The dinning room at El Comedor. (Cheryl Howard/Borderzine.com)

Ambos Nogales, primera vez

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Teaching and Learning and Caring Blog

I crossed the border for the first time in six years, used my current passport for only the second time. The sweetness of Mexico hugged me with glad and colorful arms along with the melancholy of my absence. From my settlement of San Juan, New Mexico, I drove to the Tucson Bead Show for the craziness that this city stages every February. This was only my second time to attend, to spend hundreds of dollars on beads that would become, in the coming year, creations of adornment that make me happy to make and make people happy to wear. Putting Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Governor Jan Brewer, and Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake into a guilty corner, I drove from Silver City to Lordsburg through Texas Canyon and into the metropolis.

A gringo’s tale of two Walmarts

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I have a “gringo” friend here in Rio Rico, Arizona, a town where we both settled to live, which is virtually atop of the United States of America’s border with México. She recently emailed me, “It’s more fun having Latinos as neighbors than, well, almost anybody.”

“So true,” I emailed her back. “Especially so here, where you and I live as minorities. It is so pleasant to read that, you, like me, get such pleasure out of being immersed in a mostly Mexican culture.”

I’m always reminded of that pleasure when I shop the Nogales, Arizona, Walmart which is filled with warmth, smiles, and laughter, as contrasted with shopping the Walmart at the mostly gated and overwhelmingly “gringo” retirement community, Green Valley, Arizona, which is an easy 20-minute drive north via Interstate 19. But what a grim and cold place that cavernous place is to me. Smiles and laughter seem to be forbidden. That’s why I prefer to head, south, on another easy 20-minute drive on Interstate-19 to shop the Nogales’ Walmart. That’s where I rarely leave without learning a new Spanish word, which comes in handy here in my Rio Rico, where 85 percent of my neighbors – most of them far more bilingual than I am – claim Spanish as their native tongue.