Ambos Nogales
When walls go up, Nogales reshapes — but the people often stay the same.
ARIZONA SHERIFF
Tony Estrada remembers those Mexican ghost stories, the ones whispered with childhood friends into the still darkness.
He remembers the rusted nickels he stockpiled for black-and-white movies with his brothers, the buttery stacks of tortillas his mother used to knead. The flat, unfamiliar taste of his first hamburger.
He remembers what Nogales looked like back when there was no wall.
From a lectern emblazoned with the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office seal, Estrada — Arizona’s longest-serving sheriff — speaks with a surprising kind of grandfatherly gentleness, weaving staccato memories into one, uninterrupted story of his life that flows with the Santa Cruz River: straddling the brushstroke border between two cities that share a name.
Estrada moved to Nogales, Arizona from Nogales, Sonora, Mexico in 1944, just a few months after he was born — back when immigration was no more than a short walk across the street, one that could just as easily be made in the reverse direction.
He is nearly 76 years old now, much older than the razor-wire wall that towers over him — and his conjoined hometowns, collectively known as Ambos Nogales, or “both Nogaleses” — like a sentinel.
Last October, the Department of Defense sent military troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in preparation for thousands of asylum seekers traveling north from Central America. Since then, the Pentagon has sent more troops to the border to support the work of Customs and Border Protection — totaling at nearly 5,000 active-duty troops stationed at across the border.
But Estrada resists the portrayal of the U.S.-Mexico border as a place of “crisis” — a term often used by the Trump administration to describe it. When Estrada thinks of Nogales, Arizona, he thinks of a place where 20,000 people live, work, study, and play.
“I don’t think there’s anything we can’t deal with. I don’t think there’s a crisis,” Estrada says. He pauses, and then clarifies. “There’s a humanitarian crisis.”
At sunrise, I traveled to Nogales from Tucson, driving south for an hour on a pinstripe desert highway until the mile markers transformed into kilometers, the billboards flashed by in Spanish, the radio rumbled to the staticky hum of reggaeton. Here, at America’s southern edge, 94 percent of the population is Hispanic.
“The border wall is not the answer, is never going to be the answer [and] has never been the answer,” Estrada — the state’s only Hispanic sheriff — says, the soft cadence of his words sliced by the crisp air streaming down from the overhead vent.
It feels like I have heard this declaration before, tucked into the folds of progressive political messaging, shot through the heart of activist polemics. But somehow, it is different coming out of the mouth of an Arizona sheriff.
THE WALL
The wall is there, and then it is not.
I am driving among sand dunes massaged into the land, walnut trees — nogales, as they are called in Spanish — that hold fast to the desert like claws.
Two miles east of downtown Nogales, the desert feels untouched — if I ignore, for a moment, the tire tracks left by the Border Patrol vans pulsing across the land at regular intervals. If I allow myself to forget the indigenous lives that have called the Santa Cruz River Valley home for millennia.
Standing parallel to the steel slats of the wall, I notice the original U.S. boundary markers — short, white obelisks erected after the Mexican-American War. There are fifty-two originals across nearly two thousand miles of border; each its own reminder that the wall was not always here.
It was not until the 1990s, under both Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, that the wall was constructed in this area, built from Vietnam War-era helicopter landing mats and steel bollards.
Last fall, concertina wire was added by the U.S. military, designed to deter smugglers from encouraging people on the Mexico side to climb the wall. But the Nogales, Arizona city council unanimously condemned the wire in a resolution earlier this year, claiming it would “inflict serious bodily injury or death” on the city’s residents, many of whom work or attend school in close proximity to the border wall.
My eyes trace the wire encircling the crest of the wall until it stretches beyond the scope of my vision. In the distance, the wall ends suddenly, replaced by three-foot tall vehicle barrier constructed from industrial-era railways — the only kind of barrier that allows water to flow when the Santa Cruz River floods every year, and the only kind that can withstand the river’s turbulence without getting knocked down.
A few hundred feet farther, just past the river, the wall begins again.
Near the vehicle barrier, the soft growl of cranes cuts through the silence. The military is building a bridge for Border Patrol to use when the river floods.
“Once the bridge is built, I predict the government will replace the three-foot vehicle barrier with more high-rise, 18 to 20 foot wall,” Dan Millis, the Sierra Club’s Borderlands Campaign coordinator, tells me. He believes the construction of the bridge, when complete, will incentivize the military to build a wall in place of the existing barrier.
