By Robert Rhodes
Mennonite Weekly Review

NOGALES, Mexico — Across the street from the Burger King, the scene changes quickly in this border city. On the Arizona side, typical American prosperity reigns — good streets, thriving businesses, orderly traffic.

Just a short walk away, however, a far different world and way of life emerge.

On the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border — bristling with sensors, cameras, X-ray devices and a tall, meandering wall constructed from steel panels once used to build desert runways during the 1991 Gulf War — the Third World collides head-on with the First.

On the steep, rolling hills that rise everywhere in Nogales, Mexico — a booming, impoverished city of more than 400,000 people — row upon row of what can only be described as shacks cling next to unpaved streets.

Perhaps most astonishing is that many of Nogales’ residents see this way of life as an improvement, even a godsend.

“The bittersweet reality is that we’re tied to an unjust economy,” said Tom Brenneman, who works on both sides of the border to build awareness and inspire productive, peacebuilding dialogues among those who can do something about the inequities that dominate the frontera region.

Brenneman, of Tucson, Ariz., works with BorderLinks, a binational group that seeks to bridge the two disparate cultures that meet at the border, and offers educational seminars and interactive programs with border residents.

He also is part of Cooperative by Design, a Tucson peacebuilding consortium, and the Sonoran Borderlands Peacebuilding Initiative, which offers training in conflict resolution and takes part in other border-related efforts.

Brenneman partners in much of this work with Cecilia Guzman, a native of Nogales who runs the BorderLinks-sponsored Casa de la Misericordia, or House of Mercy, a community center in Nogales’ Colonia Bella Vista neighborhood.

There, Guzman serves local children, offering a hot-lunch program and other services, and accommodating people from north of the border who wish to learn more about the challenges facing the city and its people.

Major players in Nogales

On a recent morning in January, Guzman maneuvered her van among the steep, winding roads of Nogales, dodging the often manic traffic along the main drags and pointing out the major players in the Nogales economy.

Ever since the emergence of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, American commerce has dug deep into Nogales’ barren hills.

Today, U.S.-owned maquiladoras, or factories, offer the jobs, and higher wages, that have drawn tens of thousands of migrant workers from Mexico’s impoverished southern reaches.

Workers from Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca and other parts of the country have flocked to Nogales, where the 50 pesos, or $5, they can make in a day was once what they made in a week back home.

In one of Nogales’ newer industrial parks, large, state-of-the-art maquilas have cropped up.

Master Lock, Weiser, Otis Elevator, Molex and ACCO are just a few of the large American firms represented in the city. Motorola, Samsonite and ITT, a military contractor, also have maquilas in Nogales.

To many observers, the economic disparity in Nogales is the dark result of American greed, but Guzman and Brenneman say the issue is not that simple.

The maquilas, Brenneman said, “are a necessary but regrettable evil,” if only because they offer workers in southern Mexico a chance to earn higher wages and escape even worse economic conditions elsewhere in the country.

Still, the explosion of Nogales’ economy has had a dismal fallout as the city’s services and infrastructure crumble beneath the demands made by the surging population.

Just a short walk from the industrial parks, entire hillsides are covered in squatters’ shacks, the homes of many of the maquila workers who cannot afford better housing.

At the crest of the hill, one worker apparently is living in his car. He has gathered a small pile of firewood, with which he wards off the morning chill.

Along these streetless slopes, children scamper along dry rain sluices and stacks of old tires are fashioned into crude retaining walls — a hallmark of Nogales architecture.

Water, sewer and electrical service are rare in these slums. The quality of construction is often rudimentary at best.

Not far away, higher-quality housing is available for families who can afford it. The government-sponsored program requires a family to earn the equivalent of three maquila salaries before they can qualify, Guzman said, keeping such housing out of reach for most workers.

Border trafficking

Of course, the maquilas are not the only economic catalyst in Nogales. Because it is a major port of entry into the United States, Nogales sees its share of illegal border trade, including that of drug traffickers and smugglers. Subterranean water channels near the border have become catacombs filled with drugs and other perils, Guzman said.

In the city’s Colonia John F. Kennedy — a neighborhood of opulent, walled compounds — many of the city’s movers and shakers live, from politicians, lawyers and maquila managers to narcos, or drug kingpins.

It hasn’t always been this way, Guzman said.

In the 1950s, when she and her husband, Francisco, a blacksmith, were growing up, Nogales had only a tenth of its present population and was still known for its walnut, or nogales, trees, few of which survive today on the city’s denuded hills.

And though the region’s problems are many, Guzman and Brenneman believe building dialogue and mutual understanding about the borderlands is essential to their recovery.

In 2002, Vernon Jantzi, director of the conflict transformation program at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va., offered a seminar at Casa de la Misericordia, sponsored by BorderLinks, Catholic Relief Services and other groups.

Another seminar in 2002 focused on the lives of women in the borderlands.

Then, in February 2003, a forum featuring Mennonite peacemaker John Paul Lederach, JustaPaz founder Ricardo Esquivia and Harold Saunders of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue was held in Nogales, Ariz.

The importance of these dialogues cannot be underestimated, Brenneman said.

“People on the border are living global realities,” he said.

Among those realities are the differences in culture and government that exist on both sides of the border.

“But there are shared and fluid dynamics along the borderlands that defy those differences,” Brenneman said.

Fashioning structured dialogues about change management in the region, he said, is the major task he faces now.

Slowly, support for efforts like his and Guzman’s are growing on both sides of the frontera, and gradual improvements are being seen in the city itself. Still, the grim faces of need and uncertainty about the future remain.

“Problem-solving comes down to information,” Brenneman said. “There is hope in Nogales because of a generation of people who are willing to take these challenges on.”