Victoria Blanco

The author of “Why We Cross the Border in El Paso”, now in her thirties, writes about living in the border town of El Paso and how the border between United States and Mexico has changed over time. In her youth, she is enchanted by the Rio Grande, watching Juarez children playing on the Mexico side and wondering why her family simply couldn’t raft across the river to visit family in Mexico and avoid the border patrol agents. As she grew into a teenager, her border crosses with her friends were to get drunk in Juarez and become brazen to the border patrol agents, using the border like a dare—daring the Customs and Border Patrol agents “to restrain me—force me to take a breathalyzer and call my mom to pick me up” (11). Now she sees the dry riverbed of the Rio Grande as...