that, I mean, the drug runners, the terrorists, you know, all that stuff. But they’re chasing people who risked their life to get a job. That’s really, to me, not a good use of government dollars.” Punishing employers is easier said than done, but Stedman just sounded fed up with and saddened by the border debate. In the past year, he and his employees have found 13 dead migrants on the ranch, mostly victims of heat exhaustion.
From Coast to Coast
Most of the ranchers I met in Texas had voted for Trump, but not because they want him to build a wall. They haven’t been able to hire ranch hands from Mexico for decades because of the CBP’s constant presence. They wanted Trump because of issues like the inheritance tax—which the president has reformed in a way that should allow more family ranches to pass on to the next generation. For South Texans like Stedman, there are just more pressing problems to deal with than people crossing the border. If South Texans feel the friction of living on the dividing line, West Texans were basically unfazed by it. The border hardly affects their lives at all. The conditions are too harsh for it to be much of a crossing point and the region too empty to attract folks looking for work. Overall, Texans are satisfied with the border as is, making them square pegs in the round political categories that people think organize American voters.
Our southern border is safe and sound. That’s what I found tracing it by bicycle. The one thing I didn’t find on the border that I expected to find everywhere, growing like scrub brush in the desert, was anger. I assumed Mexicans would be angry with Americans, intruders like me. I assumed Texans would be angry with Mexicans. I was wrong on both counts. These are generous people with centuries of a shared culture.
It was encouraging to find that the border is a different place than the one cut and edited for the news. It’s a region caught in the middle. The people who live there are optimistic, but concerned for their neighbors. If there are “bad hombres” in this story, the people on the border think they live in Washington and Mexico City. Both governments ignore those who dwell on the line, and if they do pay attention, they lie or miss the point entirely. “Elections are rigged,” my Mexican friend Davi Rivera told me. “The corruption is absurd. You can see it. It’s not like it’s hidden!” Stewart Stedman was equally skeptical of the bureaucrats. He wants “limited government” and to just get on with his business. “The farther away my tax dollars go,” he said, “the less enthusiastic I am about sending them there.”
