Line. Fence. Wall.

Summary

Throughline: "Line. Fence. Wall."

Podcast: Throughline (NPR)
Hosts: Rund Abdelfatah & Ramtin Arablouei
Producers/Reporters: Christina Kim & Anya Steinberg
Date: September 11, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode of Throughline—titled "Line. Fence. Wall."—is part of their ongoing immigration series and dives into the tangled, contradictory, and politically charged history of the U.S.-Mexico border. The episode investigates how a once-abstract line on a map became today's heavily surveilled, contentious, and occasionally surreal border, marked by physical barriers that don't always match the actual international boundary. Through vivid storytelling, historical research, interviews, and archival sources, the hosts and their guests trace the border's evolution across three pivotal eras: from the first postwar survey, to the birth of fences, to the modern era of walls and militarized enforcement.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. A Border Up Close: Living with the Wall

[00:35–04:36]

• Setting the Scene: The show opens with Christina Kim getting a virtual tour of a house in Brownsville, TX, from realtor Eduardo Contreras. The backyard has a direct view of the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
• Contradictions of the Wall:
  • The physical wall doesn't align with the actual border—beyond the wall is still U.S. territory.
  • The wall is massive but punctuated by gaps and open sections.
  • Surveillance is ever-present: border patrol agents, sensors, and cameras patrol and monitor the area.
• Community Impact: The wall's existence often explains local development, and living next to it becomes a strange normal—a fence that's "just another big fence in the back."
  • Quote: "The truth is, because Mexico was not literally on the other side, to me, it's just another big fence in the back." – Eduardo Contreras [03:09]

---

2. Part I: Wild, Barren, and Worthless – The Birth of the Border

[07:09–20:15]

• Pre-Border Landscape: The desert between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific was long home to many Indigenous tribes—Yaqui, Tohono O'odham, Kumeyaay—who did not conceive of a fixed border.
• The Postwar Draw: The border was conceived after the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) and detailed in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
• Survey Challenges:
  • John Russell Bartlett (an inexperienced bookseller turned Commissioner) and Pedro García Conde (a seasoned Mexican surveyor) led their respective teams through hostile, unmapped terrain.
  • Maps were inaccurate, reference points were off by miles, and the area was still dominated by Native nations.
  • The survey was marred by internal dysfunction, logistical nightmares, and cultural misunderstandings.
  • The border itself was a negotiated compromise, a "split the difference" deal around Paso del Norte (El Paso).
  • Quote: "As far as the eye can reach stretches one unbroken waste, barren, wild and worthless." – John Russell Bartlett [16:20]
• Completion & Consequences:
  • After years of recalibration, negotiation, and physical hardship (including deaths, such as Garcia Conde's), the demarcation was completed in 1855—marked only by scattered stone monuments.
• Indigenous Sovereignty:
  • Despite the survey, the territory effectively remained under Indigenous control, a fact that confounded and frustrated the surveyors.

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3. Part II: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors – Communities, Commerce, and Conflict

[22:08–34:29]

• Ambos Nogales:
  • The town of Nogales straddles both sides of the border ("Ambos Nogales"), once functioning as a binational community.
    • The only distinction: building materials and a theoretical "line."
  • Entrepreneurial adaptation—John Brickwood's saloon straddled the border, selling American liquor and Mexican cigars without paying duties.
• The Arrival of Fences:
  • Originally, there were only pro forma markers (like piles of rocks), but with growing settlement (especially the railroad), greater demarcation became necessary.
  • President McKinley proclaimed a cleared border strip; homes and businesses—including Brickwood's saloon—were razed to create space distinguishing the nations.
• Mexican Revolution and Growing Anxieties:
  • The border became a strategic prize during the Mexican Revolution, leading to increased violence, raids, and migration north.
  • World War I fears (e.g., German spies) further ratcheted up enforcement.
• Catalyst Incident:
  • On August 27, 1918, a tense encounter led to a deadly shootout at the border; conflicting orders from American and Mexican customs agents led to chaos and deaths.
  • Cultural Impact:
    • The incident is immortalized in "El Corrido de Nogales," a border ballad.
  • Aftermath saw the first U.S.-built people-dividing fence in Ambos Nogales.
  • Quote: "Whenever I think about this, I think of the Robert Frost poem where he talks about how good fences make good neighbors..." – Guest Historian [32:44]
• Early Law Enforcement:
  • The fence was originally meant to separate space, not people. In fact, early restrictions were focused more on stopping Chinese immigrants than Mexicans.
  • The 1924 Immigration Act created strict quotas and established the Border Patrol, but much early enforcement concerned Prohibition.

---

4. Part III: The Border is Everywhere – Militarization and Modern Politics

[35:49–49:59]

• Changing Attitudes:
  • Silvestre Reyes, born and raised on the border, recalls youthful games helping unauthorized migrants evade border patrol.
    • "Play on the truck, and if you see the jeeps coming...start blowing the horn." – Silvestre Reyes [36:07]
  • The mid-century Bracero Program enabled legal labor migration, but anti-Mexican policies and mass deportations intermittently targeted Mexican communities.
• Operation Hold the Line (1993):
  • Reyes, now a Border Patrol chief, launched a show of force in El Paso, using hundreds of agents and vehicles as a "human wall" to physically deter crossings.
    • Quote: "People are in unchartered territory." – Silvestre Reyes [42:08]
    • Public Perception: Operation claimed a dramatic drop in crime, but experts dispute direct causality.
• Nationalization of Border Policing:
  • The El Paso method spread: Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, Operation Safeguard in Arizona.
  • The number of border agents doubled in five years. Politicians seized on border anxieties.
• Politicization across the 1990s:
  • Immigration becomes a wedge issue, with images of border crossers and dire warnings about "illegal immigration."
  • Quote from campaign ad: "They keep coming. Two million illegal immigrants in California." [44:29]
  • Both parties position themselves as tough on border enforcement; anti-immigration rhetoric intensifies.
  • Notable Quotes:
    • "I'm suing to force the federal government to control the border." – Pete Wilson [45:04]
    • "The day when America could be the welfare system for Mexico is gone. We simply can't afford it." – Dianne Feinstein [46:06]
• The Clinton Administration and NAFTA:
  • Clinton simultaneously promoted more open trading borders (NAFTA, 1994) and implemented the first major metal border walls (e.g., in San Diego and Tijuana).
  • Officials hoped harsh desert terrain would deter crossings, but migration simply shifted to more dangerous routes.
  • Insight: The "highly militarized border" is born during the ‘90s.
    • "It's the ‘90s, I think, where we really see...the birth of that highly militarized border." – Guest Historian [46:53]
  • Critique: Instead of preventing migration, enforcement "pushed migrants into deadlier parts of the desert."
    • "Desperate people will do desperate things." – Ramtin Arablouei [48:56]
  • Reyes's justification: The point was not outright prevention but "managing" and "reeducating" people about the border. [49:21–49:45]

