The Border Symbiosis

By Ed Magnuson.

The blue jalopy creaks and groans, its bumper nearly scraping the roadway of the Good Neighbor Bridge, which spans the Rio Grande between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. The driver has given 29 fellow Mexicans a free lift south because he can bring five cartons of cigarettes into Mexico for each passenger in his car. Next comes a pickup carrying six teenage Mexican girls, all trim in their red vests. They are returning to Juarez from their classes at a Roman Catholic girls school in El Paso. Behind them is Yolanda Rivas, who is heading home after an eight-hour shift in an El Paso clothing factory, where she earns $135 a week sewing trousers, a job that would pay $30 a week in Juarez. So it goes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Says Veronica Jacquez, 24, a native of El Paso who is personal secretary to Juarez Mayor Francisco Barrio: "This is like one big city, except with bridges. Most of the people go back and forth all the time."

It is the world's most extraordinary border. Nowhere, with the possible exception of Berlin, is the contrast so stark. On one side of the blurry line stands an economic superpower, on the other a nation burdened with widespread poverty. "This is the only place I know where you can jump from the First World to the Third World in five minutes," says Julio Chiu, a bank executive in El Paso who grew up in Juarez.

Yet for 1,936 miles -- from the Pacific Ocean, across the rugged coastal mountains, the hot sands of the Sonoran Desert, the high plains near El Paso and finally the verdant citrus fields that end at the Gulf of Mexico -- the largely unmarked frontier is as much a link between the U.S. and Mexico as a barrier. The movement across the boundary is massive. Each year there are hundreds of millions of legal crossings. In addition, 1,056,907 undocumented aliens were seized along the border in 1984, almost a 50% increase over ten years ago, and authorities cannot even estimate the number who made it across undetected.

Increasingly dependent on one another, the 7 million residents of either side of the boundary have created a cooperative culture that is neither American nor Mexican. It is a hybrid that has latched on to the strengths of both national heritages. The corridor, observes Journalist Tom Miller in his book On the Border, "is a third country with its own identity . . . Its food, its language, its music are its own. Even its economic development is unique."

The cross-pollination creates a lively cultural blend. In Juarez, a popular hangout is the Kentucky Club, where mostly Mexican patrons select from such jukebox favorites as Duke Ellington and Julio Iglesias. Across the river in El Paso, Mexican teenagers from Juarez buy heavy metal rock LPs from Star Records, a music shop, since such disks are scarce in their city.

In Matamoros, on the southern tip of the Rio Grande Valley, Mexican and American white-collar workers sip Scotch and water at Blanca White's, while a marimba-and-drum combo plays local salsa-flavored music. Young women from Matamoros cross into Brownsville daily to attend Texas Southmost College. They party on the U.S. side in blue jeans and T shirts, on their home turf in cocktail dresses. Affluent Americans in El Paso drink margaritas and munch tamale and chili canapes at black-tie affairs. When they visit friends in Juarez, their parties start earlier and linger long into the night.

Familiarity, it seems, breeds tolerance. "The Mexican American in Nogales, Ariz., is not reticent to say he's Mexican," says Paul Bracker, a local businessman. "There is a healthy attitude here toward heritage." Says Robert Stuchen, vice president of the Capin Mercantile Corp., one of Arizona's largest employers: "My kids are not aware of prejudices here in Nogales. We're probably more Mexicanized than the Mexicans are Americanized." Merchant Fred Knechel, president of the Chamber of Commerce in Calexico, Calif., across the line from Mexicali, contends that there are "class prejudices but not racial prejudices on the border."

The lives of many residents straddle the boundary. "Half of my family is in the U.S.," says Francisco Xavier Rivas, 36, who runs an industrial park in Mexicali. "It's interesting when we get together. Those from the U.S. speak almost no Spanish, those from Mexicali speak so-so Spanish, while those from Mexico City speak very good Spanish." Cathy Hernandez, 29, was born in Juarez but went through high school in El Paso. She is an international banking officer at the First City National Bank of El Paso. Her husband Javier, 32, works as a supervisor at a racetrack in Juarez and speaks little English. They live in El Paso, and she became a U.S. citizen four years ago. She enjoys the international mix. "We celebrate most of the Mexican holidays because my husband gets the days off, and we celebrate American holidays because the bank takes them off."

