Bisbee,AZ:"a liberal oasis in a conservative desert"- "The (Southern border)wall projects hostility" [View all]

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/25/us-mexico-usa-cooperation-idUSBRE94O05S20130525?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews

[font size=5]As border tightens, some U.S.-Mexico neighbors reach across the fence[/font]

By Tim Gaynor

(Reuters) - Mexican activist Maria Elena Borquez takes up a paintbrush and daubs a bright splotch of color on the rusted steel fence separating the small Mexican town of Naco from a neighboring town in the United States.


"The wall projects hostility," she said, paint pot in hand and surrounded by youngsters from both the United States and Mexico. "The idea is to transform it with art, friendship, colors and life ... into something that unites us," said Borquez, who is director of the local museum.


As the United States pushes for tighter security along the Mexico border as part of efforts to overhaul immigration laws, Borquez is among scores of residents on either side of the border in this corner of southeast Arizona taking the unusual step of working to strengthen neighborly ties.


The project, with a group calling itself the "Border Bedazzlers," was founded last year by Gretchen Baer, a painter in the former copper mining town of Bisbee about 5 miles north of the border.


Bisbee, with 5,600 residents, is hardly a typical town - a local bumper sticker describes it as a "liberal oasis in a conservative desert" - in its community outreach. ....


There are also periodic flare-ups over civilian volunteers looking for unauthorized border crossers and Mexico's outrage after Arizona passed a 2010 law that required police to question those they stopped, and suspected of being in the country illegally, about their immigration status.


"As the U.S. is pumping up all this security on the border and more and more money is being spent on all of this 'keep them out,' people want to respond in a positive way and say 'That's not us,'" said Baer. ....

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