---

5. The Border’s Enduring Symbolism & National Politics

[49:59–50:59]

• The Modern Border:
  • 700 miles of physical barrier now line the border; surveillance and militarization have spread.
  • Border politics are leveraged nationwide—even as most Americans have never set foot at the border.
  • Key question posed:
    • "Why is this space that is so peripheral...so important in American politics?" – Guest Historian [50:03]
• Preview for Next Episode:
  • The country moves toward "a detention footprint in every community"—hinting at the diffusion of border enforcement far from the border itself.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Quote | Speaker | |-----------|-------|---------| | 03:09 | "The truth is, because Mexico was not literally on the other side, to me, it's just another big fence in the back." | Eduardo Contreras | | 16:20 | "As far as the eye can reach stretches one unbroken waste, barren, wild and worthless." | John Russell Bartlett (journal entry) | | 32:44 | "Whenever I think about this, I think of the Robert Frost poem where he talks about how good fences make good neighbors..." | Guest Historian | | 36:07 | "Just play on the truck and when you see the jeeps coming, because we could see the jeeps coming from far away, just when you first see them, start blowing the horn. And if the border patrolmen ask you...tell them you’re playing. I was thoroughly briefed." | Silvestre Reyes | | 42:08 | "People are in unchartered territory." | Silvestre Reyes | | 44:29 | "They keep coming. Two million illegal immigrants in California." | Political Ad | | 45:04 | "I'm suing to force the federal government to control the border." | Pete Wilson | | 46:06 | "The day when America could be the welfare system for Mexico is gone. We simply can't afford it." | Dianne Feinstein | | 48:56 | "Desperate people will do desperate things. And we learned that people did do it." | Ramtin Arablouei | | 49:21–49:45 | "Well, that the border...can be managed. The border can be managed. People can be reeducated..." | Silvestre Reyes | | 50:03 | "Why is this space that is so peripheral...so important in American politics?" | Guest Historian |

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-----------|--------------| | 00:35–04:36 | Real estate tour, border wall as a backyard fence | | 07:09–20:15 | The first survey: U.S. & Mexican boundary commissions, mapping, Indigenous sovereignty | | 22:08–34:29 | Ambos Nogales: a binational community, birth of the first fences, The Nogales shootout | | 35:49–49:59 | Bracero Program, Operation Hold the Line, ’90s border militarization, NAFTA, modern walls | | 49:59–50:59 | Border’s symbolism, national politics, and continuing expansion of border enforcement |

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Tone & Style

The episode blends vivid scene-setting, journalism, and archival voices. It’s analytic but accessible, moving seamlessly from historical anecdotes and local color to deeper political analyses. The show’s “time machine” sensibility keeps the tone inquisitive and empathetic, often using dialogue and direct narration to immerse listeners in pivotal moments.

---

Summary

"Line. Fence. Wall." unspools the history of the southern U.S. border, challenging common assumptions and revealing how each phase of “bordering” was shaped by wider societal, political, and economic forces. Far from a static line, the border is exposed as a living experiment—one that has gone through phases of ambiguity, cooperation, and militarization, morphing alongside America’s fears, ambitions, and election cycles. The result is a border that is at once an ever-changing reality for those living near it—and an enduring symbol wielded in national politics, often far removed from the realities on the ground.

Transcript

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[Rund Abdelfatah]

Hey, everyone. Rund here. This week as part of our ongoing immigration series, we're going to explore the origins of the US Mexico border. Producers Christina Kim and Anya Steinberg take it from here.

[Christina Kim]

On WhiteHouse.gov, the official White House website. The Trump administration has posted a short video of the US Southern border.

[Devin Kadayama]

White vans patrol the border fence. There's no people anywhere in sight. All you can hear is the sound of wind and the slow crunch of tires on a gravel road.

[Christina Kim]

And then a caption flashes across the screen that says the sound of a secure border, courtesy of the one big beautiful Bill.

[Devin Kadayama]

The one big beautiful bill will infuse more than $100 billion into immigration enforcement and border security. Almost half of those funds will go towards maintaining and building more of the border wall. Watch the video and the wall looks totally solid. But go there in real life and it can be a little different.

[Christina Kim]

Hey, can you hear me?

[Eduardo Contreras]

Can I. Can you hear me now?

[Christina Kim]

Hey, how are you?

[Eduardo Contreras]

Good.

[Christina Kim]

This is Eduardo Contreras. He was born and raised in Brownsville, Texas, right on the US Mexico border. And now he's a local realtor.

[Eduardo Contreras]

Yeah, I'm just turning on the lights real quick and then I'll step outside.

[Christina Kim]

You're making the house look nice, like all realtors do.

[Eduardo Contreras]

Yeah, it's part of the job.

[Christina Kim]

He's giving me an online tour of a home that's for sale in the southmost neighborhood.

