BORDER TWINS: DOUGLAS AND AGUA PRIETA

(FAR RIGHT) Across the line in Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, street vendors hawk everything from fresh fruit to hot dogs to ice cream.

DOUGLAS and Agua Prieta WHERE EVEN FENCE POSTS BLOOM

Text by Susan Hazen-Hammond Photography by Eduardo Fuss Essentially one community since the turn of the century, these border twins leave travelers with a lingering feeling of fondness and nostalgia for years to come.

This town isn't really located at the end of the world," a woman explains jokingly as we sit in the old Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, a copper smelting town on the Mexican border, in the extreme southeast corner of Arizona. "But you can see it from here."

Everyone laughs. But later, listening to rain splash outside in the night, I think, no, that's wrong. Douglas and its Mexican twin city of Agua Prieta, Sonora, evoke not the end of the world, but the end of the rainbow.

The two towns, one Mexican, one American-one with a bedraggled Third World appearance, the other looking like an ordinary United States town in the late 1950s - lie twenty-five miles east of Bisbee, and about a ninety-minute drive south of the Chiricahua National Monument's "Wonderland of Rocks." Though the U.S.Mexican border separates them, Douglas and Agua Prieta have been essentially one community since their founding near the turn of the twentieth century. A full eighty percent of the 16,000 residents of Douglas speak Spanish, and many have close relatives in Mexico. Set at an elevation of nearly 4000 feet, the twin cities share an almost stereotyped southwestern geography: they lie in a flat-bottomed bowl surrounded by desert mountains and hills. On first impression, neither Douglas nor Agua Prieta seems all that glamorous. Night and day, the copper smelter to the west of Douglas gurgles out vapors that environmentalists claim increase the acid ity in rain in many western and midwest ern states, reaching all the way to Canada. And in Agua Prieta, the bright colors of the storefronts can't conceal the all-pervading grime, nor offset the presence of barefoot, ragged-looking beggar children who lurk on many corners, waiting to rush out and ask tourists for a "cuora" -a quarter. Yet clearly, some special quality beneath the surface fuels the affection and pride that residents feel for their community. And certainly something here makes visitors remember a trip to Douglas and Agua Prieta fondly and with nostalgia for many months and years. But like most real-life magic, the magic here is oblique. You'll see it not directly but out of the corner of your eye. You'll notice it afterwards in the anecdotes and memories you've gathered, and in the lingering sense of having visited another world. Obviously, these border twins aren't really the end of the rainbow. But you can see it from here. From right here in the marble-columned lobby of the old Gadsden Hotel, where the morning light shines through the cactus, hills, and blue sky of the Tiffany stained-glass windows. Where young men in white cowboy hats, shining boots, blue jeans, big belt buckles, and plaid shirts sit talking intensely in Spanish. Where famous Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa once rode his horse into the lobby, right past the bronze gladiators, and on up the white marble stairsin legend, that is. But see, here's proof. See that chip in the stone right there? That's where Pancho Villa's horse slipped and nicked the stairs. As to proof of that rainbow and its pot of gold...

On the Mexican side of the arbitrary line separating Douglas from its "twin sister," my photographer partner and I walk along uneven dirt streets past a young woman drying her long black hair in the sun. Past spiny fences made from hundreds of the broomstick-like desert ocotillo plants that now, after rain, glow a soft velvet green. These thorny fences blossoming suddenly with diminutive leaves suggest an Americano-style advertising slogan for someone to add to the neatly painted welcoming sign of this friendly, unselfconscious place. The greeting now reads, "Bienvenidos a Agua Prieta, Ciudad Amiga"-Welcome to Agua Prieta, the Friendly City; but it could easily also proclaim, "Where Even Fence Posts Bloom."

Wandering the dusty streets, we acquire a shadow, ten-year-old Manuel. He fills us in on local lore and talks about the water truck, the weather, and himself.

"What's the very most interesting thing in this town?" we ask him in Spanish.

"La escuela," he replies, sure of the answer: school.

"And what are you going to do when you grow up?"

"Trabajar," he says, as certain of the future as he is of the present: work.

These two responses-"school" and "work"-come again and again from the lips of children on both sides of the border.

Manuel's curiosity and timidity seesaw back and forth-sometimes he walks beside us; sometimes he trails us a block behind. Across from the tiny neighborhood grocery store, he loses his shyness and clutches our arms as a whirlwind spins around us. Some years ago, he announces solemnly, one of these whirl winds picked up a little girl and blew her high into the sky. Then it moved on with out her, and she crashed to the ground.

