'It's not the same': How Trump and Covid devastated an Arizona border town

[Eugene]

Source: Capital and Main with The Guardian

'It's not the same': How Trump and Covid devastated an Arizona border town

Nogales residents say the city is struggling amid the pandemic and after years of Trump painting the area as a ‘war zone’

Debbie Weingarten of Capital and Main
Fri 4 Sep 2020 11.00 BST

When Francis Glad was a child growing up in Nogales, Arizona, the US-Mexico border near her home was nothing like it is now. “It was more like a neighbor fence, like you have at your house,” she remembers. “It was very symbiotic. Just people coming back and forth.”

But today, a towering 30ft border wall, made of dizzying steel bollards, slices through the Nogales sister cities.

The economies of the two Nogaleses have always been intrinsically linked and mutually dependent on cross-border commerce, with residents from each side passing through to do their daily shopping or to visit with friends and family. Years ago, Glad’s mother ran a hotel in downtown Nogales, Arizona, which was almost always packed with businesspeople and tourists.

But, she says, the bustle has stopped. In part, Glad blames the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and lies about the borderlands. “Outsiders believe that Nogales is a war zone,” she says, “with ‘murdering, rapist,’ undocumented [people] climbing the border wall like the zombies from World War Z, when it’s far from the truth.”

More recently, Covid-19 restrictions on “nonessential” border crossings have turned downtown Nogales into a ghost of its formerly busy self. In a small town with a $28,000 median income and a poverty rate of 33.9%, the slowing of traffic comes with potentially dire economic consequences for workers and small business owners.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/04/nogales-arizona-trump-border-wall-covid

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. I used to live in Tucson. Went to high school there.

When I lived in Tucson we'd go to Nogales on occasion to shop in Mexico.

When I first moved there, in 1962 from northern New York State, it was dizzyingly exotic. I feel very fortunate to have experienced such different cultures.

I graduated high school in Tucson, and over the many years since then, often when I've gone to Tucson I've included a side trip to Nogales.

In recent years, well before Covid-19, things had changed a lot. A few years back none of my friends in Tucson were willing to make the trip and the border crossing. Shops in Nogales closed down, almost wholesale. I no longer felt very comfortable going there. Which is a huge shame, because things like being able to cross a border like that easily is so important.

Some years back my older sister turned me on to the Hotel Frey Marcos in Nogales. It is something like two blocks inside of Mexico and is (or at least was when we went there) totally wonderful. We'd park on the American side in a parking lot we knew was safe to leave the car for a day or two, and walk across the border. My sister would book us rooms because she had a coworker who spoke fluent Spanish, which was very convenient. Invariably we were the only Americans staying there, which is truly a shame. We always had a wonderful time, got great margaritas at the hotel bar, and felt completely safe, as American women traveling alone.

These days, like so many people, I'm completely disinclined to travel anywhere. And I'm a person who has essentially defined myself most of my life by my travels. Sigh. Someday, someday, in the more distant future than most people realize, this will finally end and we'll take up a new normal, although I truly hate that term. Life will be very different, far different than we can possibly imagine right now. I do hope that life will include resuming at least some of the travel I used to do, but if it does not, then sigh, and oh well. We will all adjust. Yes, we will.

The sad thing is that it's not just places like Nogales that are hurting, but everywhere that depends on any kind of tourism. Which is a surprisingly large part of the country. I live in Santa Fe, NM, which is a huge tourist town. We are essentially torn between wanting to remain locked down to keep safe, and wanting to let tourists in for the economy. It is not an easy decision.