The Bridges of Juarez
Traveling to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
Ciudad Juarez sits in the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border. Right across El Paso in Texas, Juarez is considered by some as a dangerous city. I went there this past October to participate in a mountain bike race, the Chupacabras 100 km. I drove from my home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to El Paso, some 240 miles away. I parked behind a supermarket a few blocks from the International Bridge Paso Internacional Paso del Norte and walked my bike across.
The bridge
As I remember going through the bridge, I remember a silly smile I sometimes carry. Like when I deplaned at Tokyo Haneda over five years ago and had this same boyish full-of-amazement smile. As if I was a young child again and was going to look at the trains at the model trains toy store that my parents could not afford to buy me. Walking off the jet bridge, I looked like a child opening a full-size bullet train present on Christmas day, a machine capable of outrunning the destructive fury of a bullet.
Now in Juarez, I was sensing some form of magic in the air on the Mexican side of the border. The bridge this time was a pedestrian one. The bridge anywhere else would have meant nothing. No engineer would take pride in its construction. It was probably some generalized unoriginal concept bridge used in…