Did she die?

Oh, no. But now when a dust devil comes, twirling dirt, paper, and plastic round and round, mothers hold their children tight, cross themselves, and whisper, "May the devil leave, and God come."

Later, in the tree-sprinkled plaza, across from the serene white face of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a brown skinned old woman with silver hair shakes her head when we ask about the whirlwind and the little girl. "That cannot be," she says firmly. But then, like the rainbow, facts and details on both sides of the border here tend to be many-colored, subjective. There and not there. Not the central issue at all.

Take the question of the Cochise County Historical Museum, number eight on the list of thirty-eight noteworthy sites pinpointed on the joint city map of Douglas and Agua Prieta. When we can't locate that museum one day, even with map in hand, we ask a friendly man on the street. He stops and thinks.

"You mean the Gadsden Hotel?"

No, though that remarkable monument to the days of grand hotels would indeed make a fine museum.

"Or the Phelps Dodge store?"

Ah, how that old-new "company store" evokes memories-of a deep voice singing, "I owe my soul to the company store," of tales of starving children and people who work all their lives without ever being able to pay off their debts to the company and the store. Yet in real life, in the here and now, the store manager has assured us, the prices are reasonable; all who enter may shop, and customers are far more likely to owe their souls to VISA or MasterCard than to their accounts at the company store. No. Interesting, but not a museum.

"Well, I've lived here all my life, and I've never heard of a museum," the man on the street says finally, apologizing. We thank him, forgetting to tell him about other museums here, places we've already located and enjoyed, like historian Ervin Bond's private research museum and the school district's Museum of Memorabilia.

Later, we discover this conversation occurred within yards of the concealed museum, and I decide it was partly a matter of perception. To the man on the street, the city itself-where you can still buy corrugated washboards and round metal Saturday-night bathtubs-functions as a historical museum.

If you doubt it, just step around the corner and into the Arevalo Shoe Shop, where Señor Luís Arevalo-with one of the glowingest faces around-sews boots and shoes on an 1887 Singer sewing machine. And rings up sales on a silvery undated cash register that's just viejo, muy viejo-old, very old. All in a store that still looks like it did in 1951, the year he opened here.

Then there's the question of statistics. One sunny afternoon, we visit Agua Prieta's “Municipal Palace” (city hall) and talk to a pleasant official of the city's “Honorable Municipal Government,” as it's politely called in Spanish. The man looks like a fair-haired British professor, but answers our questions in shotgun bursts of Spanish.

About the population. We've heard all kinds of numbers.

Well, 40,000, more or less.

Including the “colonies,” the adobe and plywood suburbs?

Well, maybe 45,000.

We've heard 70,000 people.

That could be. He shrugs.

Apparently no one knows for sure just how many people live in Agua Prieta, except the silver-haired old woman in the plaza. “A lot of people,” she says firmly. And many have come in the last fifteen years, swelling the city from 18,000, just modestly larger than Douglas then, to somewhere between 45,000 and 70,000, leaving Douglas far behind.

Some find work in the maquiladoras, the more than thirty “twin” plants where Mexican workers assemble American-made components for return to the United States. About 9000 Agua Prietans, more women than men, assemble electronic equipment or sew items like disposable hospital garments, all destined for sale in the United States.

It's a good steady income, as long as you don't compare your paycheck with that of your primo, your cousin on the American side in Douglas.

But “they'll fish you out” if you climb down into that shallow, dry arroyo between the border twins, a man whitewashing a fence in front of a tile-roofed house in Agua Prieta explains, grinning, one sparkling morning.

Mojados (wetbacks), indocumentados (people without documents), coyotes (smugglers), la migra (U.S. immigration officials): these words float in the air on both sides of the border, even in the loudspeaker songs playing in the plaza in Agua Prieta.

“Maybe we should ask if they're coyotes,” a young man sitting on a concrete bench across from us in the plaza suggests in Spanish to his companion one day. He nods over to where we sit,stamped invisibly but plainly as gringos. His friend laughs. Not us. Clearly we don't resemble coyotes, people who make their living by bringing “illegals” across.

Jesús, the man sitting next to us eating a hot dog exquisito-hot dogs are always “exquisite” here, it seems-laughs, too.

