Ciudad Juárez is a crossing city on the border between the United States and Mexico, a place travelers pass through on the way north: “you went north, you passed through Ciudad Juárez”.
| Type | Border city |
| Spanish entry | Ciudad Juárez |
Description
From the road “the city is 2 or 3 miles” away (from an unstated point). It is layered: “there are stairs, caparates, streetlamps, cloths stretched from one side to the other”.
The crossing
Juárez is “on one side, the pass on the other”, and serves as a reference point (“right now they are next to Ciudad Juárez”). No crossing fee, authority or papers are recorded. The corridor holds three other towns:
- Ciudad Acuña del Río, with the same function: one can “cross the border there and go on to make connections”.
- Ciudad Zaragoza, “a mining city” “from where the trains leave”.
- Ciudad del Río, from which a train leaves for Glastonville.
Conflicting accounts
- The four towns are grouped under one label; whether they are four places or one city under several names is not established (treated here as four).
- An origin myth tells of a city that “began with a tree, a red cifrero bathed in blood that marked the limits of the places of home, of tribes”. One reading assigns it to another southern city, taking cifrero for ciprés (cypress); neither the city nor the tree’s name is established.
Open questions
- The distances between the four towns, and whether one authority governs them.
- The cloths’ material and color; the population, its livelihood, and what goods cross.