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Growing up in and around San Francisco, as I did, is both a delight and a burden. The burden comes from the inbred chauvinism that comes with being a San Franciscan. We’re a pretentious crowd—elitist and self-centered—convinced we’re hipper than thou. We eat better food, our weather is nicer, our fashions are more dashing, and our innovations are much more creative. Than what? Than whose? Ah, that’s another example of our San Francisco pretentiousness. We don’t need to complete no stinking comparisons. We think we’re better than anyplace else and anybody else. That’s part of our charm, or so we like to imagine. And it also can make us insufferable to be around. We’re in love with ourselves and our city. As I headed south for another trip to the California border, I couldn’t help but travel with that attitude. As noted, it’s inbred. I was off to the border to report another chapter of the never-ending story of the American standoff with Mexico, but I was also slumming. I was en route to check out how my poor brothers and sisters survived far from my cosmopolitan home. I picked Calexico as a base camp because it defies the stereotypes most of us rely on when we think about the Mexican border. Calexico is not another example of the Tijuana–San Diego type of dichotomy: a teeming megalopolis of contrasts, with extreme poverty punctuated by lawlessness on the south side of the line and pristine affluence to the north. Instead, Calexico is another dusty stop along the brutal desert border, one of those places where the coyotes and drug traffickers drop their loads before disappearing again south of the border. Calexico, my preliminary research suggested to me, was also a struggling Mayberry RFD of the border, with unique twists on the theme of a Norman Rockwell–type America.    Monday “Where California and Mexico Meet!” 2 monday Calexico is poor, undereducated, and polluted. It is within Imperial County, which suffers last place among California counties in water and air quality, schooling, and income. Calexico is a struggling market city of fewer than fifty thousand citizens. It can claim few cultural amenities . Cosmopolitan sophistication is across the border in Mexicali, a twenty-four-hour-a-day cornucopia of dining and nightclubs, theater and concerts. It is the state capital of Baja California and home to the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California. Calexico was an unknown place for me; I’d only passed through it en route elsewhere. Much like naive anthropologists searching for an undiscovered (by them) indigenous population to study, I was off to tell the tales of what I figured would be a colorful—but underprivileged—collection of Californians. I knew I would find a unique culture to celebrate, and one that could help us all better understand our border wars with Mexico and Mexicans. Over many years of studying borders I’ve learned that frontier dwellers experience a transnational lifestyle that often transcends the prejudices of fellow citizens living distant from the Other. It’s a rite of passage for most Californians to make a trip to the border and cross over into a few blocks of Mexico, the legendary land of (for a teenager) easy underage booze, Wolfman Jack, and the donkey act—experiences that tend to reinforce, not dash, those prejudices. California and Mexico come together at the only place where the first and third worlds meet. For Calexico, far from the spotlight of Tijuana, that clash creates frustration and opportunity, in the midst of daily routines. The borderstraddling Calexico lifestyle is one the rest of us can learn from, and we can use the lessons of our border’s Calexicos—with luck—to move the immigration debate in Washington and Mexico City from hype and hysteria to hope. I am fortunate enough to have lived on and reported from all sorts of borders, political and social. Berlin before the Wall came down. The Greece–Turkey crises. Afghanistan–Pakistan. The Iraq–Jordan line. North and South Korea. I’ve heard the Montana jokes Minnesotans make. Along any borders cultures exchange with each other and thrive, even as the artificiality of what we call a political border inevitably creates strains. As I was preparing for my trip south to Calexico, I met my friend Markos for lunch in Fairfax, a village on the north side of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, across the Golden...

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