He knows about coyotes, though he crosses on his own these days. For twenty years, he's worked in Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, even Alaska. Always illegally. With just a skeleton English vocabulary of about a hundred words. Now a job waits again, this time in New Mexico, once he's slipped through the hole in the fence, down into the arroyo, and up through the fence on the other side, between rounds of the green Border Patrol car.

It sounds scary to us, but Jesús smiles and shrugs. He does this twice a year, returning openly to Chihuahua every five or six months to visit his wife and bring her what little money he's saved.

As the music competes with the laughter and shouts of children playing in the school yard across the street, we watch the palm trees and smartly dressed passersby and smile at each other-Jesús, little Manuel, Mario, and us. Mario's the shoeshine boy, and he looks as if he doesn't smile a lot. Earnestly, wholeheartedly, he's polishing our boots, with his hands and a little rag he pulls from his homemade plywood shoeshine box. He's just eleven years old, but already he has puffy eyes, and faint lines mark his dark face. Even so, "school" and "work" - those are his answers, too. Later, when I'm alone in my small room in the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, Jesús, like Mario, returns to haunt me. All I want to remember is the old man's beautiful lopsided smile and his sense of accepting life. But instead I picture an old man shivering as he huddles down alone in the dark arroyo some cold night and tries to avoid the Border Patrol's searchlight. And with that image comes resentment of the boundaries, the barriers, the social and economic conditions that offer an open hand to one person, a clenched fist to the other: that contribute to the unnec-essary tragedies of life.

Like all the children's graves you see in the cemetery, among the hand-hewn pink, blue, and white wooden crosses. Among them, a double grave: Filiberto Mazon C., dead December 18, 1968, at the age of six months, and his younger brother, named for him, Filiberto Mazon C., who died one year later, December 10, 1969, at seven months. Recuerdo de su mamá. Remembered by their mother, who was pregnant with the second Filiberto when the first Filiberto died. Que en paz descansen. May they rest in peace. But what about their sorrowing mamá? Did she name her next little boy Filiberto, too? Does he live today? Does she live still? Or does she too lie buried here somewhere, beneath a simple, unmarked wooden cross?

Yes, these laughing border twin cities admit to a grim side, a dark dimension that goes even beyond the tragedy of so many dead children in a cemetery. The nights here reportedly belong not just to human "coyotes," but also to big-time drug dealers and other ominous types. And for all the smiles and bright white paint at the Municipal Palace in Agua

Agua Prieta, political tensions in the city run high, with chronic accusations of ballot irregularities and manipulation of election results. Several months after our visit to Agua Prieta, the ever-simmering coals in this political fire flamed into protests, riots, and sit-ins that closed the border for several days and destroyed the interior of the city hall. Now the Honorable Municipal Government conducts its business in temporary quarters - in a school.

These and other serious problems beg to be resolved. But even the dark side here has its humor. The late Benjamin Franklin Williams, Sr., a warm-hearted, old-style international businessman who for many decades added flavor, zip, and color to the local scene, used to enjoy talking about the time during World War II when he did some, well, irregular importing on behalf of the U.S. government. Or about the days in his youth when the roof of the Gadsden Hotel offered the best view in town of the fighting between Pancho Villa and the Mexican government troops-until stray bullets hit nearby.

And in spite of the dark side, enchantment, glamour, and surprise blossom here, more than you'd ever dream just driving through. You'd never guess Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy performed onstage in the Grand Theatre-that's theatre, please, not theater. Or that one year the headlines read: Chicago 14; Douglas 3. ("That tells the story of a good, indifferent, and bad baseball game," the report begins.) Just passing through, you'd miss the tale of the samurai turned metallurgist, early in this century. And stories about the Douglases, whose name became a town. And the faded pictures of the cavalry. The men lived in tent-topped barracks and left behind old horseshoes that people dig up in their backyards today.

You'd miss feeling the lingering presence of the old Apache leaders, Cochise and Geronimo. And watching the hawks and the hummingbirds that flit among the wildflowers in the hills, between the rusty, bullet-ridden cans. And you'd miss the Slaughter Ranch, home of the famed sheriff who ran rustlers right out of these parts, a century ago. Cattlemen and cattle talk still fill the town today, but newfangled rustlers are more likely to alter computer entries than brands. The electronic brain keeps track of every calf born, every cow sold, at spreads like the 12,500-acre Unit One of Rainbow's End Ranch, outside of town.

"We a.i. everything," ranch manager Todd Cleckler says, as we bump along through the fields in a pickup truck, checking for newborn Charolais and Charbray calves.

