Do You Know the Way to...Nogales, Mexico?

I made my first trip down to the border this semester on Saturday. Actually, it wasn't just my first trip this semester; it was my first trip down to the border since I was about ten years old. My family preferred the Pacific Coast and places where we had family for travel, so we never went down to Mexico, or much further south than Tucson, for that matter.

I figured that since I would be covering the border this semester, it would be good for me to at least see what it looks like and how I would get into Mexico, if I was so inclined. So I grabbed my camera, my passport, and my friend, Meredith, and went down to Nogales for a quick afternoon trip.

The first thing I noticed was that shortly we got onto I-19, all of the distance signs were in kilometers, not miles. It wasn't a particularly eventful trip down there; the road wasn't overrun with Border Patrol agents or anything. In fact, I was rather disappointed.

We finally began the winding descent into Nogales, and as we went around one curve the city opened up to me and I saw the houses on the surrounding hills. We made our way down to the main city street, so we could park and walk around. There didn't seem to be any traffic laws as people just walked into the street at random and as I saw several cars blatantly run red lights. Blue and white school buses drove people from their parking lots down to the border.

We parked and headed down to the inspection station. The area around the border was teeming with Border Patrol agents, some in SUVs, some on foot, and some on bikes.

We didn't plan on actually going into Mexico, since our time was limited and we couldn't actually see the end of the line of the people trying to get back into the United States, but the "low battery" light started flashing on my camera, and I figured that there must be some place to buy a lithium battery in Nogales, Mexico, since it does get a lot of tourist traffic.

So we crossed.




The first thing that struck me was that while there were easily 30 Border Patrol agents, at least, in the area, watching who entered the U.S., there was on Mexican border agent, sitting on a metal folding chair behind a collapsible banquet table, "watching" the people who came through.

We had barely stepped out of the inspection station and into the border when a jovial man in a yellow shirt came up to us, asking us in perfect English, "What do you need? I have everything you want: Valium, Oxys, Percocet. What are you looking for?" Obviously, the people of Nogales know that college students are coming and they know what they want. I looked up and down the street and noticed that most of the buildings I saw were pharmacies. I replied that we were just looking for a place to buy a lithium battery for a digital camera. He directed us to another, larger pharmacy across the street, making us promise to come back to him if we decided that we needed anything.

In our short trek to the pharmacy, we were stopped by three other men, all asking us what we needed and listing their prescription wares. Yes, the people of Nogales have our ticket. We begged them off and made our way into the pharmacy; they didn't have lithium batteries and the employee there said that there wasn't an electronics store nearby, so we headed back out into the street.

We wandered around Nogales for another thirty minutes, being stopped by another four men offering us prescriptions. After shaking them all off, and with my battery completely dead, we decided to head back to the United States.

We got into the line, which moved surprisingly quickly. As we waited in line, people offered to sell us gum and suckers. The Border Patrol agent glanced at my passport and waved me through.

We got in the car and left. The drive back to Tucson was considerably more exciting as we saw a couple of Border Patrol SUVs and had to go through a Border Patrol checkpoint, which again, we were waved through with the agents barely looking at us.

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All photos taken by the author.

For information about crossing over to Mexico, check out "¿Passport Preguntas?" on Border Beat, http://borderbeat.net/story/show/28, or visit the Border Patrol website at http://www.cbp.gov/.