The River Between

Since you got that stunning two-nations view back at the overlook, let me tell you honestly and clearly about this border you're looking at, because it's easy to get wrong, and the truth of it is better than the headlines. El Paso and Ciudad Juárez are twin cities — genuinely twins, grown up together on either side of the Rio Grande, which here forms the line between the United States and Mexico. Together they make one enormous shared metropolis, more than two million people, one of the largest cities anywhere along the two-thousand-mile border.

And here's what visitors often don't understand: for the people who live here, on both sides, this is far more one community than two. Families live on both sides. Tens of thousands of people cross those international bridges every single day — to work, to school, to see grandma, to shop, to eat — back and forth, back and forth, a river of ordinary life flowing across an international boundary as naturally as you'd cross a street. The two cities share an economy, a culture, a history, food, music, family. El Pasoans are fiercely proud of that bond, and proud that theirs is consistently ranked one of the safest big cities in America. So as you look out at that line on the map, don't picture a wall between strangers. Picture a doorway between neighbors — the Pass of the North, doing what it's done for four hundred years: letting people through. Roll on.