"A.i.?

"Artificially inseminate."

"Oh."

But after everything's been a.i.'ed, Todd and his co-manager and their cowboy Joaquín turn the ranch's million-dollar bull and his cohorts loose to frolic with the cows, just in case. "It's hard to fool Mother Nature," Todd grins.

And there's so much more. As you wander among the colorfully painted shops on the Mexican side, stop to smell-and taste-fresh bread in one of the bakeries. Look for the smiling woman storekeeper who talks sociably about hidden gold in the mountains nearby. And hunt for a little girl who joyously dances to Mexican tunes. Does she still dance and answer, "school" and "work"?

Back in Douglas, track down Henry Pérez, a full-blooded Aztec, sixty-one, who grew up in Douglas in the days when people still made their fences of ocotillo on this side, too. In the days when "adult education" meant little Henry-then still known by his Spanish name, Enriquewas sent to school to learn English, so he could come home and teach the language to his father.

If you want a straight answer, as straight answers go, ask Henry. If you want a good story, ask Henry. Ask him about how his Aztec parents happened to settle here. Or about his years at the smelter. Or about how his father's parents, deep in Mexico somewhere, loaned their little boy-who would someday become Henry's fatherto a German doctor, so the child could learn to read and write. (Loaned him, Henry? Yes. Loaned.) Finally, regardless of your faith, or lack thereof, take time, if you can, to attend Mass in that gleaming white Mexican Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe by the plaza. Where a little girl in a blue-andwhite polka-dot dress studies you through her grandmother's black lace mantilla, as 700 voices say the credo, all at different speeds. Where the rushing mighty wind of two millennia ago seems to reach out into the twentieth century when 700 voices address their neighbors individually: La paz. La paz. La paz. Peace. Peace. Peace.

Oh, it's easy enough to see why, for someone who lives here and seldom gets away, the local joke would be about spotting the end of the world from here. But for those who can rub off the smelter smoke and dust and discover the hidden gold that is these people and their place, the end of the rainbow lies nearby.

Very close to here, as I look into Henry Pérez's kind Aztec face and dark eyes.

Hasta la vista, he says gently, our last night in Douglas. Until we meet again.

Hasta la vista, Henry.

Hasta la vista, Manuel and Jesús, Mario, Natalio, Benjamin Franklin Williams, Señor Arevalo, and everyone else. Hasta la vista, Cities of Friendship, where even fence posts bloom.

The service ends. Now turn to your neighbors and clasp their hands. Peace. Peace. Peace.

WHEN YOU GO... Bienvenidos a AGUA PRIETA... Ciudad Amiga!

Once you've explored the Chiricahua area, it's only a short drive south to the border towns of Douglas and Agua Prieta. From Chiricahua National Monument take State Route 181 south and west to U.S. Route 666, the Coronado Trail, then south to Douglas. (If you're traveling directly from Phoenix or Tucson, take Interstate Route 10 to the turn-off for U.S. 666, southwest of Willcox.) Total driving distance from the monument is approximately fifty-six miles; from Phoenix, 229 miles; from Tucson, 118 miles.

Douglas, which dates from 1901, is not large as border towns go. Much larger is its fast-growing Mexican neighbor, Agua Prieta, where you can order authentic Mexican food and purchase bargains in leather goods, spirits, and fabrics.

Temperatures are mild here at 4098 feet above sea level: 79.2 degrees Fahrenheit average maximum, 46.3 degrees average minimum. Nights are cool both summer and winter. Days are sun-filled-3800 hours a year.

Douglas's setting is perfect for experiencing a wide range of climate and life zones, from subtropical desert to snow-clad mountains, all within a few hours' driving distance on modern highways.

Also worth seeing and enjoying in the general area is Willcox Playa, a dry lake noted for its unique birdlife; Cochise Stronghold, a rocky niche in the Coronado National Forest, said to have been one of the Indian leader's hideaways; the ghost towns of Pearce, Gleeson, Courtland; the ranching center of Willcox and the farming community of Elfrida; Tombstone, the town too tough to die; and scenic, historic Bisbee.

Agua Prieta, across the border from Douglas in Old Mexico, is a rapidly growing industrial town, with shopping and sight-seeing adven-tures within walking distance.

For more information, write or call Douglas Chamber of Commerce, Drawer F, Douglas, AZ 85608; (602) 364-2477. -R.G.S.