NYT, "American Road Trip": Border towns Columbus, New Mexico, and Palomas, Mexico

[DeepModem Mom]

Frugal Traveler | American Road Trip
Three Miles to Go in New Mexico
By MATT GROSS
Published: July 18, 2007


(Matt Gross for The New York Times)
A mariachi band is a common site on 5 de Mayo, the main boulevard in Palomas.

THE border towns of Columbus, N.M., and Palomas, Mexico, lie just three miles apart, but that short distance — what you might drive to the supermarket, say — encapsulates a world of difference.

Columbus is sparsely built and sparsely populated: fewer than 2,500 people, living in trailers, RVs and modern ranch homes in the desert, with low, dry scrub never more than a rabbit’s hop away. Each downtown block contains at most four buildings, painted yellow, blue or pink, and between them are dusty lots. From the outside, it can be hard to tell whether anything — three cafes, a library, the chamber of commerce — is open, so still is the air and so empty are the streets. It’s like a well-tended house awaiting its owners’ return from vacation.

By contrast, Palomas is dense and lively. Concrete buildings cluster around the port of entry into the United States, and street vendors sell decorative saddles and paletas (similar to Popsicles) to American tourists. Errant mariachi bands patrol the streets, and at noon men sit under shady trees in a park to hide from the sun. When it rains, the streets, many of them dirt roads, flood badly, and shoeless children appear even more pitiful as they beg for pesos. Farther from the border, the houses are frequently unfinished gray concrete shells with “For Sale” signs hanging in glassless windows. A few kilometers out and you’re back in the desert....

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I kept returning to Palomas over the next couple of days, not only to fill my belly with inexpensive food (Gámez, on Cinco de Mayo Street, had excellent grilled chicken) and my car with inexpensive gasoline ($31.25 for a full tank at Pemex, about $8 less than in Columbus). But life here was also more vibrant — and didn’t shut down at 6 p.m.

Once, I stopped in at a La Reina de Michoacán ice-cream parlor where I had a fantastic guava paleta ($1) and met an older man carrying a fat pet lizard. While he let it run around his table, he told me in awkward English that he used to work illegally in San Diego before being deported. Now he was holed up in Palomas, biding his time till he could cross the border again. As he pronounced his name — Charles, not Carlos — I could sense his pride in simply having lived on the other side....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/travel/18frugal.html