During my week on the U.S./Mexican border, crossing each day between Nogales, Ariz., and Nogales, Mexico, Manfred and Adeline Cripe were my gracious hosts.Where the cities of Nogales, Ariz. and Nogales, Mexico straddle the international boundary, a high border wall cuts a jagged path through the heart of their union.
They are twins, cities conjoined by a shared history, geography and culture yet wards of two different nations: Mexico and the United States.
On the evening of Sept. 15, eve of the Mexican day of Independence, the streets of Nogales, Mexico rang in celebration as a peaceful crowd of thousands gathered in the center city.
Fireworks lit the night with brilliant sprays of fire, illuminating the nearby hills, the low clouds and the faces of children upturned toward the sky; some delighted, some terrified. Honking cars and discos rocked with mariachi music and street vendors advertised their wares: light-up jewelry, Mexican flags and oversized sombreros.
Just a few hundred meters away, silent but for the echoes of the party from the other side of the wall, the streets of Nogales, Arizona were empty. There may have been a time when the party knew no boundaries, but things have changed.
The next day, just after the last of the party music faded, the sun broke over both Nogaleses. It was a warm and sunny Sunday.
In Nogales, Ariz., Manfred and Adeline Cripe’s butterfly garden was full of birds, bees and desert creatures. The little garden and its life-affirming rhythms seemed a balanced constancy in the changing border world.
The Cripes sat in their living room as sunlight streamed through a large picture window.
Manfred Cripe said the older residents of Nogales still talk about the days when there was no fence.
“There was a free movement basically back and forth, but that was before we moved here,” he said. “Perhaps that is the optimal condition, but we don’t live in that kind of world today.”
The two met when they were both working in Nigeria. When Manfred Cripe first brought Adeline, originally from Northern Ireland, back to the U.S., they had 90 days to get married before her fiancé VISA expired.
“Everybody joked with me that it was a shotgun wedding,” he said, smiling.
The Cripes moved to Nogales in 1977 and to their current home, a house on a hill just a half a mile from the international border, in 1979.
On the patch of earth the Cripes call home, a lot has changed in recent years. The U.S. Border Patrol installed a stadium light on the edge of their backyard and a shipping company put up a huge and humming cold-storage facility on the hill nearby.
But it’s still the same old Nogales: the place they raised their children, worked as teachers and go to church, Manfred Cripe said.
“It’s just about like living any place,” he said, “The border is only maybe a half-mile away, but it is still half a mile away, and it is really a different world here.”
But through familial and economic links, Nogales, Mexico and Nogales, Ariz. are tied together. When the economy hurts in Mexico, Arizona sees more migrants.
“We have been made aware of it over the years we’ve lived here because there has been movement of migrants through our property,” Adeline Cripe said. “One morning Manfred counted 50 migrants throughout the day.”
The couple also have found things migrants have discarded or lost after crossing into Arizona: trash, clothes, cell phones and backpacks, Adeline Cripe said.
Migrant foot traffic near their home in Nogales seemed to intensify about 10 years ago when the authorities remodeled the DiConsini Port of Entry in downtown Nogales, the couple said. During the same years in the mid 90s, Mexico saw a severe devaluation of the peso.
“After they remodeled it, the U.S. government never really got control of the border again,” Manfred Cripe said.
His wife agreed.
“They made the wall bigger and seemingly impenetrable, but it didn’t seem to make any difference,” she said.
Manfred Cripe views illegal immigration as a complex phenomenon created by political and economic interdependencies that are by and large accepted by society ó one that benefits corporations, politicians and migrants, too.
He doubts the border wall will work.
“People will either go over it, they’ll go around it, they’ll go through it or they’ll go under it, because, again, if there is some incentive for them to get over here, they will find a way around it,” he said.
When groups of migrants started passing by the edge of their yard years ago, the Cripes said their community started a neighborhood watch and posted signs instructing people to call the police if they saw anything unusual.
But, so far, they said they haven’t had problems. Instead, the Cripes are concerned about the migrants, not as political scapegoats, but as humans in need.
“I know that some of the people must be so desperate to sell everything they have to pay to get across the border. I just wish there was some way to let them know that it is not easy,” Adeline Cripe said. “With the horrible journey through Mexico and here, always living in fear of being deported, it must be a horrible way to live.”
Around these parts, people know well the story of the typical migrants. They are exploited and misinformed by coyotes, whom they pay to lead them across the desert. Often ill prepared, the migrants find themselves in deadly peril. Just this year, several hundred illegal immigrants have died trying to cross the Sonora desert.
People in these parts live with immigration, but they also have to live with the stories of the migrant deaths that appear in the local newspaper almost every week under chilling headlines like: ‘body found’ or ‘bones unidentifiable.'”It is a tragedy that, in many ways, doesn’t need to happen,” Manfred Cripe said.
He believes negotiations between the United States and Mexico could help resolve the contention surrounding the border and immigration, but xenophobia stands in the way.
“We have lived here for 30 years, and you deal with the problem. You deal with the situation. All of a sudden this has become a ‘national emergency’ when illegal immigrants start showing up in Atlanta and Rockford, Ill., and everybody is like, ‘Hey who are these people, and where are they coming from?’ ” he said. ” There is a fear of people … of people who are different.”
Adeline Cripe opposes illegal immigration, but she wonders if political leaders could do something to legitimize people who just want to work.
There was a time, she said, when she would have been very adamant that everybody should go through exactly what she went through to get the United States, but things have changed.
“I think living here in Nogales has made me less dogmatic,” she said.
In the community, Adeline Cripe volunteers, promoting reading in the schools. Manfred Cripe plants butterfly gardens throughout town and writes a gardening column in the local newspaper.
During the summer, the Cripes host volunteers who work at a humanitarian aid station which provides food, water and basic medical care to deportees on the Mexican side of the border.
For the Cripes, hosting volunteers was a natural extension of their desire to do good work, increase understanding of the border and serve a need in their community: ambos Nogales, or both cities of Nogales.
The Cripes heard about the binational effort, a collaboration between the U.S. group No More Deaths and the Mexican Commission for Aid to the Migrant, through their church.
They decided to volunteer as a host family.
“Even people in Phoenix, people who have never been on the border and have very strong opinions about what should happen either way,” Adeline Cripe said, “they should come and experience what it’s like to be on the border and get a balanced perspective.”
Coming Tuesday: For people of many different religious faiths, the border has become a mission.