Little park on the border

 

I debated hard whether to stop. After days without crossing a major urban area, El Paso was immediately disorienting. But the I persisted. 

Chamizal National Memorial was not high on most park-bagger lists. Hell, it was probably not 400th on most lists, if people had actually heard of the memorial. If I didn’t want to stop, it was mostly because a wrong turn could cause problems with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Chamizal isn’t just near the border; it is the border. 

Across Delta Drive, the view south is obscured by the rust-colored fencing native to the southern border with Mexico. Beyond the border checkpoints, a large statue celebrates Mexico. I didn’t have my passport. If I did, I had no desire to drive my car into Ciudad Juarez, El Paso’s cross-border sibling. 

Chamizal honors an agreement that settled a century of border disputes that began shortly after the Mexican-American War set the Rio Grande as the new border. Mexican leaders dating back to Benito Juarez (the country’s first indigenous president, namesake of Ciudad Juarez, and a Lincoln contemporary) sought to settle the border issue, since the Rio Grande continued to cut new channels after floods. 

One flood created a new channel, cutting a chunk of land south of the Rio Grande into an island. The farmland known as El Chamizal would create a century of headaches, with the two countries unable to reach a solution until the 1960s. 

Finally there came a resolution during JFK's administration. The farmland became a park south of the Rio Grande, made into a concrete channel as it flows through the urbanized areas that hug the border here. A cultural center in the middle of the park outlines the slow progress toward the Chamizal border deal. 

While not great for a river environment, the agreement put an end to land questions in downtown El Paso and Juarez. A concrete channel is far from ideal and quite unattractive, but the border issue was settled and without resorting to barbed wire in the water as one finds further downriver. The setting could seem less than settled. 

Here in a placid El Paso park, I could see the border bridge and the massive fence blocked off the Rio Grande from El Paso. The bucolic borderlands with Canada couldn’t feel further away. I looked at Chamizal as an example. 

When border issues seem less settled than ever, this little park showed that some border quarrels could find resolution, and maybe others will again someday.