We walked by the old Aduana Fronteriza, the Customs House in Juárez, now a museum of polished tile and timeworn memory. It’s easy to pass it by if you don’t know the story. The sidewalk hums with life—vendors and strollers, street music echoing from some distant speaker—but history doesn’t always shout. Sometimes it just waits.
In 1909, this was the most important building in Mexico—if only for a day. Because on that day, President William Howard Taft crossed the border from El Paso and met President Porfirio Díaz inside. It was the first time a sitting U.S. president set foot on foreign soil. They shook hands in a display of neighborly friendship, though the handshake was more theater than treaty.
Taft was all bulk and mustache, built like a man who never left a dinner unfinished. Díaz, in contrast, was lean and calculating—aging, yes, but still the iron-fisted ruler of Mexico. He wore his uniform like a second skin, more military than civilian. He had ruled for over thirty years and knew how to wear power as if it were a tailored coat.
Security was fanatical. Thousands of troops lined both cities. Texas Rangers, U.S. Secret Service, Mexican rurales—everyone with a badge or a gun had been summoned. They cleared rooftops and swept the streets. One man, an anarchist with a pistol hidden in flowers, was arrested before he could get close. The idea that a handshake might change history was apparently worth killing for.
Inside the Customs House, they sat in gilded chairs, beneath painted ceilings that still linger above visitors today. Photographers hovered. Translators leaned in. They spoke of peace and commerce, of friendship and trade. Taft praised Díaz’s vision for a modern Mexico. Díaz, ever the politician, gave the expected nod to U.S. investment and order. But it was all prelude, really. Within a year, revolution would erupt. The man who ruled Mexico for a generation would flee into exile. The Customs House would become a relic.
I think about that now—the fragility of it. Two men met here as symbols of strength, but neither would hold onto it. Taft would lose his reelection in a squabble of egos and progressivism. Díaz would be chased out by the very modernity he tried to orchestrate. And yet, the building stands. Not as a monument to power, but to the pageantry of diplomacy. A stage, not a fortress.
As I stood outside, I tried to imagine it all—the heat of the day, the polished boots, the desert wind rustling papers on the table. The photograph of the two men still hangs inside. It’s formal, posed, almost artificial. But history often is, until it isn’t.
The Customs House doesn’t demand reverence. It offers remembrance. You pass by, and if you're paying attention, you hear the whisper: We met once, here, in peace. Then the world changed.
I kept walking, but I carried that with me.