Spring Break 2008: Juarez, Cuihuahua, Mexico

Getting my guns up with Texas Tech master's student Brandon Nutting.

Here we are in front of palm trees and the Rocky Mountain cold of Coors Light along Paseo Triunfo de la República in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua Mexico.

Perspective: Border Opinions Differ

Every few weeks I receive the following picture via e-mail. Every time it arrives, I think "hate speech" and move on.


The "Yours / Not Yours" image appears to be a screen capture from Google Maps with some very rudimentary photo editing.

It is usually accompanied by some inflammatory writing.

As I write this, I sit about 45 miles from "Yours." I lived here, in Las Cruces, N.M., for 5 years. As I've bored readers here many times, I edited the NMSU student newspaper for two years, and I worked at the daily newspaper for more than a year.

Perhaps for this reason, I just don't understand the vitriol. The line between "Yours" and "Not Yours" is simply arbitrary, and to treat it as anything more is foolish to me.

Of all the problems in our country, this just does not rank for me. I've walked the streets of Ciudad Juárez with camera in hand. I've walked down the streets that the tourists do not walk down. I have seen the poverty and despair first-hand. Wanting to leave that for the chance to break one's back picking chiles in Doña Ana County just does not strike me as a crime against humanity.

Yet this is the issue for many Americans. Hence the semi-regular arrival of the photograph above.

Last week, however, I saw the image below courtesy of my friend and fellow NMSU alum Joy Victory. Joy lives in Mexico City and posted the following photograph of an Absolut Vodka billboard on her excellent blog this week.


Photo courtesy of Joy Victory, El Blog de Joy.

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According to Joy, "This billboard sits above the corner of Nuevo Leon and Sonora, a busy intersection in the Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City."

The billboard, quite clearly, is part of Absolut's In an Absolut World campaign.

According to Absolut's Web site, "The starting point of the advertising campaign was simple ‘what if everything in the world was approached with the ideal in which we approach ABSOLUT vodka?,’ " according to Karl-Johan Bogefors, Global PR Manager, ABSOLUT Vodka.

Therefore, one is to infer that Absolut interprets the map on the billboard as the "ideal" cartography from the Mexican point of view.

What a stark contrast to the image above.

Clearly, the economics of Mexico City are far different from border towns. The money of the United States acts like a vacuum to the worst elements of a poorer nation (and those south of it).

As far as I can tell from this Web site, the map on the billboard includes:

• Present day Mexico
• Republic of Texas (1836-1845), which was apparently claimed by the U.S. from 1845-1848.
• Mexican Cession (1848)
• Gadsden Purchase (1853)

At present, I'm sitting about 8 miles from the border of the Gadsden Purchase. A little more than 150 years ago, I'd be on the virtual Mexican border.

This map shows a series of somewhat arbitrary political and military decisions. Twenty miles or so south of here is the town of Anthony (New Mexico and Texas). It's a poor town by U.S. standards. But the quality of life there is vastly different than Juárez, another 25 miles or so to the south.

My point is simply that many of the people living in Anthony are surely descendants of those people who lived in that area 155 years ago. They are American citizens because the border crossed them, not the other way around.

Those ancestors likely played no role in the Gadsden Purchase. I doubt they voted or were polled. Instead, they got lucky.

And if the history of the matter really is that arbitrary, it is difficult for me to muster any passion for the position that looks at the Rio Grande river as if some demarcation of truth where on one side you are entitled to a better education and a much longer lifespan. On the other side of the line, poverty and despair. That's "yours."

And I am supposed to believe this is "not yours."

I'm sorry. I just don't.

Do Not Rely on Media for U.S. Border Opinion

Some people believe that an alien spaceship crashed in the New Mexico desert in July 1947 (read more). Given the remote location and sparse population, few people have any firsthand experience. Therefore, almost all of our knowledge is mediated.

I thought about this while driving through Roswell on Saturday. When you drive through the heart of town, everything is tourism alien-themed. We went to the International UFO Museum and Research Center a few weeks back (read here). This leads to complicated questions from the children, such as "What do aliens do to you?"

My children must suffer through the academic answer. I tell them that we have very little evidence that any alien lifeform has ever visited Earth. I do, however, spare them the mathematical details about the vast number of planets in the universe that are similar enough to Earth to support life as we know it.

The point is that most people have an opinion about what happened at Roswell, even though none of us was there. We have learned through the media.

Let me use a more concrete example. No matter your political persuasion, you probably believe that President Bush actually exists. However, of the 6 billion people on this planent, perhaps 1 million have ever actually seen the man in person (including rallies). So as far as you know, there is no real person, and all of the TV coverage takes place on the sound stage next to the one where they faked the moon landing (kidding).

My point is that we lean pretty heavily on the media to shape our reality, even though we do not think that we do. This is true with the U.S. border with Mexico.

While reading the news this morning, I came across a CNN.com story under the headline, "Minuteman supporters protest at Columbia University." And I have some pretty strong opinions about the U.S.-Mexico border.

