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Calexico, like every other place, is unique. But it is also strikingly similar to other U.S. border towns because the boundary with Mexico— simultaneously a divide and a bridge—significantly defines it. Calexico is thus caught between forces that necessitate the boundary serve as a gateway, and those that demand that it be a barrier. As such, Calexico is a bundle of contradictions. It embodies hope and despair, life and death, welcome and rejection. While one could make the same observation of any town, the contradictions are especially pronounced in places like Calexico—due to its southern limit born of conquest and exclusion and, at the same time, continuously remade through dynamic and intensifying socioeconomic ties. Located on the front line of the ever-growing boundary-security apparatus, with thousands of federal agents and their dependents working and living in the area, Calexico is in some ways the ultimate American town. In others, it is its very antithesis—especially given the historical and contemporary equation of “American” with “Anglo,” and given myriad demographic factors that help to blur the distinctions between Calexico and its cross-boundary cousin, Mexicali. An estimated 80 percent of Calexico’s children, for example, enter the city’s school system speaking Spanish, and approximately 95 percent of its residents are Latino. At the same time, while Calexico and the larger Imperial Valley are in many ways quite prosperous vis-à-vis their neighbors in Mexico, they are also home to significant socioeconomic hardship. As an April 27, 2009, Los Angeles Times article asserted, “Name the state statistic, and Imperial County (population: 172,000) is usually near the top or the bottom, whichever is worse: per capita income, welfare recipients, families below the poverty line, elderly living in poverty and so on.” It went on to report that during the previous month the Imperial Valley had the highest official unemployment rate (which is always significantly    Afterword Calexico at the Intersection of Life and Death Joseph Nevins 207 lower than the actual one) in the United States for any area with a population of more than 50,000 people: 25.1 percent. Like many such twin towns across the boundary, Calexico and Mexicali cooperate, and have long done so. The towns had such strong economic and social ties in the 1920s that their respective fire departments answered calls in either town. Still today, Calexico’s fire department occasionally responds to emergencies in Mexicali. Meanwhile, many children from Mexicali cross the boundary on a daily basis to attend private schools in Calexico, as do about 60,000 middle-class Mexicans with U.S. government–issued border-crossing cards, in order to shop at Calexico businesses ranging from mom-and-pop stores to Walmart, providing a huge impetus to the local economy. At the same time, as Peter Laufer shows us during his intimate tour recounted here, many Imperial Valley residents cross into Mexicali on weekends to enjoy the city’s restaurants or clubs. This blurring of social boundaries leads to significant challenges for U.S. authorities policing the divide. Because Calexico’s downtown abuts the international line, it is relatively easy for boundary jumpers to blend into the surroundings north of the border. At the same time, numerous residents feel sympathy for unauthorized crossers and provide them with food and water, or hide them in their homes. Others, drawn by the lucrative smuggling business, shelter migrants for a price. For such reasons, many Calexicans refuse to cooperate with the Border Patrol. Despite binational interdependence, the relationship between Mexicali and the Imperial Valley is far from an equal or just one, an outcome facilitated by the very presence of the U.S.–Mexico divide. Reminiscent of apartheid South Africa’s dependence on “homelands” for its workforce , the Imperial Valley draws much of its manual labor from across the boundary. These laborers, who typically have work visas, usually arrive by four o’clock a.m. From there, labor contractors transport many of them to farms, some as far away as Yuma, Arizona—sixty miles to the east. And they return home to the Mexican side of the boundary at the end of the day. As the Valley’s economy has diversified over the last decade and agriculture has declined in relative importance, many cross-boundary laborers now work in the service and construction sectors. Given the history of the making of the U.S.–Mexico border region, and the Imperial Valley in particular, racism and overlapping classbased inequalities are deeply embedded...

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