We were driving through Juárez, a city whose veins run with traffic and stories, when I first caught sight of it—flat and metallic, almost dull against the brightness of the Mexican sky. The wall.
I suppose it’s always there. You can’t exactly miss it. But for most of the morning, the vibrancy of Juárez had overwhelmed my senses: colorfully painted homes stacked on hillsides, vendors hustling under the weight of fresh mangoes, sun-scorched murals of Frida and Zapata, and a thousand voices mingling in the streets like song. It was easy, at first, to forget the border even existed. But then the road would bend or rise, and there it was again—long, brown, monolithic. A punctuation mark carved across the land.
There is no avoiding it.
In places like Juárez and El Paso, the border is not a distant headline. It’s the backdrop of life. The wall creeps and cuts and fences, but the people, as they always do, continue moving—across, around, and through. Culture doesn’t observe national lines. Language, food, music, memory—they blur and blend. Grandmothers still make tamales with recipes older than any immigration policy. Children grow up speaking both English and Spanish with the ease of birdsong. There is a shared weather here, a shared dust, and often, a shared family divided by bureaucracy and geography but united in history.
Before 9/11, this reality was much more fluid. Our guide, José, spoke of a time when people crossed daily for work, for school, for errands, with the same casualness I walk from my living room to the porch. The idea of the border was present, but it hadn’t yet hardened. You could live in El Paso and have dinner with your cousins in Juárez. You could study here and sleep there. But after 9/11, everything changed. Security intensified. Fences became walls. Time waiting to cross stretched from minutes to hours. And slowly, a psychological barrier formed alongside the physical one—a sense of separation where there once had been flow.
El Paso is, by population, one of the most Hispanic cities in the United States. Nearly 83% of its residents are of Mexican descent. And yet, even within that familiarity, there’s a growing sense of being watched. Surveillance towers loom. Drones buzz quietly overhead. Border Patrol trucks idle, ever present. It’s a strange thing, to be in a city so culturally Mexican and yet feel the weight of being in a fortified zone.
I’ve lived much of my life in spaces where these realities are abstract. Cable news panels and Senate hearings. Immigration bills with names like acronyms and consequences that feel distant. But in Juárez, everything was concrete. Not metaphorical. The wall was a thing I could touch. The lives it divides were all around me—smiling, hustling, hurting, surviving.
It didn’t help that the day we toured the city, someone casually mentioned it was Donald Trump’s birthday this weekend. Strange, how even that cast a shadow. I don’t care to make this political—I truly don’t. But it’s hard not to feel the tension of symbols. The man who made the wall a slogan. The helicopters overhead. The protests in the U.S. under banners like “No Kings.” These things aren’t just national politics—they are emotional atmospheres. They change the way you carry yourself. They change the way you’re seen.
Back home, in Carthage, I often feel buffered from the extremities of policy. We have our divisions, yes, and our own quiet reckonings, but things move slower. Here, though, in this strip of the continent where two nations press their foreheads together, it is all immediate.
In Juárez, I felt it—not just in my eyes, but in my bones.
And yet, in the middle of all that—walls, wires, guards, and ghosts—there was still laughter. There were street tacos with pickled onions so bright they made my eyes water. There was a man selling used books in the shade of an old fig tree. There were murals honoring the women of Juárez, painted with reverence and rage. And everywhere, there was motion.
The wall may try to stop things. But people? They keep going.
We drove on, and to me the wall just begs more questions than it answers.
Who belongs where?
And what does it mean to be home?
I don’t have the answers. But today, for the first time, I stopped thinking about the border as a concept. I saw it as a scar. Not fresh, but still tender. Still healing. Or maybe reopening. And maybe the point isn’t to erase it, but to understand what it means to live beside it. To live in spite of it. To live across it.