[Eduardo Contreras]

It's your typical, you know, blue collar, hard worker, American and getting by.

[Christina Kim]

Eduardo is showing me a house that's typical for the area. Your standard three bedroom, two bath house.

[Eduardo Contreras]

A lot of them have, you know, the nice tile.

[Christina Kim]

It's really beautiful. Everything looks really brand new. That kitchen.

[Eduardo Contreras]

Yeah, look, still has the, the wrapper.

[Christina Kim]

But I'm not here for the tiles. Wow. Okay. And now I see we've got a kitchen door that leads to the backyard where my view is. The U.S. mexico border wall.

[Eduardo Contreras]

Yes, ma'.

[Silvestre Reyes]

Am.

[Eduardo Contreras]

It's huge, huh? About 20 some feet high, that's for sure.

[Christina Kim]

And that's the backyard. This is the backyard of the house we're seeing today.

[Eduardo Contreras]

Yeah, it is.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

Yep.

[Christina Kim]

Buy this house and you can barbecue by the border wall. And that's not unheard of in this part of town.

[Eduardo Contreras]

You have your typical border patrol agents you know, circling around the area and if there's areas around that have your sensors and your cameras on the fence and that's how they, you know, protect the area.

[Christina Kim]

Is this a hard house to sell because the fence is right there?

[Eduardo Contreras]

Oh, I hope not.

[Christina Kim]

One thing that might make it easier is that the border wall here doesn't mark the actual border with Mexico. On the other side of the wall is U.S. territory.

[Eduardo Contreras]

The truth is, because Mexico was not literally on the other side, to me, it's just another big fence in the back.

[Christina Kim]

That's also pretty normal. It's not always possible to build a fence on the actual border. And what's more, the fence is full of gaps.

[Eduardo Contreras]

There's parts of this fence that are open. It's not all, like, you know, closed. If you drive around this fence, there's areas where, like, it's opened and then there's traffic going in and out because, you know, there's people that live on the, on those ranches or there's a small neighborhood that's on that side of that fence.

[Christina Kim]

While the wall isn't necessarily a selling point, according to Eduardo, it's partly why this newly built house even exists.

[Eduardo Contreras]

That wall that you see over there wasn't constructed by itself. It takes people, man hours, money, you know, infrastructure, and look. That's why you have this beautiful new construction home. Like somebody's gonna buy it.

[Devin Kadayama]

So did you put down an offer?

[Christina Kim]

No. He and I both knew I wasn't really interested in buying, but I couldn't stop thinking about what he showed me. A border wall that isn't on the border. An enormous, intimidating fence that also has big gaps. It's way more porous than we might think. And contradictions like that have defined the border for hundreds of years, right since.

[Devin Kadayama]

The first surveyors drew it. And that's where we're going to start today. Way back at that first line in the sand to see how we could get to a place where a 20 foot plus steel wall is going to be someone's backyard fence. I'm Anya Steinberg.

[Christina Kim]

And I'm Christina Kim. Today on Throughline, we're traveling back in time to three critical moments in the history of the border. From its origins.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

It wasn't a place in of itself. It was a place that people moved.

[Devin Kadayama]

Through to the first fences.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The fences were really just fences, like the way we imagine fences in our.

[Christina Kim]

House to walls of law enforcement.

[Silvestre Reyes]

They're going to see a wall of border patrol vehicles and agents and steel.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

This is Carone demars calling from San Antonio, Texas, I listened to NPR throughline. In fact, it is the only podcast that I have a paid subscription to because it's that valuable.

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[Rund Abdelfatah]

Part 1 Wild, barren, and Worthless.

[Christina Kim]

We'Re somewhere in the desert between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. It's a place of extremes. Temperatures can climb to 118 degrees under the beating sun in the summer, rolling clouds bring dramatic monsoon storms, and the rivers and arroyos swell. Otherwise, it's dry.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

Partly for that reason, it was sparsely settled in the 19th century. It's a place that many indigenous people pass through.

[Christina Kim]

Dozens of tribes called this area home for centuries, including the Yaqui, the Tana O', Odham, and the Kumeyaay.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

But they wouldn't have thought of the border as a specific and distinct place.

[Christina Kim]

In 1850, the US Mexico border didn't exist yet, but it was about to.

[Devin Kadayama]

Hundreds of miles away, a man named John Russell Bartlett was busy packing up his things to head south. He had just been hired as the new US Boundary commissioner, the head of a team of men in charge of marking the US Mexico border for the first time. It's not quite what he imagined for himself.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

Bartlett was a bookseller from Rhode Island.

[Devin Kadayama]

A bookseller with big dreams. He'd gone to Washington, D.C. hoping to become something glamorous, like a U.S. diplomat to Denmark. Instead he landed this job to cross.

[John Russell Bartlett]

A wilderness from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean. A distance of more than 800 miles would at any time be a labor of difficulty.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

He had no experience in surveying.

[Devin Kadayama]

This is Rachel St. John.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

I'm Associate professor of History at UC Davis.

[Devin Kadayama]

She also wrote a book called Line in the A History of the Western U. S. Mexico Border.

[John Russell Bartlett]

The work is one for the near completion of which we could not be too thankful.

[Devin Kadayama]

When Bartlett joined the survey, it had already been going on for over a year. And let's just say the U.S. boundary Commission was not known for its outstanding workplace culture.

[Christina Kim]

Bartlett was the fifth U.S. commissioner to be hired. One of his predecessors had left the job after being shot by his lead surveyor during a drunken argument.

[Devin Kadayama]

Quick pause for context here. The whole reason this survey was happening was to wrap up a war. The US And Mexico had fought a war that was primarily about expanding US territory, and the US had won.

[Christina Kim]

In February 1848, the two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico ceded a huge amount of land, what makes up Nevada, Utah and California, plus parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming.