In the middle of July 1992, Emily and I packed up our Chevy Cavalier and headed for Arizona. We both were born in the Kansas City area, and we had lived our entire lives in the Missouri/Kansas area. This was a big move.

My dad had taken a job in Phoenix, and we decided to try something different. "Why not go to college in Arizona?," we asked. So began this great adventure.

Living in Phoenix is great. To borrow a metaphor about Anchorage, you're only 30 minutes from the Southwest. That is, Phoenix is a massive city, and there is no forgetting that you live in a massive city. And most of the people who live there are like us and were born somewhere else.

Phoenix was big, scorching, and crime-filled. We burned out pretty quickly. So in March 1994, we went on a tour of the Southwest looking for a "better" place to go to college. I was very ignorant about what made a "good" university, so we were swayed by silly things, such as mountains and foreign language requirements.

We drove to see Western New Mexico University (Silver City), New Mexico State University (Las Cruces), New Mexico State University at Alamogordo (Oops! A two-year school), the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque), and New Mexico Highlands University (Las Vegas, N.M.).

I had high hopes for Highlands. It sounded so "old west" to me, and it was my early favorite. Thankfully, however, the town is not all it could be. UNM was a close second, but it seemed much more like an urban campus. So we settled on Las Cruces, some 65 miles south of Truth or Consequences, where my dad took his first radio job in 1949 (irony).

The move was only slightly less random than a coin flip, but it was one of the best things that we ever did.

As I mentioned, Phoenix is not the Southwest. It's like Chicago with cactuses. The culture is strictly American. Las Cruces was different. Shortly after moving to Las Cruces, we went to the Fourth of July-related Electric Lights parade. There we sat on the side of El Paseo Drive and watched the parade.

And we sat shoulder-to-shoulder with people who had lived in Las Cruces their entire lives. And the residents of Las Cruces are a majority Hispanic, according to one estimate. This experience allowed me to gain a real appreciation for another culture -- one completely different from my midwest roots.

That first summer (1994), I took a NMSU class titled, "U.S. Military History" with professor Sadler. Since his expertise focused on the border, we learned a lot about that. It was a great education experience, even if it did mark one of the two "B's" I got at NMSU.


New Mexico State's traditional three-triangle logo (see above) represents the blending of the three cultures, Hispanic, Native American, and Caucasian (interestingly, I can find little documentation on this).

On this account, NMSU was a great place to be. We learned a lot about other people with other pasts.

We also were 45 miles from the Mexican border. It was not some distant other. It was not something we knew only through the media. It was a part of our lives.

We travelled to Juarez often. I spent time off the main beat photographing the city for my photojournalism class. I learned a lot.

Sadly, however, large border towns are not especially representative. Juarez is much different than Cozumel, where I visited as a teen-ager. You can get a better glimpse of the border if you travel west from El Paso, Texas.

There you will quickly cross into New Mexico. Continue west on N.M. state highway 9, and you will travel parallel with the border for almost an hour. It is an amazing experience. There is no river. There is no wall. In some cases, there is almost nothing except a small post delineating the border, which is somtimes just yards away. There is just unwelcoming desert.

Driving that highway has changed me. You spend your whole lives learning geography through maps. And those lines look real. But they're not really real. There are artificial, politically created boundaries. I just had the good fortune to have been born on the economically advantaged side of the line.

Of course, this highway was not always next to the border. The border used to be in Las Cruces. The small "suburb" of Mesilla once was in Mexico. During the Gadsden Purchase, however, it became part of the United States. Overnight, those residents changed citizenship. They said, "We did not cross the border. The border crossed us."

Those years in Las Cruces did change me. I just do not see they border as a hard line on a map. It's a living, breathing thing. And I never would have felt the way I do if I had not experienced the entire picture firsthand.

I'm not trying to change anyone's opinion here. Really, I'm just commenting on the role of the media. I will argue that you do not have a real opinion about immigration if you've never been there. Unless you've stood on the side of highway 9 looking south into the unfriendly desert, you have an uninformed opinion.

Sitting in Iowa, or Minnesota, or Ohio, it's easy to have an opinion about the border, perhaps. You might see opportunists darting across a small stretch of river to take advantage of your tax dollars. But in my experience, it's not like that. Instead it's the dozens of Mexican citizens who have died in that desert looking for a better life. Trying to do jobs in a meat packing plant or cotton field that I do not want to do.

I respect your opinion, whatever it is. But before you declare certainty that you are correct, take a trip to the border. Meet some people. Drive over to Columbus, N.M. Park your car. Walk across the border there to Palomas. Talk to some people. Do not rely upon the media. Experience it yourself.

P.S. I would love to post some photos here, but all of my work then was done with slide film, and I do not have a slide scanner today.

Holiday Tour Travels South of Border

Today's trip took us to Palomas, Chihuahua, Mexico. We had a great lunch at the Pink Store, and walked around town in the near 70 degree temperatures.

Here you can see some arbitrary people eating in the Pink Store. I recommend No. 5, the Pancho Villa Platter!