The New York Times Magazine contains its second excellent story on La Frontera in recent weeks. It is called Life on the Line by Andrew Rice. Here is the link.
A quote from the article:
Nearly everyone I met in El Paso — whether they spoke Spanish or English, were liberal or conservative, rich or poor — told me the same thing: no one outside really understood this crisis they were living through. American politicians often talked about the evils of the cartels as if drugs were a purely Mexican business, instead of a thriving multibillion-dollar trade that involves two parties. A generation-long effort to stanch the flow of drugs and desperate people across the border had reached its logical endpoint, the approach favored by ancient empires: the raising of a wall. The barrier wasn’t very likely to overturn the law of supply and demand, but it did serve as a useful symbol of the process of alienation, a closing-off of lives and minds, along the line it traces. The peculiar fluidity of the borderland was drying up as it was slowly sapped away by two unappeasable forces: the cartels on one side, the reactionaries on the other.