[Devin Kadayama]

They had agreed on the border in the treaty. Now they needed to mark that border out on the land.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

If you read the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it looks like a clear blueprint, right? They say what you need to do is you need to look at this map and these few places and just draw straight lines between them and then follow rivers. It'll be no problem.

[Christina Kim]

Famous last words. When the survey began, both nations sent their own team of men to meet at the border. And while American commissioners came and went, Mexico's commissioner, a man named Pedro Garcia Conde, trudged on. Su demostrado talento, sus conocimiento scientifico.

[John Russell Bartlett]

His demonstrated talents, his scientific knowledge specific.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

To the material at hand, but also.

[John Russell Bartlett]

His true patriotism and important service he.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Has lent to the nation.

[Christina Kim]

Garcia Conde was grizzled. He was an experienced surveyor, and right from the start, he watched the American team fall into disarray.

[Eduardo Contreras]

Si nun meio real y empueltos es la mayor mi sera y expuentos peligros puedima. Without any real means and surrounded by the greatest misery and exposed to every danger imaginable, we are advancing the work as much as possible. Given the disorganization of the American Commission.

[Christina Kim]

Which wasn't to say the Mexicans had it easy. Both sides were contending with forces outside their control.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

One of the problems they run into is that the California gold rush starts.

[Christina Kim]

The American Commission couldn't find enough boats to take them to San Diego where the survey was supposed to start.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

And so they end up getting stalled in Panama for a long time.

[Christina Kim]

When they finally got going, it was slow and hard.

[Devin Kadayama]

There was no gps, no satellite imaging. Surveying was done using tools that have names I can barely pronounce like sextants, theodolites and circumferenters.

[Christina Kim]

And to make matters worse, the Mexican government didn't have much money after the war to finance their boundary commission. Garcia Conde had to draw on his personal line of credit to fund the expedition. So by the time Bartlett showed up, Garcia Conde had been through it.

[Devin Kadayama]

When he meets Bartlett for the first time in Paso del Norte, present day El Paso, Texas, he's not impressed.

[Eduardo Contreras]

El Senor Bartlet que la presideo perojos que tenemos cacer. Mr. Bartlett, who presides over it, is a fine fellow but without any idea of the work we have to do. We wrote 120 engineers and except for two or three very average ones among them the rest don't know a single word, nor do they obey the commissioner.

[Devin Kadayama]

But there's nothing he can do about it. This is the man he has to work with.

[Christina Kim]

And right away the two of them run into a problem.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

They have where Paso del Norte actually is, where they're standing. And then they have where it was drawn on the map.

[Christina Kim]

They look at the treaty map and they realize it's wrong. Paso del Norte is a good 30 miles south of what the map says and Paso del Norte is supposed to be their starting reference point for marking the border.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

But it is actually very tricky because depending on where they drew it, hundreds of miles were at stake. If they drew it from one place, they would shift to Mexico. If they drew it to another place, they'd shift to the United States.

[Christina Kim]

It wasn't just land at stake. People lived in this area too. Depending on where the line landed, those people would either be Mexicans or Americans.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

These two boundary commissioners came up with a compromise where they decided to sort of split the difference.

[Christina Kim]

We won't bore you with the details, but Mexico got a little more land to the north and the US Got a little more land to the west.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

They then went on their way.

[Devin Kadayama]

Bartlett kept a detailed journal of the expedition.

[John Russell Bartlett]

April 19, 1851. A wild and barren region lay before us. We toiled across these sterile plains the sun glowing fiercely and the wind hot from the parched earth cracking the lips and burning the eyes.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

He's constantly complaining the country passed over.

[John Russell Bartlett]

In the last three days is uninteresting and the extreme. One becomes disgusted with the ever reoccurring sameness of plain and mountain plant and living thing.

[Devin Kadayama]

They were traveling with mules and huge wagons, sometimes where there weren't roads or even trails.

[John Russell Bartlett]

We found ourselves all at once surrounded by steep hills, steeper mountains, ravines, gullies and frightful canyons.

[Devin Kadayama]

They were plagued by breakdowns.

[John Russell Bartlett]

The wagon turned bottom upwards, rolling down.

[Christina Kim]

The ravine by unreliable team members.

[John Russell Bartlett]

My cook took the opportunity to get.

[Devin Kadayama]

Drunk during the night, and by a.

[John Russell Bartlett]

Lack of food, we had not tasted a potato for a year, nor any other vegetables except a little wild asparagus.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

Most people on the commission are unexcited about this place, and Bartley in particular at one point writes, is this the.

[John Russell Bartlett]

Land which we have purchased and are to survey and keep at such a cost? As far as the eye can reach stretches one unbroken waste, barren, wild and worthless.

[Devin Kadayama]

For both commissions, this survey was supposed to be about staking a claim on this land on behalf of their nations. It was about marking out what belonged to Mexico and what belonged to the.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

US and what the boundary commissioners find, in fact, is that no, this space is mostly inhabited by, and in fact controlled by, indigenous peoples.

[Devin Kadayama]

Still, many of the tribes that lived there, like the Pima and Maricopa, aided the boundary survey. They served as guides, provided food and information. But the survey also ran into bands of Apache and Comanche people who saw the survey as an intrusion.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

Time after time, native people prove to the boundary commissioners that they do not actually control this landscape.

[Christina Kim]

Throughout the survey, the commissions are constantly splitting up to survey different pieces of the border and then meeting up again. On one of his detours, Bartlett Receives Bad news.

[John Russell Bartlett]

December 24, 1851. Dr. Vassbinder arrived today bringing the painful news that General Garcia Conde, the Mexican commissioner, had died.

[Christina Kim]

Garcia Conde had fallen ill days after Bartlett had last seen him. Bartlett is shaken he had ever shown.

[John Russell Bartlett]

Himself, ready to aid the American commission in any way that lay in his power.

[Christina Kim]

Bartlett is ready for this grueling journey to come to an end. And the end was near, or so he thought.

