A Brief History of Borders in Ajo, AZ

Ajo, Arizona sits about 43 miles from the Mexican border. It is a one stoplight town with a population of around 2,500 year-round residents that increases to closer to 4,000 when the snowbirds migrate south for the winter.

Ajo is a town of borders. Prior to the town’s founding the land on which it sits belonged to the Tohono O’odham Nation. The Nation stretched from present day Arizona into Sonora, Mexico. In the mid-1500s, Fray Marcos, a Spanish missionary, leading a small expedition in search of the famed City of Cibola arrived in the Nation. Fray Marcos was followed by Melchior Diaz and the much larger conquistador expedition of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. Coronado’s men and weapons overpowered the settled tribes on the Nation and the Spanish slowly colonized the entire area.

The Tohono O’odham Nation and the Spanish continued mining on a small scale and Ajo remained part of Mexico for the next 300 years until the Gadsden purchase in 1854. The Gadsden purchase, negotiated between James Gadsden, US Ambassador to Mexico, and Mexican President Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, ceded 29,670 square miles of Mexican territory to the United States and moved the border southward to follow the courses of the Rio Grande and Colorado Rivers. Not only were people who had formerly been Mexicans become US citizens but the Tohono O’odham Nation was slashed in half, separating families who had lived on the land for generations.

Between 1854 and 1884, Ajo was little more than a staging post. In 1884, Tom Childs re-opened the mines that had been abandoned by the Spanish, and the Arizona Mining and Trading Company established Ajo’s first copper mine. As industrial revolution bought new technology to mining, Phelps Dodge began open-pit copper mining in 1911 and a new set of borders were created. On the ridge, were the grand houses of the mine owners, overlooking the spectacular desert landscape. The lower town was segregated into white, Mexican and Native American sections with the living conditions become progressively worse and the pay progressively lower. When workers attempted to unionize in 1983, Phelps Dodge, following the prevailing anti-union sentiment of the Reagan administration, bought in non-union workers from outside Ajo, but the days of the mine were already numbered. Phelps Dodge shuttered operations in 1985.

Today, there is a new set of borders in Ajo. They are harder to define because many of them are no longer based on geography, race or economics. New housing for Border Patrol families sits next to winter homes of snowbirds. Edgy’s REB Supply is across the street from the American Citizens Club, which, contrarily to our current perception of the name, was founded by, and is still mainly a meeting place for, Mexican Americans. Humanitarian Aid workers and Border Patrol agents park next to each other at Olsen’s grocery store. Year-round and part-time residents gather at the library to use the wifi. Despite their physical proximity, borders are ever present and seemingly more insurmountable between them than the fence that marks the arbitrary boundary between the US and Mexico.

Nearly 200 years since Gadsden cut their land in half, the Tohono O’odham are still fighting to re-unify their Nation. If we continue to create more and more literal and figurative borders between us, will our children and their children still be fighting to break them down in 2220? Better, perhaps, to remove them now. #sinfronteras

Sources:

Ajo Chamber of Commerce

US Department of State, Office of the Historian

US Historical Markers

How the Raccoons got High

On Sunday, my first time as a solo facilitator with No More Deaths, I selected the South Growler Mountains for our water drop. We packed up the truck with water, beans, blankets, trail snacks and socks, checked the maps and GPS and drove down into the desert.

We made easy going of the first mile and half, straight out across the gravelly sand, across a few shallow washes and through a grove of cholla. As we neared the foothills of the mountains the terrain became rockier, the washes deeper and the cholla were replaced by a mix of organ pipe cactus, palo verde and creosote.

On dropping down into a particularly deep wash we found an evident migrant rest stop with blankets, clothing, used tins of food and empty black water bottles, which are issued to migrants in Mexico. As we searched the area, we spotted a trail of ATV dust headed straight for us. Quickly climbing out of the wash we set ourselves up behind a palo verde tree and took out our snacks and personal water bottles. We discussed how to handle the coming interaction. The only question from Border Patrol that you legally have to answer is “Are you a US citizen?” We agreed that we would not answer any other questions.

The ATVs came closer and we could hear the Border Patrol agents shouting to each other as they looked for us on the other side of the wash. Finally, one agent called out, “I got eyes on them!” and drove through the wash to where we were sitting. “What are you doing out here?” He asked. We sat silently for a couple of minutes, he waited. “Are you all US Citizens?” While I could probably get away with saying “yes” to the citizenship question, I always answer “no” because I want in some small way to challenge the assumption that all white people in the desert are US citizens. He asked about my documents, then got back on his ATV and left. We sat for a few minutes, waiting for them to be far enough away that we considered it safe to return to the water drop.

After making our first drop we continue to follow the wash up into the mountains and found a well-used trail, with historic and recent trash of all kinds, winding up a saddle. At the top of the saddle we reached the Cabreza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge fence. There was no sign of the previously established water drop, based the strong signs that the trail was being used regularly, we decided to place an experimental drop just below the saddle and check on it in a couple of weeks.

The sun came out as we made our way back down to the pass, following a different wash from the one we had made the first drop in. As the sunlight filtered through the mesquite it glinted off something metal. IT’S A 20 POUND BRICK OF WEED! A very old, very moldy and much chewed upon brick of weed, but still a brick of weed! The buds were tightly packed together and wrapped in tin foil, which had been torn open and the brick chewed at, likely by a combination of raccoons, rodents, birds and insects. Judging by the amount of weed that had been eaten, there were some very stoned animals in the Growlers.

We had a good day. It had everything you could ask for in a day, good exploration of trails, a worthwhile water drop and a little desert surrealism….as the sun set we left the remainder of the brick for the raccoons so they could “wake and bake.”

Don't Leave Your Bag Unattended...

I have been back in the desert for a week now. At first it was a slow adjustment, leaving behind my regular type life for real this time and not knowing where the desert would lead me.

On my first day, we found a homemade backpack constructed of cardboard, burlap sacking and string. These backpacks are often used to carry marijuana bricks across the border and finding it led to a conversation about the difficulties of unraveling the border narrative of the drug trade. 

On the Mexican side of the border, most if not all, the crossings are controlled by the cartels. Migrants who cannot afford to pay the cartels for passage across the desert are forced to carry drugs in full, or partial, payment for a coyote’s (guide) services provided by the cartel.

Here in Ajo, the crossing is the longest of any point on the border, up to 70 miles of uninhabited national parks, US army and Bureau of Land Management land. The dangerous nature of the crossing means that the cartels charge the least to cross and that the migrants who cross here are often the least able to afford the crossing fee, therefore they are forced into carrying drugs in lieu of cash payment.

On the US side of the border, this reinforces the right-wing narrative that all migrants are drug smugglers. It is a disingenuous narrative, designed to provoke fear in the US population and to criminalize people who have been displaced through violence, climate change and economic insecurity. A person who has left their homeland though fear of gang violence, walked thousands of miles in search of basic safety and arrived in Sonora only to find that the cartel crossing fee exceeds any amount they could possibly muster, who then agrees to carry a brick of marijuana across the border is not a “drug smuggler.” An unwilling “mule,” maybe, but not a smuggler which implies repeated commercial interest in the drug trade.

For now, the desert is leading me to help these migrants, the ones who do not garner sympathetic news stories or spark crowd-funding campaigns. I am looking for a place to stay in Ajo and to play a small part in humanizing the border for those most in need.