At times like the end of last month, when I’m busy with work projects and related travel, I look up and a week or two has flow
n by. Last week I was in El Centro, working with a client whom I visit 2-3 times a year. If a city or town is one I regularly visit on business, I make an effort to learn a few things about the community. I also try to see and experience things from the perspective of local people. After all, there are reasons why most people live and work where they do. Over time, I’ve come to realize that understanding such things is important, particularly when people hear that I’m from a “big”, well-known city like San Francisco. I’ve also found that the ”bias” runs in both directions as many rural and small-town folk I’ve encountered really do expect city dwellers like me to look down on them.
El Centro, with a population of about 50,000, is the largest U.S. city below sea level (-50 ft). It’s approximately 120 miles east of San Diego, in the middle of the Imperial Valley, which is essentially an irrigated desert. Given its location, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s hot there, with normal temperatures in June and July ranging from 103-107 degrees. In fact, the city’s motto is: Where the Sun Spends the Winter. For a wimpy San Franciscan like me, coming from a climate where 65 degrees is a warm summer day, the heat is pretty near unbearable. When visiting during this time of year, I enjoy walking around a local park in the morning just before dawn, when the temperature is a “mild” 80-85 degrees.
Anyway, why am I writing about El Centro? Because after I got home last week, I read an article in the local paper on Saturday about a section of the border fence that’s being built in Texas – right through the campus of a local university. The further one gets from the border with Mexico, I can imagine that the concept of a fence actually securing our borders seems more plausible. On the other hand, the plausibility of this concept seems to diminish the closer one gets to the border, particularly in communities like El Centro. A short drive to the more recently developed parts of town will take you past ”big-box” retailers like Lowe’s, Home Depot, Best Buy, Costco, Wal-Mart, Marshall’s, Mervyn’s, Target, and then to the Imperial Valley Mall – with 108 businesses, anchored by Macy’s, JC Penney, and Sears. How can a community of 50,000 support all of this? It can’t – but Mexicali, a city of about 1 million people just across the border in Mexico can.
What’s more, it isn’t just about who shops in these businesses – it’s about who works there, and in local agriculture, and in the local medical center that employs over 700 people. In communities like El Centro, the border is a living, breathing “membrane”, with each side simultaneously nourishing and being nourished by the other. Every time I visit, I’m struck by what I perceive to be the ridiculous notion that people can be successfully ”walled-off” from one another without any negative impact on their communities. As for national security, what’s to stop someone from quietly joining the stream of thousands who cross the border every day in communities like El Centro to shop and work?
Integrated border communities demonstrate that the “security” of a wall is illusory. Unfortunately, it’s an illusion that many have bought into, notwithstanding numerous historical examples to the contrary. From my perspective, it’s simply the latest attempt to separate those who are different into “us and them”. As a resident of a border state, I acknowledge the risk but refuse to live my life based on fear.
