Walking Along the Border on Election Day

The man was sitting on a bench in front of the 20-foot rust-colored border wall near where the public buses passed. He was jotting in a small notebook in the bustling center of Nogales, Sonora. It was Tuesday, Election Day in the U.S. I approached him and told him I was a journalist and was interested in what he thought about the election in the United States, especially since the border—which I pointed to right before us—was one of the election’s biggest issues.

His answer was terse: “It’s another country.”

The man told me he coordinated the buses and spent a lot of time on that bench. He preferred not to use his name. It was midday, and the sun was rising to the top of a clear, blue sky, and I had just crossed the border. The tension was already heated in the United States, and it was a relief to be in Mexico.

At first I thought the bus coordinator was being dismissive, and I was going to move on. But then he asked, “Who do you think is going to win? Trump?” I told him that according to the polls it was 50/50. This was before we knew what we do now: that Donald Trump was about to win the election decisively.

The bus coordinator said, “I hope Harris wins.” He paused. “Because she’s a woman. Would this be the first woman president in the United States?” I nodded. “We also have our first woman president in Mexico,” he said, referring to Claudia Sheinbaum, who was inaugurated on October 1.

My plan was to walk along the wall and perceive the U.S. elections from the Mexican side. Even though our conversation was brief, the bus coordinator was exactly the person I hoped to talk to. Here was a place where U.S. elections would affect people blatantly, viscerally, and palpably—as border policies have for decades—yet they had no say in the choice at all. I wanted to capture people’s sentiments.

I also wanted to converse with the wall itself. Let me explain: There is a stark difference between the wall on the Mexican side and the wall on the U.S. side. The U.S. side is dominated by the enforcement apparatus, which has become the source and the logic of the presidential campaigns, from both parties. In U.S. campaign and national narratives, it was difficult to hear the border characterized in any other way. On the Mexican side, however, the offering was a more complex and alternative story, whether it be the graffiti and art on the wall, or simply the words of people like the bus coordinator, people who worked, lived, went to school, and walked around the wall.

Right before I crossed the border I talked to Gustavo Lozano of the Border Beatz Music Collective in Nogales, Arizona. He told me, “None of the politicians, not Trump not Harris, no representatives of their cabinets—Republicans and Democrats—the very people that have influence in where we are going as a country, none of them know what the borderlands actually are, that the borderlands are a deep source of riqueza, wealth.” Here, he told me, there is an interchange of culture, a sharing of culture, knowledge, and skills. Lozano talked about revitalization projects in Nogales. He talked about creating an arts corridor. He talked about the galleries with challenging, provocative art, art that created conversations about the border, that transcended the border, that subverted the border. I didn’t realize this at first, but as I walked along the borderline, it was this type of inspiration that I sought, the omitted or unheard stories.

As the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano wrote, “Walls are the publishers of the poor,” and the Nogales border wall was no exception. Written on the bollards—the thick steel bars—in one section was the message: “Nuestros sueños de justicia no los detenienen ningún muro,” No wall can stop our dreams of justice. In another place the prose expressed that “América es una sola casa,” “America”—in the Latin American sense of the word, that is, the combined North and South American continents, “is a single house.” Later I stood mesmerized before a rendition of the U.S. flag made on the border wall made of clothes, T-shirts, children’s clothes, undergarments, the same clothes that tear on the razor wire, or are sometimes found discarded in the desert. And farther down the wall are the papier-mâché sculpted faces near where three dogs napped in the shade.

I interviewed another man who was waiting for a bus in another area named Manuel. He told me he wasn’t from here but from Ciudad Obregón, about five hours to the south. He told me he didn’t understand the U.S. electoral process. He said, “Why Tuesday?” In Mexico elections happened on Sunday. I agreed it doesn’t make sense to have elections on a workday. But I told him in many places people can vote early. He said, “Doesn’t that create more possibilities that the vote can be manipulated?” I told him that I appreciated his skepticism. Like the bus coordinator, Manuel treaded the election question carefully. He said he “didn’t dislike” Trump. I told him that he could dislike him, I wouldn’t mind. He asked me, “What is this threat of mass deportation?” This threat would be repeated by Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt on November 5 (the next day) after his victory was announced. She reiterated Trump’s promise to undertake the “largest deportation in the history of the country” and said this operation would begin on day one. There was an immediate spike in the stock price for the private prison company Geo Group, a company that had also been doing well under the Biden administration. Manuel thought the mass deportation would be “mutually damaging,” especially since Mexico, he understood, would be corralled into helping with the expulsions. He said this would create a ripple effect of suffering.

I wandered up a block from the border to where two women were selling secondhand clothes, in front of the apartment they rented together. As I approached, I noticed one of the T-shirts they were selling; it was black with white letters: “I don’t give a fuck what you think.”

I asked the women about the election and the border. Like other people, they eyed me cautiously and asked me who I wanted to win. I gave them my thoughts, which seemed to put them more at ease. Their names were Bertha and Mariana. Bertha told me she had two kids in the United States and that they were voting for Trump. “Do you know why?” I asked. She shrugged. Then she told me she wanted Harris to win. The women told me—like the bus coordinator—that Mexico has its first woman president, whom they liked. They told me her government was going to help them. They’re going to help especially, Mariana said, “madres solteras,” single mothers, like they were. There were “ayudas” for housing, for education, for health. We need all of that. “Would that be the same with Harris?” they asked. I wasn’t sure.

“Would the wall come down?” one of them asked. I said I’m not so sure about that either. In fact, I admitted, Harris had said that she would build it more. “Es muy triste,” Mariana said, “para el mexicano” (That is very sad for the Mexican people). I wondered, again, why the Democrats chose the hardline campaign stance on the border. I had heard from people who justified this campaign strategy as practical, inevitable, that they had to do it. I found this perplexing, especially since in 2020, the Democrats ran a campaign on a more humane border, and they won.

Later, I discussed this with longtime Nogales organizer Marycruz Sandoval Pérez, from the Colonia Flores Magón. “They [by they, all politicians of all parties] always put us down as an excuse when there are elections,” she said. “But they know perfectly well that we are a ‘bad necessity’ in the United States.” Because, she asked, who else would pick the food, wash the dishes, clean the hotel rooms? It was precisely this constrained perspective that Sandoval Pérez described, the constant commodification of people, that I wished to break free of on my walk.

But now I was headed back. Near the DeConcini port of entry, I passed a man who strummed a mandolin and sang “La Llorona” with the voice of an opera singer. The song stopped me in my tracks, and I listened with complete attention. Then I began to jot down inspired notes about how hope doesn’t lie with the politicians from the upper echelons but rather from below, in art, in conversation, in song, in graffiti, in normal everyday people. I have heard “La Llorona” hundreds of times before, but this rendition soared, and I realized I was seeking something much more than an election assessment. I was searching for the source of change, how things really move, how they transform. It usually does not come from above, but from below, like a passionate song.

I realized that what I was craving was the inspiration that comes from the borderlands, not as a place of chaos and violence—as Trump will now loudly and endlessly portray it—but precisely the opposite: a place of creativity, a fertile ground where solutions are found. Bertha and Mariana have them. Gustavo Lozano has them. Marycruz Sandoval Pérez has them. Now, as the Trump administration barks out its plans, it is more important than ever to listen.

This was first published on The Border Chronicle.

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