[John Russell Bartlett]

Everything required to ensure the speedy completion of the work was at hand. But all of my plans were frustrated by dispatches from Washington.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

Congress decides that they don't want to.

[Christina Kim]

Approve the boundary line, and they'd suspended the commission.

[Devin Kadayama]

Bartlett was in big trouble.

[Christina Kim]

Remember when he and Garcia Conde compromised over where to start the survey?

[Devin Kadayama]

Turns out Congress was not happy with Bartlett for the deal he'd struck. They thought he gave too much land to Mexico.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

The ultimate outcome of this is the two countries decide to renegotiate the boundary line.

[Devin Kadayama]

Congress forked over $10 million to buy a chunk of southern Arizona and New Mexico from Mexico. And so the borderline moved again. By the time Bartlett got the news, it had been nearly two years since he and Garcia Conde had made their initial compromise. Now it would have to be redone. The US And Mexico sent out a new survey team and they replaced Bartlett with another commissioner.

[Christina Kim]

The survey was finally finished in October 1855. It ended up taking six years.

[Devin Kadayama]

The finished product was a nearly 2,000 mile long line that followed the Rio Grande river, then stretched into the desert until it reached the Colorado river and continued across land until it reached the Pacific Ocean. In many places, the only sign that it existed was the occasional boundary monument, these short obelisks made of stone.

[Christina Kim]

But it was still a border, a line that both nations could begin to define themselves against as they grew up changed.

[Devin Kadayama]

And soon the land that Bartlett called wild, barren and worthless would start to fill up. That's coming up.

[Christina Kim]

Hi, it's Jonvi from Dallas, Texas, and I love Throughline because I love stories. And without further ado, you're listening to throughline from NPR.

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This message comes from BetterHelp President Fernando Madera describes how BetterHelp online therapy has helped him.

[Silvestre Reyes]

For me, sometimes I just need to go and talk to somebody that is.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

Not gonna judge me right, is gonna.

[Silvestre Reyes]

Be there and gonna listen to me and I can't start just saying, look, I'm not feeling right today and it feels natural.

[Christina Kim]

I love it.

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[Devin Kadayama]

Part 2 Good.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Fences make good neighbors.

[Devin Kadayama]

We're at a saloon in Southern Arizona known as the Exchange. There's men sitting around drinking and gabbin, just like any old timey western saloon.

[Christina Kim]

The saloon is in a town called Ambos Nogales. Well, actually it's two towns, Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico. That's why it's called Ambos Nogales. It means both Nogales and the owner.

[Devin Kadayama]

Of this saloon, John Brickwood, has purposefully built it right on the border.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

So that he could sell American liquor without any duty on it from inside the bar. And then he had a little box on the outside that was actually in Mexican territory. And so he could sell Mexican cigars from the box without having to pay the duties on them there as well.

[Christina Kim]

It's been a few decades since the US Mexico border was drawn, and in places like Ambos Nogales, it's still pretty theoretical. In the town's early days, you could basically only tell the difference between the Mexican and US Sides because the Mexican buildings were made of adobe, while the Americans preferred to build with wood.

[Devin Kadayama]

For most of the 1800s, there wasn't much going on here. The town was mostly railroad workers and the gambling saloons and brothels that served them. They were building a train stop in Ambos Nogales.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

And the cities really take off when a railroad connects across the US Mexico border.

[Devin Kadayama]

The railroad was finished in 1882 and it ran right through Amos Nogales. It brought merchants and traders to the town. The ability to move between the US And Mexico was actually a huge economic draw.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

And I think it's important to recognize that these government agencies and the border towns around them are initially made to support trans border movement.

[Devin Kadayama]

And things were pretty friendly between Mexico and the US along the border in these early years.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

They would have parades and celebrations that would bring both sides of the community together. One of the things about Ambos Nogales is lots of buildings and streets are called international. There's a celebration of people being together, Mexicans and Americans, in a shared vision of development.

[Devin Kadayama]

They took pride in their interdependence. A Nogales, Arizona newspaper.

[Christina Kim]

We speak of the two towns as.

[Devin Kadayama]

One, for they are really such being.

[Eduardo Contreras]

Divided by imaginary line.

[John Russell Bartlett]

Only.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

As those towns get more heavily developed, as lots of buildings cluster close to the border, it becomes hard at times, particularly for government agents, but also for regular people to distinguish between when they're in Mexico and when they're in the United States.

[Christina Kim]

One of the only signs that there was a border was a marker outside of Brickwood Saloon.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

The boundary marker that the surveyors had put in was just a big pile of rocks.

[Christina Kim]

And as things got busier in Ambos Nogales, that Pile of rocks wasn't quite cutting it.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

Customs officers start saying, you know, this is. It's impossible for us to police this space if people can just walk through John Brickwood's saloon and we can't see if they're entering the US Or Mexico.

[Christina Kim]

So a new survey team came to town to mark the border more clearly.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

They put a new boundary monument and they build it on the porch.

[Christina Kim]

A giant white obelisk. The new boundary marker smack dab on.

[Devin Kadayama]

The porch of the saloon in a picture taken from that time. It's taller than the men around it, and it was just the first step towards something much larger.

[Christina Kim]

In 1897, then US President William McKinley issued a proclamation to clear a strip of land 60ft wide and 2 miles long right through Ambos Nogales.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

They say, you know, in order to make clear where Mexican space stops and where American space begins, we need to move some of these buildings out of the way. We can't just have buildings right up and onto the border.

[Devin Kadayama]

John Brickwood's saloon and a slew of homes, businesses and Barns were given 90 days to vacate.

[Christina Kim]

They knocked it all down, and the saloon was no more. In its place was a clear strip of land still in Amos Nogales. And all along the border, there weren't many fences. The ones that were there were actually built to control the movement of cows, not people. But that was about to change. The Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

Border towns became particularly important because they had ports of entry where people pay their customs duties. So if someone can take over a border town, they can take that money.

