After a bathroom break, we gathered in the living area of BorderLinks for an orientation. The lady in the middle speaking is Fernanda Morillon and the lady in the cap next to her is Rachel Winch (Rachel was the driver of the van I rode in.)
There were twenty-seven of us in our group. We left BorderLinks in two vans and headed for Nogales, Mexico. We crossed the border almost without knowing it. They have a random system. If you get a green light you go on through. A red light diverts your vehicle for questioning. Both vans got green lights and we stopped just the other side of the fence.
This is where deportees from the United States are dropped off. There is a Red Cross clinic here, but there was no one around it.
We had enough Spanish speakers with us that we were able to talk to some of the people who had been deported that day. I was hesitant about invading their privacy, but it turned out they were anxious to talk. This group of folks had been abandoned in the desert by their "coyote" when the Border Patrol came upon them. (They had paid the coyote $3000-$6000 each to be safely transported across the desert.) As Fernanda talked with them, the young woman on her left broke my heart. She was 23 years and her face looked so much like my oldest granddaughter. She had three children (all born in the US) and had spent six years in California picking strawberries. She went home to visit her family and now is separated from her children.
One of the women had become separated from her younger brother in the desert and had not heard whether he was alive or dead. They were trying to check with the Detention Centers to see if he might be at one of them.
A cemetery adjacent to the deportee area --
This area, with its services for deportees, is actually a service of the Mexican government --
Next door is one of the many factories established following NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) --
Nogales is NOT the sleepy little village I remember from visiting over forty years ago. There are many American chains represented here -- and the Mexicans say they "take all of their earnings back to the US as well!"
No different than the US, there was lots of road construction everywhere --
After our visit at Grupos Beta, we drove to the top of a ridge overlooking Nogales where and organization named HEPAC (Hogar de Experanza y Paz A.C.) was our host --
Here we ran into something I hadn't seen since we were in Bolivia -- composting toilets! There's a bucket of wood shavings out of sight over on the left for throwing down the hole when you've finished your business. Used toilet tissue goes in the waste basket...
Due to the incredible numbers of workers moving to Nogales to work in the factories, the hillsides are filled with various shanty barrios --
Most families have both parents working in the factories. The schools are open only four hours per day. Therefore, there are lots of children left alone most of the day. HEPAC tries to run camps and classes for children. A good share of their work is trying to educate the children that they do not have to allow inappropriate touching by others...
More of the hillside housing. The mountains in the rear are across the border in the US.
More housing --
This is housing built by one of the factories as part of their contract with the Mexican government. This unit houses a couple of hundred workers, but the company employs over five throusand!
That housing complex is next door to this Maquiladora, one of ninety-five huge factories in Nogales.
Another Maquiladora. You can see the border fence in the background --
We crossed the border back into the United States without incident. The Border Patrol agent took the fourteen passports from our van, ran them through her little machine and waved us on by. We drove around to look at the infamous wall from the American side of the border --
It's an ugly steel thing, twenty four feet high, rusting away --
Incongruously, there are gates in the fence about every hundred feet or so --
And of course, a couple of our group had to try and see if they could climb it --
We hadn't been there long before the Border Patrol stopped by. We were very close to the spot where a couple of weeks ago, a Mexican sixteen year old had been shot (on the Mexican side of the border) eighteen times by US Border Patrol after he threw rocks at them. We heard a lot about it while we were in Nogales, but I sure hadn't read anything in the Phoenix paper.
A chilly prayer vigil at the fence; some quiet time for reflection then it was back to Tucson and Cas Miraposa where a wonderful hot meal was waiting for us.
Casa Mariposa is a house of hospitality for people being released from immigration detention. Our meal was prepared by recent detainees who later shared their stories with us.
It was a long, emotional day that will require a great deal of reflection and processing on my part. Id you are going to be attending the Mennonite Church USA Assembly in July in Phoenix, you can sign up to spend a day with a BorderLinks/MCC trip.
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