The blue jalopy creaks and groans, its bumper nearly scraping the roadway of the Good Neighbor Bridge, which spans the Rio Grande between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. The driver has given 29 fellow Mexicans a free lift south because he can bring five cartons of cigarettes into Mexico for each passenger in his car. Next comes a pickup carrying six teenage Mexican girls, all trim in their red vests. They are returning to Juarez from their classes at a Roman Catholic girls school in El Paso. Behind them is Yolanda Rivas, who is heading home after an eight-hour shift in an El Paso clothing factory, where she earns $135 a week sewing trousers, a job that would pay $30 a week in Juarez. So it goes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Says Veronica Jacquez, 24, a native of El Paso who is personal secretary to Juarez Mayor Francisco Barrio: "This is like one big city, except with bridges. Most of the people go back and forth all the time."
It is the world's most extraordinary border. Nowhere, with the possible exception of Berlin, is the contrast so stark. On one side of the blurry line stands an economic superpower, on the other a nation burdened with widespread poverty. "This is the only place I know where you can jump from the First World to the Third World in five minutes," says Julio Chiu, a bank executive in El Paso who grew up in Juarez.
Yet for 1,936 miles -- from the Pacific Ocean, across the rugged coastal mountains, the hot sands of the Sonoran Desert, the high plains near El Paso and finally the verdant citrus fields that end at the Gulf of Mexico -- the largely unmarked frontier is as much a link between the U.S. and Mexico as a barrier. The movement across the boundary is massive. Each year there are hundreds of millions of legal crossings. In addition, 1,056,907 undocumented aliens were seized along the border in 1984, almost a 50% increase over ten years ago, and authorities cannot even estimate the number who made it across undetected.
Increasingly dependent on one another, the 7 million residents of either side of the boundary have created a cooperative culture that is neither American nor Mexican. It is a hybrid that has latched on to the strengths of both national heritages. The corridor, observes Journalist Tom Miller in his book On the Border, "is a third country with its own identity . . . Its food, its language, its music are its own. Even its economic development is unique."
The cross-pollination creates a lively cultural blend. In Juarez, a popular hangout is the Kentucky Club, where mostly Mexican patrons select from such jukebox favorites as Duke Ellington and Julio Iglesias. Across the river in El Paso, Mexican teenagers from Juarez buy heavy metal rock LPs from Star Records, a music shop, since such disks are scarce in their city.
In Matamoros, on the southern tip of the Rio Grande Valley, Mexican and American white-collar workers sip Scotch and water at Blanca White's, while a marimba-and-drum combo plays local salsa-flavored music. Young women from Matamoros cross into Brownsville daily to attend Texas Southmost College. They party on the U.S. side in blue jeans and T shirts, on their home turf in cocktail dresses. Affluent Americans in El Paso drink margaritas and munch tamale and chili canapes at black-tie affairs. When they visit friends in Juarez, their parties start earlier and linger long into the night.