[Devin Kadayama]

Different Mexican revolutionary factions would raid American towns along the border. And as Mexico became increasingly unstable, more Mexicans started emigrating to the US Violence.

[Christina Kim]

Along the border increased.

[Devin Kadayama]

And then, in the middle of the Mexican revolution, World War I began. That brought a whole new set of anxieties.

[Christina Kim]

The US Feared that German spies could infiltrate through the border. All of a sudden, people who had long been neighbors were suspicious of each other.

[Devin Kadayama]

The US started to send all kinds of people to the border to address these different threats.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

The US government deploys the military to the border border to protect people on the US Side. You also have intelligence officers operating on the border looking out for spies, more customs agents coming out, trying to watch for smuggling of guns and money. And then you have immigration officials who are trying to manage the flow of refugees.

[Christina Kim]

Those big changes on the border were coming to Ambos Nogales, too. The mayor of Nogales, Mexico, ordered construction of a wire fence on the Mexican side to make it easier to manage the flow of crossings. But Ambos Nogales had already become a powder keg.

[Devin Kadayama]

And on August 27, 1918, the fuse was lit.

[Christina Kim]

You might hear different versions of this story, depending on who you ask, but any way you tell it, the story ends in violence. It was just after 4:00 in the afternoon. A Mexican carpenter named Teferino Gilamadrid was leaving the US after finishing work. He was carrying a bulky package under his arm. As he approached Mexico, he was ordered.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

To halt by American officials.

[Christina Kim]

They wanted to inspect the package.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

Mexican officials told him he should keep coming.

[Christina Kim]

The U.S. customs official raised his rifle to force Gila Madrid to come back for an inspection. What happened next is still disputed today.

[Devin Kadayama]

Someone from either side of the border, it's unclear who fired the first shot.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

And violence broke out, actually between the two sides of the border.

[Devin Kadayama]

It was chaos. Mexican civilians grabbed guns and joined the fight.

[Christina Kim]

It's immortalized in this Mexican song. El Corrido de Nogales tells the Mexican version of the battle. The song goes, when a Mexican crossed the borderline, a gringo fired a shot at him. That was the beginning of the story. The corrido is all about the bravery of the Nogalences. It says there were 1500 gringos, all were federal troops and the the people of Nogales did not let them advance.

[Devin Kadayama]

But things were escalating. At some point, a Mexican consul tried to negotiate with an American soldier. If they both raised a white flag, it could all be over. The American replied, go to hell.

[Silvestre Reyes]

American troops don't carry white flags and don't use them. If the Mexicans don't hoist a white flag within 10 minutes, US soldiers will march in and burn Nogales, Sonora.

[Devin Kadayama]

The Mexican side raised a white flag. The battle lasted more than two hours. As many as four Americans and 129 Mexicans were dead, including the mayor of Mexico's Nogales. And hundreds of people were wounded.

[Christina Kim]

After the battle of Ambos Nogales, people on both sides expressed regret.

[Eduardo Contreras]

The shooting was an unfortunate affair started by irresponsible persons under undue stress of except excitement.

[Devin Kadayama]

But the damage was done.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

And that leads a lot of government officials along the border to say we need a fence. We need to be really clear about marking this space.

[Christina Kim]

And so one of the first US built fences meant to divide people was built through Ambos Nogales.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

Whenever I think about this, I think of the Robert Frost poem where he talks about how good fences make good neighbors, that these Fences are built in a very different mindset than the border wall of today. This is not seen as an imposition by the US Government on Mexico, but rather a joint effort to better demarcate where Mexican and American space.

[Christina Kim]

The fence wasn't about keeping Mexican people out of the U.S. mexican people in.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

General are not seen as an immigration problem. No one cared about immigration at all on the US Mexico border until the very late part of the 19th century.

[Christina Kim]

And if people were concerned about who was coming through the southern border, that concern was mostly about Chinese immigrants. Which isn't to say immigration wasn't a big issue in the U.S. it was.

[Devin Kadayama]

In 1924, Congress passed one of the most restrictive immigration laws in its history, setting strict quotas for who can enter the US Congress also established the Border Patrol to control immigration, though it mainly ended up enforcing Prohibition.

[Christina Kim]

By the mid-1920s, the infrastructure of the border, the fences, the manpower and the law enforcement, the tools that we use today, were all in place.

[Silvestre Reyes]

I walked the border and I saw example after example of a border that was totally out of control. We have to gain control.

[Christina Kim]

That's coming up.

[Eduardo Contreras]

This is Rachel from San Diego, California. You're listening to Throughline from NPR.

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[Guest Historian / Narrator]

Part 3 the border is Everywhere.

[Silvestre Reyes]

I was born and raised on a farm here in El Paso. We grew cotton, alfalfa, stuff like that.

[Christina Kim]

This is Silvestre Reyes. He was born in 1944.

[Silvestre Reyes]

As a young boy, I was a lookout against the Border Patrol. It was simple. Just play on the truck and when you see the jeeps coming, because we could see the jeeps coming from far away, just when you first see them, start blowing the horn. And if the Board of Patrolmen ask you what you're doing? Tell them you're playing. I was thoroughly briefed.

[Christina Kim]

When Silvestre was a kid, a federal initiative called the Bracero program gave work visas to Mexicans who came to the US for short term contracts, mostly in agriculture and on railroads. But some workers still crossed without papers on the farm.

[Silvestre Reyes]

The undocumented ones, they're the ones that would run and hide. The other braceros, they had their ID cards, so they were okay. Although I will tell you, sometimes they would run just to be decoys. It was fun times.

[Christina Kim]

It was fun. You remember that as a fun memory?

[Silvestre Reyes]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. They were trying to catch people that were undocumented, but the only thing they would do is catch them, process them, and then we would see the same guys back a couple of days later.

