March 01, 2017 at 09:00AM
Most of those who attempt to climb the wall into the US will be arrested and sent back. If they survive, they will keep trying
The wall is an army in brown. It is fabricated in sections 10 girders wide, 18ft tall and crowned with a metre-high blade. To watch the slatted world on the other side – Mexico – as you walk through the city of Nogales is to be reminded of a zoetrope’s flickering image; the same sequence played again and again. The steel, untreated, is red-brown with rust, and this rust in turn has leached into the wall’s concrete base and drained down its sides to the ground.
The wall divides the town – Nogales Arizona/Nogales Sonora – though most of the population lives on the Mexican side. On one of the slopes on the US side is a shrine. Ranged along a reinforcement joist slanting from the wall’s concrete base are some burnt-out tealights in glass jars. Knotted to the vertical palings above are a length of curled yellow ribbon and, tied in place with the same kind of ribbon, a bunch of dirty plastic daisies turned brittle by the sun. Nogales, Sonora, on the other side, is 20ft below, and I realise that the wall stands on its own embankment – steep on the Mexico side, like a castle dyke. In order to climb the wall from Nogales, Sonora, you first have to climb the slope. About 38ft, all told. Through the wall, in Mexico, I can make out a white, windowless building and a sign: despacho juridico, legal office. Stencil-sprayed on the adjoining wall, a young man’s face – a boy’s really, in its chubbiness – repeated over and over, like a crude Warhol, like a picture of a martyr.
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