The city of El Paso, Texas, divides the U.S.-Mexico border neatly in two. It’s not just that it’s situated about halfway along the border’s length, although it is. It’s that it marks a turning point in the nature of the border.
Travel east of El Paso and you can follow the Rio Grande as it flows to the Gulf of Mexico, tracing the ripples of Texas’s southern outline as it goes. The land just past the city is wide open grassland, dry but not too dry—riparian. Its banks are lined with pecan orchards, cotton fields, cattle ranches, and fishermen. Eventually the current carves into the sheer rock walls of Big Bend National Park’s gorgeous canyons.
Travel west of El Paso, and the border is practically a straight shot to the Pacific Ocean. It doesn’t follow any sinuous natural feature; it’s all straight lines and angles set by governments and treaties in the mid to late 1800s. They were drawn by politicians in offices over a thousand miles away, and on a map they look tidy. On the ground, though, those lines cut through rolling deserts and rugged mountains. They divide the land arbitrarily. Or at least they claim to—the land doesn’t know or care that we think there are lines across it.
That’s the stretch of remote land where large groups of asylum seekers from Central America have been crossing lately.
That’s the stretch of border that interests me right now.
That’s the stretch where I traveled next this past weekend: west of El Paso.
East of El Paso: the Rio Grande divides Mexico on the far side from the U.S. in the foreground.
West of El Paso: the view as I set out on New Mexico State Road 9.