It rises like a monument and a question mark rolled into one, a sentinel on the border that offers no easy answers. Officially, it's called La Equis, or The X, a 200-foot steel structure designed by sculptor Sebastián and inaugurated in 2013. He claimed it represented the blending of two cultures: the Spanish and the Indigenous — a cross of histories, if you will. Some say the two beams also form the first letter of México, bold and unmistakable. Others whisper that it looks like a wound.
I didn’t know what to expect when we drove past it. From a distance, it could be mistaken for a stylized oil rig or a surreal gateway. Up close, it dominates the skyline, even more than the mountains or the maquiladoras. It looks like it belongs to the future — or perhaps to a past that never happened. A relic from a timeline where monuments were built not to glorify power, but to wrestle with it.
La Equis stands on the former site of El Chamizal, a piece of land long contested between the United States and Mexico, a dispute settled only in the 1960s after nearly a century of negotiations. The monument, then, is rooted in resolution — or resistance. The location isn’t random. Nothing on the border is.
To some Juárenses, it’s a source of pride: something monumental in a city more often defined by the negative. To others, it’s a costly vanity project — money that might have gone to roads, schools, or shelters. I couldn’t help but think it resembled the kind of public art that cities often install when they’re trying to prove they exist beyond their headlines. As if to say: we are more than the violence you read about.
But even its shape — that bold X — reminded me of the marks we make to denote uncertainty. X for the unknown variable. X for a map's treasure or a site of death. X, too, as in crossing — borders, identities, lives.
As I stood beneath it, I thought of how the line between nations here is so thin and so thick all at once. How a child can be born on one side and be labeled citizen, and born on the other and be labeled migrant. How language, food, and blood flow easily across this border, but not people. And how this metal monument, so rooted in the ground, could never capture the motion of lives that refuse to be boxed in by fences or fear.
La Equis doesn't explain the border. It doesn’t glorify it either. It just is. Towering, angular, jarring — a scar and a signature. And in that way, it might be the most honest monument I’ve seen in a long time.
Because if a city must bear witness to its own contradictions, at least let it do so in steel.