M E X I C O
NOGALESCROSSROAD©Alessandro Gandolf i
Nogales (Mexico), a view of the city with the 2011 metal
fence separating the city
Paul Theroux describes the fence in Nogales as “the oddest frontier I have ever seen”. A metal fence divides the city into two: on one side boring Arizona with villas and shopping centers, on the other side extravagant Mexico with mariachi, night clubs and low-cost dental clinics.
After years of shooting and murders in the street, the drug cartels have stopped fighting and Nogales is again a rich crossroads where the world’s North and South meet.
Americans who want to have fun and save on their dental surgery come here (prices are 70 percent lower than in the USA). Desperate immigrants from Central America come here to enter the States illegally. Here southern Mexicans, too, come looking for a job, attracted by a fast growing economy.
“We have a university, hospitals and hundreds of businesses, it is like a happy island in the middle of the desert” says Nogales’s mayor. “We are the new Tijuana, but there is no danger here”.
Nogales (Mexico), Koali Pontual-Thorne in the studio of the dentist José Luis
Espinoza. Koali lives in Alaska but flew to Mexico to save money
Nogales (Arizona, USA), a border guard of Border Patrol has just caught two illegal immigrants in the countryside near the border
Nogales (Mexico), the bride Mayra Alejandra Jimenez hugging a friend at
the Divina Providencia parish
Sahuarita (Arizona, USA), old overalls kept at the Air Force Facility Missile Site 8, a nuclear missile base active from 1963 to 1982. Nogales tourist attraction, in Mexico, is related to the presence of important US military bases near the border. Soldiers used to go to Nogales to have fun and for their dental care
Nogales (Mexico), a dancer getting ready at the Bolero night club before opening
Nogales (Mexico), workers unloading hay for cows in a farm next to the metal border, built in 2011, separating Mexico from the United States
Nogales (Mexico), drug addicts, alcoholics and illegal immigrants with a dependency problem are hosted at the Centro de Integraciòn para Adictos y Alcohòlicos en Recuperacòn
Nogales (Mexico), a view of the border between Mexico (on the left) and the United States
Nogales (Mexico), a dance course taught by Maribel Acosta at the Centro Imfoculta
Nogales (Mexico), two US couples having a rest at Salon Regis, a
Nogales historical bar founded in 1928
Nogales (Mexico), Koali Pontual-Thorne (on the right) buying medicines in a
pharmacy near the border. Koali lives in Alaska, she came to Mexico to save money
Nogales (Mexico), the city’s oldest cemetery few kilometres from the metal fence built in 2011
Nogales (Mexico), tourist police checking two suspects
Nogales (Mexico), a man with a donkey walking in the street
Nogales (Mexico), people queueing at the border to enter the United States
Nogales (Mexico), an old photo of the border between Mexico and the United States kept at Casa de la Cultura
Nogales (Mexico), Plaza Pesqueira, a street with several dental clinics
Nogales (Mexico), a girl putting make up on a bus along the border between United States and Mexico
Nogales (Mexico), few kilometers from the city the metal fence built in 2011 ends all of a sudden. Many illegal immigrants cross the border
without being seen through this point
Nogales (Mexico), young people doing artistic gymnastics in a gym
Nogales (Mexico), a family in a games room in a shopping centre in
the souther part of the city
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