Naco, Arizona | In the Magazine/Past Issues/May 2007 May 2007 Border Walls Photos

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Old Glory juts toward the Mexican border as if in warning...

This is for display only! This is NOT the actual print, you will receive!

Hallway Office Wall Living Room Lounge Red Stucco Wall

Naco, Arizona

Old Glory juts toward the Mexican border as if in warning. Unlike most barriers on the border, the nearly mile-long fence on a local rancher's land was built not by the U.S. government but by a private group, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, which opposes the influx of illegal immigrants. The group promises that if the government doesn't seal the border, it will.

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East of Naco, a monument and a barbed-wire fence mark the U.S.-Mexico border. Formerly Mexican territory, the United States purchased southern reaches of Arizona and New Mexico from Mexico in 1853. Five years before that, at the end of the Mexican-American war, Mexico had ceded to the United States much of the territory that now makes up the southwestern U.S.

Figures of Santa MuerteSaint Deathface north near the border crossing in Agua Prieta, Mexico. The skull-faced object of veneration is not an actual saint of the Roman Catholic Church, but a folklore figure increasingly popular with those who live on the edgedrug runners, coyotes, smugglers.

Border Patrol agents in Nogales, Arizona, protect themselves with an old baseball backstop. Before they put it up, would-be border crossers (or helpers attempting to create a diversion) would toss rocks over the wall in the direction of the agents; now officers park behind it and monitor the border in safety.

Freight rolls a few feet north of Mexico on a line repeatedly hit by train robbers unfazed by border fences. Here, the easternmost man-made barrier on the international frontier ends abruptly near the Rio Grande.

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