Where I come from, political and cultural geography is stretched to its limits. On the frontera, life is interesting because it has to be—difference and individuality are woven right alongside tension and contradiction. But that mix is also what makes it beautiful.
MacMillan defines a border as “the official line separating two countries… the edge or boundary of something.” When I read that, what stays with me is how artificial a border really is. A line someone once drew on a map, and then everyone agreed to pretend it was real. In truth, we all live with borders—political, yes, but also social and cultural ones. Lines that divide us by class, age, language, gender, faith, or simply by who belongs where.
El Paso, where I grew up, sits on that supposed line. But anyone who knows the region understands: the line is more conceptual than physical. People move back and forth constantly, carrying two cultures, two languages, two histories in their pockets without thinking twice. Life on the frontera means living in two worlds at once—and somehow, they feel like one.
In 2015, when I began traveling through border cities and towns, that feeling deepened for me. Over 18 months, I learned to see borders not as barriers, but as living things shaped by the people who cross them every day. Borders breathe. They hold memories. They shift depending on who is looking. And most of all, they remind me that the place I call home—El Paso-Juárez, and even into New Mexico—is more than a boundary on a map. It’s a human landscape, alive and complicated, and profoundly my own.
