ALTAR FLORAL ARRANGEMENTS

Last night, we went to Juarez. We parked in El Paso to walk across the border, because getting your car into Mexico is easy, but getting it back out is something else again.

South El Paso, right by the border crossing, is an incredibly visually stimulating place. The streets are lined with shops that have garage doors instead of regular doors. When the garage doors are open, clothes on racks spill out onto the sidewalks, toys hang from the open garage roofs, people are everywhere peddling and shopping. The prices are very cheap. The number of shoe stores was astounding. The shoes were available to try on, in El Paso.

Crossing into Mexico, we queued up at the bridge over the Rio Grande with thousands of people, all of them Hispanic (we stuck out like sore thumbs). We walked along the road next to a high brick wall with barbed and razor wire on the top of it, shredded plastic bags caught up in the wire and fluttering in the night breeze against the purple sunset. To get into Mexico, we had to pay thirty-five cents to one of the women working the windows on the right. To the left, hundreds and hundreds of cars were lined up waiting to get into the U.S. The line moved so slowly that many women were able to work selling things to the people in the cars--they carried food and flowers, candy and gum around in the snarling traffic mess, trying to convince the drivers of the cars to purchase what they had.

At the bridge's apex, I looked down at the Rio, which is partially walled with concrete at about a 20-degree angle. The sun had gone down behind the mountains to the south of Juarez and the sky was purple and orange; the muddy river reflected the lights and colors of the sky. Graffiti covered the concrete on the Mexico side, all in Spanish, which I don't know a lot of, but the messages were clear enough--Osama isn't the criminal, Bush is, stop bombing the world, fuck Bush, etc. Some of the artwork was quite elaborate--a ten-foot-tall graphic of Che Guevara caught my eye as particularly well done.

Along the river, a man caring a hat looked up at the thousands of people crossing the bridge, calling out in a cracked voice and holding up his hat. I couldn’t make out what he said, but got the gist of it well enough.

In Juarez, many of the first stores we came to were pharmacies--the kind of pharmacies where you could buy medicines you need a for in the U.S. In addition to the pharmacies were a number of CD stores and--*more* shoe stores. Only the shoe stores in Juarez had the shoes locked up, all on display in glass cabinets, as if the shoes were works of art to be looked at, not useful accoutrements for the feet. There were *so many* of them. Despite the fact that there were people everywhere, I only saw two or three people inside the shoe stores, looking at the shoes.

We kept walking. The sidewalks were rough and uneven, and full of people. So many different smells came wafting out of the different kinds of buildings we passed, all dedicated to commercialism; I looked for it, but I didn’t see any kind of housing, only endless fluorescent-lit stores and restaurants. Smells of bleach and food, of piss and garbage, of animals and Windex and rot.

We walked past a young man sitting on the curb behind a beat-up SUV, his head in his hands, an older woman patting his back and arguing with a man. We walked past shoe store after shoe store after shoe store. We came to a plaza, with a park. Signs in Spanish admonished people to stay off the green areas, which were fenced in. People sat around the park on the walls that lined the small green spaces, many of the people alone, not talking to anyone else, sitting with their hands in their laps, faces down.

At the top of the plaza was a big church. The doors were open. Inside, people sat in the pews, some looking at the minister, some simply seemingly happy to have a quiet place to sit down. I leaned in to the edge of the doorframe to try to see in without disrupting anything. A teenage male came up to the doors as I was doing so, stopped and crossed himself, and went into the church.

On the way walking out of Juarez, we passed several homeless women holding up cups and begging. We passed five cats prowling the base of a trash can, four of them kittens. We passed a dog who had recently given birth. We passed two cops on bikes. At the border crossing back into the U.S., we had to show our identification, say why we were in Mexico, and explain what was in our bags.

Once we'd gone through that, we started back across the bridge. A woman with three children sat against the wall of the bridge, trying to sell candy. One of her children, a girl who couldn't yet have been three, followed people, holding out her hands. She followed people a lot longer than I would have thought. I put my hand on her tiny head and she turned around and walked back to the woman.

The same man who had been walking under the bridge with his hat was still there, his voice hoarser, ca

A one time grocery store in one of El Paso's oldest neighborhoods. Today, it is a flower shop.