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  • Bridges across the Borderline:The Local Politics of Building the First International Rail Bridges in the Americas at the Two El Pasos, 1880-1883
  • Gladys A. Hodges (bio)

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Finished in 1881, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe (ATSF) and Mexican Central railroad bridge spanned the Rio Grande between El Paso, Texas, and El Paso del Norte, Chihuahua. Courtesy of the University of Texas at El Paso Library, Special Collections Department, Laurence Stevens Papers, MS114.

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Bridges—timbers and trestles, ties and rails—were indispensable in the changing relations between Mexico and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Metaphorically, bridges between El Paso del Norte (now Ciudad Juárez), Chihuahua, and El Paso, Texas, represented a new era of comity and communication between the two republics as well as between the two towns, tightening the bonds at both centers and margins.

Bridges across the borderline visibly represented the portfolio of common interests and political agreements that had been hammered out at ministerial levels in Washington, D.C., and Mexico City. Bridges funneled traffic through customs checkpoints and immigration controls, constituting barriers against infringement upon national pride and prerogatives. They boosted cooperation and economic expansion by way of a bi-national transport network that opened enormous new vistas for development on both sides of the Rio Grande. Bridges between the new town and the old town reduced time and space, enabling closer social and economic interplay. In addition to social and cultural linkages, the community of more than ten thousand persons in greater El Paso del Norte offered a significant consumer pool for products arriving by rail, broadening the range for mercantile and distributive enterprises across the region.1 Perhaps [End Page 27] more important for this study, bridges functioned as teachers in the development of municipal procedures and international relations. The processes of bridge planning gave the earliest visible sign that the two towns would comprise an interdependent transborder complex, interacting politically, commercially, and socioculturally.

Once the age of railroads reached the border between the United States and Mexico in the early 1880s, bridges became important points for the collection of customs revenue, the single largest source of income for both nations in the nineteenth century.2 Construction of international bridges required cooperation of officials at federal, state, and local levels along with private enterprise—although the line between public officials and private enterprise often blurred.

In an 1880s travel guide, an observer wrote that "[s]ince the concentration of several railway lines here, El Paso has ceased to be a draggle-tailed little suburb of El Paso del Norte and has become an enterprising, thriving frontier town—with all the crudeness and rawness and painful ugliness that an enterprising, thriving frontier town must necessarily have."3 Officially chartered by the state as a city in 1873, not until 1881 did the frontier village awaken from the lethargy that had accompanied it through three decades of recovery from the hostilities introduced by establishment of an international boundary in 1848-49. In short order, rail communication altered the relationship between the two towns that sometimes competed and at other times cooperated or enjoyed complementary roles, bound as they were by the new linkage across the river known in Mexico as the Río Bravo. "As each train that passe[d] the frontier w[ove] the web of the human federation," the two small towns at the Pass of the North lived the reality "that nations can never again be entirely separated. Impassable walls to enclose and protect them are things of the past."4

At the Pass through the crucial years of 1880-83, the politics of space that extended a U.S.-chartered railroad onto Mexico's soil encompassed [End Page 28] a variety of considerations. Memory of the 1848 loss of territory to the "colossus of the north" long tainted the bi-national relationship. In spite of the drive by Mexico's President Porfirio Díaz to modernize the country's economy, a major sticking point was the wariness of Mexican lawmakers of potential spatial and political encroachments connected to foreign economic investment in their...

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