[Devin Kadayama]

Then, as now, the agricultural economy relied on immigrant labor.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

The attitude towards Mexican Immigration in the 20th century United States is that workers from Mexico are necessary, but that they are not people who necessarily are going to become part of the United States. Because there's a long history of anti Mexican sentiment within the United States. And it comes up in these different flashpoints. Moments.

[Devin Kadayama]

Moments like Mexican repatriation during the Great Depression or Operation Wetback in the 1950s when the federal government led massive deportation campaigns targeting Mexicans and at times, US citizens of Mexican descent. But Rachel says even those efforts weren't meant to halt immigration.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

They're never trying to close the border. They're trying to control the border in such a way that it will allow the seamless entry as much as possible of things that they deem good, valuable and desirable in the country and to block as seamlessly as possible those things that they deem bad that need to be kept out of the country.

[Devin Kadayama]

By the late 1980s and 90s, immigration had become a big political issue.

[Christina Kim]

And by that time, Silvestre, who grew up moving back and forth across the border.

[Silvestre Reyes]

I used to go with my grandpa.

[Christina Kim]

To buy groceries in Juarez, had joined the Border Patrol.

[Silvestre Reyes]

Oh, I was excited and my family was excited. I remember my grandpa was so proud. I guess it was part of the American story.

[Christina Kim]

Sylvester served on the Patrol for more than 25 years. He became the first Latino Border Patrol sector chief, serving first in McAllen and then in his hometown of El Paso, Texas.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I attended an all boys Catholic high school right there in downtown El Paso. So we were maybe a mile, if not less, from the border line itself.

[Devin Kadayama]

This is Miguel Levario. He wrote Militarizing the Border When Mexicans Became the Enemy. And he grew up on the outskirts of El Paso Just like Silvestre reyes had some 40 years before.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

So we had to drive into downtown El PASO every morning.

[Devin Kadayama]

September 20, 1993 started off like any other Monday. Miguel was on his way to school with friends when my friend who was.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Driving was like, what is going on? And we all look up and we see, you know, the Border Patrol trucks, they were lined up every 100 yards, like, you know, they were about to face off with somebody. And I remember vividly thinking, like, oh my gosh, what is happening?

[Silvestre Reyes]

So I briefed every single agent and I said, when people wake up, they're going to see a wall of Border Patrol vehicles and agents all across this 20 mile area that we want to control.

[Devin Kadayama]

What Miguel saw on his way to school that day was Silvestre Reyes idea. A big show of Border Patrol strength called Operation hold the Line.

[Silvestre Reyes]

We're going to block people from coming into the country.

[Devin Kadayama]

Silvestre saw the border as a problem at the time. He told reporters in Texas that he was trying to fix the, quote, institutionalized undocumented entry through the Rio Grande that people had gotten used to for decades.

[Silvestre Reyes]

I walked the border and I saw example after example after after example of a border that was totally out of control. People congregating, ready to rush into El Paso.

[Devin Kadayama]

So his idea was simple. The Border Patrol would become a wall.

[Silvestre Reyes]

We have to gain control. I put the agents right on the border where I didn't care if they apprehended anybody, as long as they deterred them from crossing.

[Devin Kadayama]

Silvestre deployed 400 agents and their trucks and lined them up on the border over a stretch of 20 miles. They planned to stay out there day and night.

[Christina Kim]

And that's what Miguel saw.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I'll be honest with you, as a 16, 17 year old kid, or even younger, we didn't really get like, what was the whole point.

[Silvestre Reyes]

Now the mage can't get back, the garden and the riffraff can't cross.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And that was the point, was to be intimidating was to be a deterrent.

[Christina Kim]

The way Silvestre saw it, too many people were crossing back and forth without papers and with no regard to the official ports of entry. So he ordered the Border Patrol agents under his command to not back down.

[Silvestre Reyes]

People are in unchartered territory.

[Christina Kim]

The line held for a week.

[Silvestre Reyes]

There's never been an operation that has been kept in place for a week.

[Christina Kim]

People couldn't get to work. There were protests on both sides of the border. Still, the line held and it would hold indefinitely.

[Devin Kadayama]

Right away, Sylvester Reyes claimed the operation was a victory.

[Silvestre Reyes]

All of a sudden, the Border Patrol became heroes. Oh, my God. The crime rate in El Paso for stolen cars dropped 98%.

[Devin Kadayama]

That's an exaggeration. And Miguel says it's hard to assess the correlation between crime rates and the border blockade.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Of course, as always, historically we've done this. We associate those increases with immigrants.

[Christina Kim]

But Sylvester's narrative of success prevailed. It seemed like he'd done what decades of immigration reform had failed, to limit the number of immigrants coming in.

[Devin Kadayama]

Money, on the other hand, started pouring in, and the strategy went national. In San Diego with Operation Gatekeeper and Arizona with Operation Safeguard. Over the course of five years, the number of Border Patrol agents on the southern border more than doubled.

[Christina Kim]

In the seven months since, hundreds of federal immigration agents were deployed along the.

[NPR Sponsor Announcer]

Banks of the Rio Grande here, the.

[Christina Kim]

Traffic of illegal workers from Mexico has all but stopped. But the flow of politicians to the border here has surged. In the 1990s, the issue of illegal immigration and the need to solve it became a hot political issue. The politicians are prompted by polish showing that the issue is gaining in importance among voters who polls say are increasingly worried about the economic impact of immigrants and their effect on American culture.

[Devin Kadayama]

The country was coming out of a recession, unemployment remained high, people were on edge, and they wanted change.

[Christina Kim]

This was also the era of tough on crime policies, the so called welfare queen. And as the number of legal and unauthorized immigrants coming into the country rose in the 90s, illegal immigrants became another political target.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

They keep coming. Two million illegal immigrants in California.

