The Two Chamizals - Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
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Stumble It!The Two Chamizals
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
The park ranger had been very
helpful. He had given us directions to the famous and well-traveled downtown of
Ciudad Juarez, the Mexican border city and sister to El Paso, Texas. He
seemed a bit surprised that we were on our way to that city's
Chamizal Park, the counterpart to the American national park where he
worked. He described a walk of two miles, which sounded like a long way
to go in West Texas in the hot June sun. Nevertheless, we followed
his lead to the Bridge of the Americas, curious about exploring the
Mexican twin to the locally-popular U.S. Chamizal Park.
The Bridge of the Americas,
unlike the popular downtown bridges, is intended primarily for automobiles.
Like most things built with the car in mind, it is intimidating to
pedestrians. My wife, Jill, and I walked across the bucolic grass of the U.S.
park to get to the sprawling concrete customs facility, then
stepped around its maze of Jersey barriers to start over the foreboding
covered walkway. The metal fence cover looks like something from
a science fiction movie, but the walkway rises and falls gradually
over the Border Highway and the Rio Grande, making it fairly easy to
cross. Few choose to do so, however. A father and his young son were the
only others who passed us on the way in to Mexico.
The U.S. Chamizal Memorial
commemorates the settlement of a longstanding border dispute between
the U.S. and Mexico, with its roots in the 1848 treaty that ended
the Mexican War. For years after the peace settlement, and in spite of
close collaboration between the two nations on boundary surveying
(surprising so soon after a bitter, one-sided war), there remained
nettlesome disagreement about the exact location of the border.
The ever-meandering Rio Grande (Rio
Bravo to the Mexicans), which the treaty specified as the border
from El Paso to the Gulf, was the main troublemaker. Since the border
had been fixed to the center of its channel, whenever the river
moved, the border moved with it. Border dispute commissions resolved
most of the conflicts over the years, but the worst one - the El
Paso/Juarez impasse - proved intractable, largely because of the
value of the urban land.
Finally, in 1963, Presidents Kennedy
and Lopez split the difference. The wild river was tethered by the
neck to a concrete channel. Land changed hands on both sides of it.
The two countries made the newly-acquired spaces into public
parks dedicated (appropriately) to international peace and
understanding. (Sadly, Kennedy did not live to see the dedication of the park he
had negotiated into existence. It was Lyndon Johnson who attended the
signing ceremony with Mexican President Lopez.) We visited
the American park (where we met our ranger friend) that morning.
Now we were headed for the Mexican version on the other side of
the river.
The park was not the first thing one
saw once over the bridge - that honor belonged to Mexican customs, a
concrete monstrosity much like that on the American side. The visual
difference was not great, but a hearty Hola from a youthful
inspector, seated to the side as another man shined his shoes, reminded us
that we were in another country. I also realized how little I remembered
from the one semester of Spanish I took five years ago.
The young man knew enough
English to direct us into the government office next door, which Jill said was
the most spartan place she had ever seen. The lone man at the office
- a uniformed immigration officer at a long desk - was friendly
and discursive, not the dull bureaucrat we had been expecting. He quickly had
us on our way. The green wealth of Mexican Chamizal Park was a
few unfamiliar but short steps beyond, down the wide and bustling
Avenida de las Americas.
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Shady spots like this one are real blessings on summer days in Juarez |
This lushness is perhaps the single
most striking difference between the two Chamizals. The U.S. park is used
mostly for performing arts. The botanical features consist mainly of a large
lawn and a fascinating and varied cactus garden. Its Mexican cousin is another story entirely - huge, well-grown
palms dominate the scene, their bodies wide and bulging fat.
On a cloudless day (like most
days in the El Paso/Juarez area), the palms
create vast areas of shade, contrasting with
the bright southwestern sun. The ambiance
is similar to a typical big-city park.
Families frolic in the sun and picnic in the
shade. Soccer players (soccer is a popular
sport in Mexico) take advantage of the wide reach of the palm leaves to rest.
This was a refreshing change from the
metallic harshness of the two customs stations and the bridge.
Men ranging in ages from their teens
to their seventies sold refreshments of various kinds from
little push carts, much to the pleasure of the tired soccer players.
I walked up to one man and pointed to a bag of dark-brown chips
he was selling. Jill warned me that they may have been pork rinds (I
am a vegetarian). I said "Carne?" to the man, to which he responded, "No,
no carne, no carne." I enjoyed the chips, but my main pleasure was
getting to make some use of my limited Spanish.
Besides the bountiful shade and the
soccer fields, the park's main attraction is the city Museum of Archaeology. The first thing that struck us about this place was its
small size - two rooms, each barely the size of an average living room,
in a small classical building. Despite the museum's name, one room, or half
of the total gallery space, was used for changing exhibits of
contemporary paintings by local artists.
