Come See the New Frontier

By James Kelly, Managing Editor

Every week we take our readers to places where news is being made, whether it's the Senate office where Jim Jeffords decided to bolt the Republican Party, a jail cell where a teenage killer has come to realize the horrors he committed or a medical lab where the latest cancer therapy is being developed. But every so often, we devote a special issue to a place we find so compelling that only a dozen or more stories will do the subject justice. So, starting in February, 15 of our journalists began spending time along the 1,952-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico, home to more than 20 million people and a place exploding with energy and possibilities. What we found there will surprise you.

Senior editor Nancy Gibbs, who came up with the idea for the project, spent two weeks crisscrossing the border. "We set out to report on a region, but we found ourselves dissecting a relationship. There aren't many places you can go to see the First World and the Third World meet--in some cases, in the same city. You cross over from the U.S. side and see a donkey pull a garbage cart through the streets as you drive out to see the Mexican fiber-optics factories. It felt like a kind of time travel--we just skipped the 20th century as we drove across town."

Michael Duffy, our Washington bureau chief, spent a month reporting in Texas, Arizona, California and four Mexican states before editing the project. "What we discovered was a country all its own," says Michael. "We found that the border was changing Mexico just as quickly as--and maybe faster than--it was changing the U.S." Los Angeles bureau chief Terry McCarthy and photojournalist James Nachtwey spent a week with migrants, border-patrol agents and people smugglers in the desert scrub dividing Mexico and Arizona, the busiest alien-smuggling corridor along the border.

Tensions were not hard to find. "I covered Mexico from 1989 through 1998," says Tim Padgett, our Miami bureau chief, "but it wasn't until I revisited El Paso and Juarez for this story that I realized how strong residents' resentment toward Washington and Mexico City has become--how much, in the words of Juarez mayor Gustavo Elizondo, they've begun to feel like a neglected 'third country.' The warning from leaders like Elizondo is that if the border buckles under the increasing demands of NAFTA, then NAFTA too will suffer." Elizondo punctuated that point during the interview by throwing a tea cookie across his office, as if tossing it to a beggar--the way, he said, the feds treat the border.

"It's sure hard to ignore the poverty, but what sticks with me after six weeks on the border is the feeling that you're in a place that has finally awakened and realized its potential," says Cathy Booth Thomas, our Texas bureau chief. "It's not the Mexico I remember from the '60s, when I used to go with my parents south through Laredo to Monterrey. In those days, everybody seemed to scratch out an existence on the land or by selling cheap pottery and cheaper jewelry. But there's money there now, not just drug-lord money or old money but middle-class money, fueling suburbs with Burger Kings and Blockbusters. Businessmen have transformed the border--people like Don King from Oklahoma, who settled in McAllen, Texas, and now runs four plants in Reynosa. In the beginning, with no phone service in Mexico, he had to rig his car phone to set off his car horn, which would send a guard running to answer it." Now, of course, King is never without his cell phone.

While Latin America bureau chief Peter Katel reported from Mexico's interior, writer-reporter Josh Tyrangiel haunted Tijuana's nightclubs to explore a fresh musical hybrid called nortec. Says he: "For most of the people I met in Tijuana--young, smart, driven people--these are good times." Steve Koepp, who top-edited the project, has helped the probing continue even after publication of this issue by arranging with TIME's collaborators to stage an afternoon of town-hall meetings this Tuesday at the University of Texas at El Paso. It will be televised in border communities served by Time Warner Communications.

As always, be sure to tell us what you think by writing or e-mailing us.

James Kelly, Managing Editor