The Club has taken a firm stance against the replacement of vehicle barrier with border wall — which it alleges would stop the flow of the river, exacerbate flooding, and prevent the migration of wildlife across the border.
Standing so close to the wall I can almost touch it, I watch as military men in construction hats and safety vests add finishing touches to the bridge.
Clutching my phone, I reach my hand through a narrow space between two of the wall’s steel slats. It vibrates on the other side.
Welcome to Mexico, the screen flashes.
YOUNG VOICES
Cesar Lopez was born along the banks of the Santa Cruz River.
“My parents were traveling by car from [Nogales, Arizona] all the way to Tucson to a hospital and didn’t make it in time,” he says. “So my grandmother delivered me along the banks…I was one of the first in all of my family to be born on this side of the border.”
We are standing in a circle, spooning raspados from Finitos — a local favorite — when Lopez, a 41-year-old community organizer, tells us that Nogales’s population shrinks every year.
“There are very few options here,” he says. “Join narco, join the produce industry, join law enforcement. So we have an exodus every summer. People graduate, they hang out, and boom, they’re out.”
But to Lopez, and thousands of other nogalenses, Nogales is more than a port of entry shaped by the hands of the law enforcement agents who patrol it, a liminal space between desperation and opportunity, a purgatory of sorts. Nogales is home.
So, Lopez is investing time in the community’s youth, teaching young people in Ambos Nogales the principles of sustainable agriculture and water harvesting. He hopes they will use their knowledge to develop economic opportunities in their hometowns.
Lopez believes decades of mounting federal law enforcement numbers have already impacted the Nogales youth with whom he works.
He tells the story of Fernanda, a 12-year-old girl who was babysitting her younger siblings and cousins at a public park when the group witnessed around 20 Border Patrol agents pin down an unarmed man who was trying to flee.
“Seeing something like that, something so violent just happening even at the park, when you’re supposed to be having Finitos and enjoying yourself,” Lopez voice trails off. He pauses, shaking his head.
“There’s a lot of stories like that.”
AMBOS NOGALES
Elodia Quijada will tell you what life in Nogales was like before the wall.
Sitting at her desk at the Pimeria Alta Historical Museum in Nogales, Arizona, just feet away from the international border crossing, she recalls the maquiladoras on the Mexico side where she used to work.
Quijada is 71 years old now, but she has called Nogales, Sonora home for decades, before she married a U.S. citizen and moved just across town — to the United States.
Recounting memories of traveling between Ambos Nogales, Quijada is proof that these twin cities have always been intertwined. The shops, the factories, the produce industry all breathe together like an organism fed by a central artery: the people, on both sides, who call it home.
But to Quijada, this synergy appears to be waning. Shops that have shaped downtown Nogales, Arizona for almost a century are shuttering. One of the Pimeria Alta Historical Museum exhibits Quijada oversees is dedicated to Bracker’s, a department store that closed its doors in 2017, after 93 years in business on the city’s historic Morley Avenue.
Around 85 percent of Bracker’s shoppers came from Mexico, but the number declined in recent years. Debbie Bracker-Senday, a former co-owner of Bracker’s, partially attributed this drop to the U.S. government’s heated rhetoric against immigration.
“Our government didn’t respect our nice people across the border,” she told the Arizona Daily Star in 2017. “They really didn’t realize that the reason there was so much revenue here, and in Tucson, was because of our friends in Mexico.”
Mexican shoppers, who would come over to the U.S. side for day trips, made up around 60 percent of Nogales, Arizona’s annual sales tax revenue in 2017 — a figure that is declining from previous years, and one that some nogalenses believe stems from both the devaluation of the Mexican peso and heightening tensions at the border.
Meanwhile, Quijada says the anti-immigrant policies coming from Washington have had negative impacts on her own family by making it more difficult for them to come across from Nogales, Mexico to visit her on the U.S. side.
She pulls out a photo album from inside her desk, flipping to a page with glossy, black-and-white shots of Ambos Nogales before the wall came up.
“It’s not how it used to be,” she says, sighing.
From the window by her desk, Quijada gestures outside to Grand Avenue — the bustling road that leads to the main border crossing and spills into the mouth of Mexico’s Carretera Federal 15 on the other side.
“We don’t need a wall,” she says, her back to the sun that creeps downwards to rest beneath the Pajarito Mountains.
Under its waning, blood-orange glow, Ambos Nogales move together like silhouette ballroom dancers, bright-eyed lovers. They always have.
