THE UNSIGHTLY barrier surges up as you turn a corner, dwarfing the brightly painted houses, restaurants and little squares of Nogales in the northern Mexican state of Sonora.
In sharp contrast to the winding streets, the wall built by the gringos is straight and hostile. It cuts neighbourhoods down the middle; a 3m-high statement that America no longer welcomes the tired and poor.
As you drive along the wall, you see graffiti, then strange forms, the tin cutouts that Mexicans call milagros or miracles. They’re usually hung on effigies of saints in churches, as petitions for relief. Then there are two enormous photographic murals, comprised of the faces of deported migrants, snapshots taken in the shelters of Nogales. In one mural, different tones have been used to create the outline of bare feet walking.
“The whole fence has been sacralised with this art,” says Prof Joseph Wilder, the director of the Southwest Studies Centre at the University of Arizona.
“People are washing up against the border. The wall is a symbol of our failed policy. The government is pushing people into extreme desert regions and they die.”
Nogales Sonora, Nogales Arizona. One city, one people, divided by a wall.
“The southwest encompasses northern Mexico,” Wilder explains. “It’s one region with a shared ranching culture, and a border running through it – not unlike Northern Ireland, or any region with a contested border.”
In the old days, before an immigration crackdown that long preceded Arizona’s new law, and the drug war that killed 136 people last year in Nogales Sonora, residents went back and forth casually, to attend church, buy groceries, take lessons or have a meal with relatives. A smile and a nod to the border guards was sufficient. They knew the locals.
Now it takes two hours to cross. Customs and border protection officers in blue uniforms lug M4 assault rifles and hold dogs on leashes. Handcuffs jangle from their belt loops.
The immigration law, which Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed on April 23rd, is due to enter into force on July 29th. Last month, a second law banned the teaching of the Spanish language or Mexican heritage in Arizona schools. Critics view both laws as inflammatory and racist.
“Everyone in Mexico is up in arms,” says Wilder. “It sets back all our efforts to transcend the border and work with our Mexican colleagues. It’s a black mark against Arizona.”
Nogales Sonora, population 400,000, has the vitality of a real city, with its chaotic array of petrol stations, hotels and shanties staggering up the hillsides. Tourist shops sell stuffed iguanas and the horned skulls of steers.
Intending migrants sleep in the cemetery’s mausoleums. An abundance of parked lorries and railway tracks attest to Nogales’s position on a major trade route. Fruit and vegetables are shipped north, to American tables. In the opposite direction, America sends deported Mexicans.
Nogales Arizona, with perhaps 20,000 people, the vast majority of them Hispanic, feels like a lifeless appendage of the Mexican city.
Except for the colourful, old shops on the first two blocks of Grand Street, which cater to Mexicans crossing from Sonora to shop, Nogales Arizona is a soulless scattering of US chain stores and fast food restaurants.
One-third of Arizona’s population is Hispanic, but the Mexican-Americans are unevenly distributed, with the highest concentration near the border, and lower numbers of immigrants the further one travels north, towards the capital Phoenix.
Anger runs high here.
“Relations between Anglos and Hispanics are really bad right now, and they’re getting worse,” says Jeffrey Cota (30) a businessman in Nogales Arizona. His parents emigrated from Nogales Sonora before he was born, and Cota owns a call centre across the border in Hermosillo. Though he is a US citizen, Cota refers to himself as Mexican – a stronger statement of identity than Latino or Hispanic.
“Americans think Mexicans have only two purposes: cheap labour and to provide drugs. We have to look out for ourselves,” says Cota. “Mexicans have a high boiling point, but when they blow, they blow. Obama better do something quickly.”
In the days following the passage of the immigration law, Cota says, he saw dozens of U-haul trucks driving south to Mexico, from Phoenix and Tucson. Illegal immigrants who had built lives in Arizona were fleeing with their belongings, rather than wait to be deported.
The new immigration law requires police to check the identity papers of anyone they believe could be an illegal immigrant. Hispanics say it will make life unbearable for legals and illegals alike, and hope that one of several lawsuits may prevent it coming into force.
Isabel Navarro moved from the Mexican side of the border eight years ago. She called her shop Divinas “because Latinas are divine . . . they like a lot of bling-bling, clothes that are tight and sexy”.
Navarro ought to learn English, she says, but hasn’t had time.
Like other Hispanics, she hates Joe Arpaio, the hardline Sheriff of Maricopa County in the Phoenix region, a leading proponent of the immigration law.
“He is the worst thing that has happened to Mexicans,” she says. “They don’t want Mexicans here in the US,” she adds.
“Once the law takes effect, they’ll use it to intimidate us even more,” says Francisco Ramos Navarro (16), Isabel’s son and a US citizen who says he feels Mexican. The teenager is not alone in predicting violence.
“I think there could be attacks on the customs and immigration people – from both sides of the border,” he says.