The work varied enormously in
quality. The best artists were Picasso-like Cubists, who seemed
intent on fusing early 20th century Modernism with something uniquely
Mexican. The curator (who was in the midst of hanging the exhibit when
we got there) was friendly. He immediately rushed into his office to
get us fliers for his next show.
The other room seemed to be more in
line with the museum's stated purpose - a collection of small pots,
figures and ceramics from all over Mexico. The conservator at the museum
was highly skilled - heavily fragmented pieces had been
painstakingly reconstructed. Our favorite piece was a large Native American
vessel from Chihuahua with a black and white triangular pattern painted
on it, similar to Anasazi pieces we had seen in many a Southwestern
museum in the States.
The vessel's display case held a
large, painted rendering of the piece behind the piece itself, intended to
make its features easier to see, a creative curatorial idea. For us, of course,
the main challenge (and pleasure) was translating the minute and
detailed Spanish signage. A Mexican family were viewing the displays at
the same time, and the father was taking pride in
explaining each of the artifacts to his children.
The real treat of the museum,
however, was its garden, which sprawled out behind the building (the
interior of the museum is actually much smaller than this
outside space). Here, among a wide variety of mesquites and other desert
trees, a host of life-size archaeological statues from cultures
all over Mexico--Oaxaca, Jalisco, Mexico City, and, of course,
Chihuahua--stood guard.
At first, we thought these were
originals. We worried about their exposure to the elements, but when a
young woman whose family was going through the exhibit a bit
ahead of us plucked her finger on the side of one of the statues, we
realized we were looking at plastic replicas. The signage was not as
in-depth as that in the indoor exhibits of the museum, but it was in
both English and Spanish.
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One of the reproductions of ancient Mexican sculptures in the museum garden |
The most striking sculptures
were huge friezes, 10 to 12 feet tall and 40 feet wide, incised over every
inch of their surfaces with Maya and Aztec motifs. Near these, a
column with a fierce warrior's face from the ancient
Toltec capital city of Tula stood stoically. We especially liked the
copies of two jaguar figures from southern Mexico - one very
well-preserved and fierce, the other worn and smoothed by time,
creating an eerie and ghostly visage.
While we enjoyed these sculptures,
the family groups on the grounds preferred swimming in the
large reflecting pool that dominated the gardens. Some of the
younger children were having fun climbing on the
grimacing model sentinels, an entertaining spectacle.
There is nothing quite like the sight of an eight-year-old reveling
in his conquest of an enormous, disembodied, seven-feet-high Olmec
head.
Walking around this place was an
adventure. While the maintenance was better here than in much of the
rest of Chamizal Park, large PVC water pipes lay across several of the
paths in wait for a careless pedestrian. Furthermore, it had
rained recently, and puddles filled large sections of pathway.
The real feat was getting back across
the Avenida de las Americas. Jill, worried about the rush-hour
traffic, spotted a bridge that arched over the Avenida two blocks south of
the border crossing. Made of corrugated metal painted an eccentric
pink, the span was the steepest pedestrian bridge either of
us had ever crossed.
The top of the bridge had a
great view of the sprawling city, and of the brown, rocky mountains that tower
over it at the northern end of the Sierra Madre Oriental range.
One of these mountains had the words "La Biblia es la verdad leela"
- the Bible is the truth, read it - painted on its side, one of Juarez's
best-known landmarks, easily and ideally seen from this vantage point
above the Avenida.
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The long fountain with canales next to the Americas bridge |
On the other side, a long fountain consisting of an endless row of
canales emptying into a rectangular basin stretched out beneath us. (Canales
are the roof drain spouts that are a
familiar feature in Spanish colonial and mission-style architecture.) Over the highway loomed a huge electric
billboard featuring the letters PRI (the
Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexico's ruling
party at that time) forming and then
blowing up, a pointed reminder of the
election that was coming.
The trip back to the U.S. across
the bridge was highlighted by the well-known gathering of people among the backup
of cars waiting to pass through customs, selling all
kinds of food, snacks, and homemade goods of varying
quality. While the guidebooks highlighted this impromptu market, we
found it to be one of the least interesting things we had seen that
day. It was certainly nothing compared to the park. Another enormous puddle of
water blocked the entrance to the bridge walkway, but a young mother
and her son exhorted us in Spanish to climb up on the wide hand
ledge and walk around it, which we did after some hesitation.
Once the water was crossed, and
after a brief stop at the INS station with our passports, we were back in
our own country, reflecting on our experience. We
hadn't gone deep into Mexico or stayed a long time. Nevertheless, we had managed to
sample the country with a fun and memorable experience in
five short hours, thanks to an agreement and a park made in the name
of international understanding.
More Information
Tony Porco lives in a Washington, D.C. suburb with his wife and son. His writings have appeared in Connecting: Solo Travel News and the newsletter of the National Aquarium in Washington. His poetry can be read in several literary magazines.
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