We’ve been giving a lot of credit to serendipity on this trip. There are things that we’ve just happened upon, and leads that we’ve been incredibly lucky in finding. Yesterday was a full day, mostly sniffing around to see what could be found. We turned a corner through El Cenizo, a very low income community in Texas outside of Laredo, and went down to the river. The banks were low, and the water seemed relatively calm, a good place to make a crossing. It didn’t take long to discover that we were surrounded by evidence of that fact. Tires and innertubes, water bottles, plastic bags, and discarded clothing (primarily underwear).
The plastic bags are used to carry a change of clothes. When two are tied together, they also become an aid to flotation. When they get to the U.S. shore, they take off the wet clothes (usually just underwear) and open the plastic bags and put on the dry clothes. There are many checkpoints and border patrol agents to get to past this point, the U.S. side of the Rio Grande is by no means the end of the line. For many crossing here, it is the culmination of thousands of miles. This is just one section of what we are learning is an incredibly dangerous journey. Some will arrive at their destination, many will not but keep trying, and many will surrender this dream they thought they could not shake. It is quite a thing to lay your eyes on something like this, just a bit of trash that tells a long and painful story.

The water of the Rio Grande – or the Rio Bravo del Norte in Mexico – runs green and sluggish where it fans into the Gulf near Brownsville/Matamoros. In the north, its headwaters slip off the Rockies just east of the continental divide, and trip south to El Paso/Ciudad Juarez to begin the river’s 1,254-mile duty as the international boundary. Water from the south – the Rio Conchos, a major tributary from the Mexican Sierra Madre, joins 200 miles down river – provides most of the flow in the border segment.

Chad Richardson, a University of Texas – Pan American Sociologist, told me in a phone interview today to expect big changes west of the river border. In a very real sense, the river binds the people who live divided by it and who, with its waters, make their respective sides of the flood plain fertile. West of El Paso/Ciudad Juarez, it’s a different ball game, he said.

I think I’ll miss the river in a month or so, when we’re scheduled to follow the geopolitical divide west into the desert. It has its dark side. We’ve blanched at tales of fishing out the drowned bodies of would-be immigrants. Despite recent wet years, clashes over who should give and get how much water from the river remain fierce, but latent.

Still, it’s a visible reminder of interconnection and fluidity, qualities mirrored in the communities along it.

The signs of an Easter celebration littered the square near the refurbished church, but our visit to Guerrero Viejo was completely solitary.  

The city was once a thriving colonial township, but the waters of Falcon Dam covered it in 1953 to create a binational reservoir for irrigation and flood control.  Like the residents of the Texan towns of Zapata, Falcon and Lopeño, Guerrerans relocated.  

Since its demise, the Guerrero Viejo has lived an intermittent above-water existence, emerging in dry years, and disappearing in wet ones.

A prolonged drought in this decade has left the ruins uncovered.  No Border Story here, but one can see why these ruins have captivated writers and artists.  

The protesters’ day begins at 7:30 with breakfast and a prayer. They are 35 miles from their final destination, a distance that will take them three days to cover. As they prepare to hit the road, they load backpacks into the van, nurse tender blisters, scarf down a last tortilla and stretch tired legs. There are posters declaring “no wall between amigos” littered around the common room of the church they stayed at last night, and some people have taken permanent markers to their clothing to emphasize the message.

They call themselves the Border Ambassadors. This is day 7 of the No Border Wall walk, a 120-mile, 9-day trek from Roma to Brownsville, Texas, in protest of the planned U.S.-Mexico border fence. Nine core Border Ambassadors are completing the entire march, but at the end of the walk, they judge roughly 200 people will have participated in the demonstration against the controversial barrier. The protesters are students and teachers, professionals and laborers, young and old.

The Secure Fence Act was signed into law in 2006 by President Bush, authorizing 700 miles of double-layered fencing along the US/Mexico border. Proponents of the fence think it will stop illegal immigration and reinforce border and national security; detractors point to the division of communities, families and economies as well as the destruction of natural habitats as reasons why they think the fence will ultimately be a $1.2 billion speedbump at best. At worst, some people think the fence will simply force those trying to cross the border into even more risk and danger.

Some opponents call the fence “the new Berlin Wall,” and the debate surrounding it has intensified the extant debates on immigration and the border.

The No Border Wall walk is only one of a number of protests on this issue, some of which have turned violent. By contrast, the Border Ambassadors are explicitly nonviolent. They seek to perpetuate their message through positive energy and love, something that comes through while I’m watching today’s group of about a dozen people advance up US 281, cheering and chanting at the top of their lungs. People in passing traffic honk or wave at the walkers, giving them even more energy as they wave their posters in the air and continue toward Brownsville.

…where separate economies and culture lie mere feet away from the other, neighbors, even if not the best of friend.

Once, when flying back to college after a holiday, I saw my parents house as we took off, and my dormitory shortly before landing. It was filed away under “odd feeling”. It was the same kind I had to a greater extent when leaving Managua, Nicaragua one morning, and by nightfall, resting my head on a softer pillow in Nashville, Tennessee. These passages were marked by distance and some amount of time. I became more viscerally aware, then, that on this earth there are many different worlds, different ways of being all around us, that life is not always as we assume it is constructed.

At the border, these odd and foreign sensations are compressed into a space that is difficult to measure. None of my travel experiences had prepared me for my first walk over the bridge at Matamoros/Brownsville. But it wasn’t the first crossing, the walk into Mexico, that struck me the most, it was coming back home. It was seeing the seemingly endless yellow brick road of box stores, gas stations and fast food restaurants. It was the local supermarket, H-E-B (or Here-Everything-is-Better). The most shocking part was having the thought that we (here in the states) are the ones behind the wall. We have exported a glorified image of ourselves that has dulled our real sense of common culture. We know full well we are not Starbucks, or McDonalds, or Target, but this is how we tend to present ourselves from a street level. In Mexico, it’s right there in your face. It may be beautiful, or horrifying, or somewhere in between, but there it is. It’s hard to pass anyone on the street in Mexico and not say hello, and when I didn’t I felt like an alien, and was looked at like one. And then I thought of riding a subway in New York City, staring at the ads at the top of the car so as not to make eye contact, not to offend. Of a tendency I’ve developed from who knows where of looking at an oncoming pedestrian until the moment they begin to share the glance, then moving my focus to my feet and the sidewalk passing underneath them.

I’m not angry, or calling for a revolution, just making an observation about my home. Like walking outside and then coming back into a room where there is a smell that you must have gotten used to or just not noticed, and now you can’t get it out of your nose.

We’re an ongoing multimedia project dedicated to documenting life along the US-Mexico border. Over the next few months, we’ll endeavor to present stories that connect people to their common humanity and supersede statistics.

The crew has just left Brownsville/Matamoros and is currently in McAllen/Reynosa. We will be launching the first series of stories soon. Check back here for updates.