[Devin Kadayama]

California's Republican Governor Pete Wilson, who was running for reelection in 1994, made immigration the center of his campaign.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

And the word he used was illegal immigrant. And he had these commercials at the time where he showed immigrants running through traffic near the border.

[Christina Kim]

Governor Pete Wilson sent the National Guard.

[Devin Kadayama]

To help the border patrol.

[Christina Kim]

But that's not all.

[Silvestre Reyes]

For Californians who work hard, pay taxes, and obey the laws. I'm suing to force the federal government.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

To control the border. It's associating migrants with the threat of invasion. And part of what played into Wilson's politics around that is that you do see increases in immigration over time across the border, particularly as the Mexican economy is destabilized in the 1970s and 1980s. That category of the illegal alien gets increasingly attached to Mexican people in a way that then the government can evoke at different times, either for political reasons or to manage labor.

[Devin Kadayama]

Pete Wilson won his reelection campaign, and other politicians followed suit.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Immigration is basically a political ace card.

[Christina Kim]

And it wasn't just Republicans. Democrats Also took up the issue from.

[Devin Kadayama]

California Senator Dianne Feinstein.

[Christina Kim]

The day when America could be the.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

Welfare system for Mexico is gone. We simply can't afford it all the.

[Devin Kadayama]

Way to President Bill Clinton.

[Silvestre Reyes]

Two years ago, when I took office, I was determined to do a better job of dealing with the problem of illegal immigration.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

The Clinton administration steps in and really embraces a hard border policing model where they really focus on border control.

[Silvestre Reyes]

One of the cornerstones of our fight against illegal immigration has been a get tough policy at our borders.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

They put up a bunch of new barriers so, you know, infrared cameras and all sorts of high tech stuff. It's sort of, it's the 90s, I think, where we really see that.

[Silvestre Reyes]

The.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

Birth of that highly militarized border.

[Christina Kim]

And the irony here is that Clinton was securing the border at the very same time that he was opening it up.

[Silvestre Reyes]

Good morning. This week, at a time when many Americans are hurting from the strains of the tough global economy, our country chose courageously to compete and not to retreat. With its vote Wednesday night for the North American Free Trade Agreement, the House of Representatives sent a message to the world. Yes, the Cold War is over, but America's leadership for prosperity, security and freedom continues.

[Christina Kim]

Nafta, or the North American Free Trade Agreement, went into effect in 1994, a year after Operation hold the Line. And what it did was essentially open up the borders for the flow of goods between the U.S. mexico and Canada.

[Devin Kadayama]

There was a fair amount of anxiety around this.

[Christina Kim]

Is it right to move your jobs.

[Silvestre Reyes]

To Mexico where people live in poverty?

[Devin Kadayama]

So right as manufactured goods were starting to flow in like never before across the border, the Clinton administration built some of the first metal border walls.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

They have these huge metal walls that go up outside Tijuana. And showing that in a very public way was a way to balance out the increased movement that was going to be going across the border borders with nafta.

[Devin Kadayama]

One part of the San Diego wall was built on Imperial beach and now extends some 300ft into the ocean.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The idea that we close off El Paso and San Diego, it would force migrants to consider entering through the Sonoran Desert, one of the harshest environmental landscapes in all of North America. And they thought, they're not going to do it. It's too harsh, it's too difficult, and they won't do it. What we learned is that desperate people will do desperate things. And we learned that people did do it.

[Christina Kim]

What do you say to people that say all it does is it pushes migrants to areas outside of ports of entry to deadlier parts of the desert that it doesn't really stop undocumented immigration into this country. Right. Like it's not effective in that way. What do you, what do you say to that?

[Silvestre Reyes]

Well, well, depends what you think we were trying to prove.

[Christina Kim]

Well, what were you trying to prove? You, you were there, you were the head of it.

[Silvestre Reyes]

Well, that the border, the, the border can be managed. The border can be managed. People can be reeducated to, to understand that we no longer can tolerate that.

[Christina Kim]

Silvestre eventually became a Democratic congressman. And in the 30 plus years since Operation hold the Line, politicians of both parties have continued to support aggressive border policies.

[Devin Kadayama]

Today, There are over 700 miles of border wall.

[Guest Historian / Narrator]

Why is this space that is so peripheral by definition is the periphery of the nation? Why is it so important in American politics? It's a place where you can really see how government works, what government priorities are, how they try to enforce them in different ways, and how local people respond to and navigate that. The Trump administration is actually moving the dynamics of immigration into the country. They're extending this border politics away from the border. I think it remains to be seen whether what has been so politically effective when isolated to a border space which is a space that most people don't inhabit and will never be to, you know, will never visit, if that can work on a national scale.

[Christina Kim]

This episode is part of our series on how immigration enforcement became political and profitable next week. The idea that you can just basically have a detention footprint in every community in America is really, really intriguing.

[Devin Kadayama]

The business of immigrant Det.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

And that's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I'm Ramtin Arablouei and you've been listening to throughline from npr.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

This episode was produced by me and.

[Christina Kim]

Me and Sarah Wyman, Amber C, Casey.

[Devin Kadayama]

Minor, Julie K. Lawrence Wu, Anya Steinberg.

[Christina Kim]

Christina Kim, Devin Kadayama, Irene Noguchi.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkel. It was mixed and mastered by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which.

[Christina Kim]

Includes Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Thank you to James Delahusy, Allison Silvera, Stephen McNally, Julian Nieviskigvi et Godoi and Bruno Ran Ramirez for their voiceover work. El Corrido de Nogales by Robert Lee Benton Jr. And Oscar Gonzalez is from the recording entitled Heroes and Corridos from the Arizona Sonora Borderlands 2002. It was used by permission courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Thanks also to Johannes Durgi Edith Chapin and Colin Campbell.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write [e-mail] and make sure you follow us on Apple, Spotify or the NPR app. That way you'll never miss an episode.

[Rund Abdelfatah]

Thanks for listening.

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