Dr. Frank J. Morales, an orthodontist in Matamoros, has a thriving dental practice with roughly 40% of his patients from the U.S. Married to an American, he has houses in both Matamoros and Brownsville, and estimates that half his affluent neighbors in El Jardin (the Garden) section of Matamoros have second homes in either Brownsville or the nearby Texas resort of South Padre Island.

There may be more tension between the nortenos, Mexicans who live along the border in northern Mexico, and their countrymen in Mexico City than between Mexicans and Americans. The nortenos see themselves as more industrious and democratic than the others, whom they sometimes call guachos (the kept ones), accusing them of living largely off government services. "We started using computers in our business ten years ago," boasts Eugenio Elorduy, a prosperous Mexicali businessman. "In Mexico City, the computer boom is just starting."

The nortenos on the other hand, are often viewed by interior Mexicans as having sold out their country by acquiring American habits. Some Mexican Americans also feel this friction. George Uribe, 60, was born in Mexico City, has a Mexican wife, but has lived in Nogales since childhood and is now a U.S. citizen. An executive in a large vegetable-distribution company, he concedes that "people in Mexico City tell me I'm a traitor. They say, 'Think of your patria (country).' " Says Uribe: "My patria, hell. I don't want to starve. I want to make a decent living."

Sheer economic interdependence is, of course, the main tie that binds the people living on opposite sides of the border. Mexicans cross the checkpoints, often daily, because there are more jobs and higher pay in the U.S. Merchants on the American side depend heavily on sales to Mexicans, who often find items of greater variety and higher quality than in their home cities. Lately, the strong U.S. dollar and the devalued peso have sharply cut Mexican buying power and caused havoc for some U.S. border businesses. Many American shoppers in turn have been flooding into Mexico in search of bargains.

The mutual reliance has grown spectacularly in recent years with the increase in maquiladoras, so-called twin plants on the Mexican side of the border. These are creations of U.S. companies, which set up factories to take advantage of cheap and once abundant labor to turn out products, ranging from computers to jump ropes, that are shipped back into the U.S. Both nations have reduced various export and import fees to aid this development. There are now some 700 such plants, providing Mexico with about $l.3 billion in earnings annually and a foreign exchange income exceeded only by its oil exports.

The presence of the maquiladoras benefits communities on both sides. El Paso Mayor Jonathan Rogers figures his city would lose 20,000 jobs if the twin plants in Juarez closed. This would double El Paso's already high unemployment rate to 24%. In Juarez, Mayor Barrio says any such shutdown would cause his city's economy to "immediately collapse."

One exception to the general harmony along the border is the friction between Tijuana (pop. 566,000), a former honky-tonk town that has made impressive progress in modernizing its business section, and San Diego (pop. 2 million), an adjacent Sunbelt city with many military personnel, both active and retired, and relatively few Hispanic residents. The canyons and ravines on the south side of San Diego have become a no-man's-land, where Mexican bandits, many of them drug addicts, prey on their countrymen crossing the border illegally. U.S. Border Patrol agents and San Diego police trying to control this violence have run into Mexican police in the canyons who, they suspect, have participated in the robberies. On at least two occasions the officers from the two nations have shot at each other. Tensions increased last April after two U.S. Border Patrol agents seized a 15-year-old Mexican for illegally entering the U.S. through a hole in a fence. The youth's twelve- year-old brother lobbed rocks over the fence at the officers. When he stooped to pick up another rock, one of the officers shot him in the back, seriously wounding him. More ill feeling was generated when Tijuana's aging and overloaded sewage system developed leaks, sending raw effluent into the Pacific and polluting San Diego's beaches.

Serious as such incidents have been, they have not reversed the long-term trend toward symbiosis and cooperation. In a few small U.S. cities, the Mexican influence has even made Americans a minority. In Los Ebanos, Texas, 80 miles northwest of Brownsville, Postmaster Lucio Flores was asked how many of the town's 800 residents are Anglos. Flores held up one finger and said with a grin, "We call him El Gringo." What is happening along the border, says University of Arizona Anthropologist Tom Weaver, is "the Americanization of Mexico and the Mexicanization of America." It is a relatively painless way for neighbors to become friends.

With reporting by Ricardo Chavira/Tijuana and David S. Jackson/El Paso