“Mom, open the door so we can play!”

If I’m being honest, taking people to see and touch the border wall can feel a bit strange. For many people visiting the borderlands for the first time, the wall is one of their primary mental images when they think of El Paso.

I understand the interest, of course; when I first moved here, I was fascinated by how my eyes adjusted to first see the checkerboard pattern of the rusty metal in the foreground and then, straight through it, into Ciudad Juárez. I remember pressing my forehead up against the wall until that pattern was embedded into my skin.

These days, when I take people to the border, it doesn’t have the same impact on me as it used to. It just feels like part of the scenery.

Other times, the drama is there – Once we passed bread, juice, and tarps through the bollards during a thunderstorm.

Our director, Sami, has been taking people to see the wall for about 15 years longer than I have. The other day, he told me a story about friends who were visiting his family in El Paso.

He took them to the wall by Sunland, the same area where we had met during the thunderstorm. Anapra is a neighborhood that has been built and incorporated into the city in the last 20 years or so. The children who live there run through the desert alongside the wall. For them, I think it is also a “normal” part of the scenery.

When Sami and his friends pull up and get out of their vehicles, it doesn’t take long for the children in Anapra to realize there are children in Sunland who are about their age. They start to talk through the fence. After a while, the youngest tugs on his mom’s sleeve and says,

“Mom, open the door so we can play!” –

What would you say to a child who wanted you to open the door?

Would your explanation about the two countries and secure borders make sense to her?

Would you get in the car and drive through the port of entry so that he could play?

Would you look wildly up and down the wall for a door, almost believing there might be one there?

Would you apologize to the children on the other side?

They surely know there’s no door.

Children see through everything, including international borders! Children cut through to the core of things. And I thank God for that.

– Clara D. Compean, Abara

Photo courtesy of PBS. In 2019, a collaboration of professors and local organizations installed bright pink see-saws on the border wall near Anapra and Sunland Park, coincidentally the site of this story.