You walk around the main reason for coming to Coolidge – the Casa Grande ruins — and you realize this used to be one of the biggest cities around. And I mean cities.

I recently encountered someone who argued Native Americans didn’t have a right to their land because they didn’t homestead it. It’s tough to make that case while walking around Casa Grande, or any of the Hohokam ruins of Arizona. The adobe buildings the Hohokam built were so weather efficient they’re emulated by millions of dwellings (and strip malls) in the Southwest to this day. Their agricultural infrastructure produced surpluses and wealth. Their irrigation systems were so well laid out, the traces of them helped inspire the placement of modern Phoenix.

It’s an odd thing in America — we’re always aware that people tread here before the arrival of Europeans. But sometimes, it’s hard to realize That those people built without seeing what they left over. The ruins of a city like Casa Grande or Pueblo Grande speak to civilizations that are as rich in accomplishment and history as anything in Asia, Africa, or Europe.

No one really knows what happened to the Hohokam. They sort of just vanished, blown away by the desert wind. Places that were once centers of civilization, places of habitation, became empty land, lost traces. Get out of the ruins of Casa Grande and into Coolidge and you realize the same trend could be occurring in this corner of Arizona.

Coolidge feels dusty, in the sense dust is the sort of thing leftover after something is gone. There’s a strip of road, some fats food joints, the sort of economically efficient layout of buildings that encourages you to blink and blow on through.

But turn off SR 87 and there’s traces of a town that was here before the chains – an abandoned art deco move theater. A diner made for cups of coffee and slices of pie and, this being the Southwest, cheeseburgers slathered with green chiles. The Golden Era Toy & Auto Museum, dedicated to classic toys, cars and bric-a-brac from days past. The name of the museum seems almost like a monument to whatever Golden Era Coolidge once occupied.

Just a little further east of Coolidge is Florence feels much more situated in a Golden Era, in a time and place of rebirth and growth. Rather than being built around the road that leads out of town, Florence has clustered its businesses and trade around a prettily done up Main Street. There’s an old-timey looking druggist and old-timey restaurants and an old-timey looking place to get booze. I respect that Florence can preserve its antiquity and quaintness while still providing the drive-in vodka experience — for those who need grain alcohol in the go.

Driving into the town, I pull off for some Mexican food at the L&B Inn. Like every small town I pass through in these parts, the clientele and wait staff are a mix of Anglo and Latino who speak in voices that mainly sound nasally Middle American. My waitress looks like she could have stepped out of a Diego Rivera mural. When she opens her mouth, I swear she could have stepped out of Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

I sit down, order an iced tea, have  a look around. This is every small town family restaurant in every small town in America, except the Mexican food isn’t wasn’t neon colored and covered in cheese and overwhelmingly mediocre.

My machaca — shredded, dried beef preserved with spices — served next to a spooned, lump of tender beans and fluffy tortillas — IS delicious. I’m from the East Coast. In the past, whenever I’ve heard friends from the border belt that smiles from Texas to California swear that their Mexican food was better, I dismissed them. I shouldn’t have. When bite into this beef, I sigh like a reunited lover. When I taste the tortilla, I realize these little pancakes aren’t just food conveyance, but little bursts of deliciousness in their own right. It’s both enlightening and depressing – in the sense that I’ve discovered something so beautiful so late in life — to learn Mexcian food doesn’t have to hard-shelled diaphragm-esque taco shells filled with hot pink glop.

I finish, feel settled, at peace with the universe, and sit in my car, watching the sunset come on. Across the street, two young white kids approach three young brown ones. I watch, wondering what they’re up to. And then the brown kids exploded in a series of movement. I crane my head.

There are hair rubs and tags and then some water guns, and then all five boys are laughing and running off together a into small town boyhood summer. The light bleeds out over the small, dusty subdivisions, painting the town blood red and bonfire orange, and I kick the car into gear and head south to Tucson.

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That’s why folks come to Ajo. To go to the Border, to la Frontera, and break on through to the other side. It’s a weird world down here, near the largest open border in the world. Between Ajo and Mexico is the town of ‘Why,’ all of a Texaco station plus a small casino run by the adjacent To’ohno Ohdam nation. Were I Paul Theroux, I’d probably note that Why’s native signage seems a sort of question posed to the outside world of passers-through: ‘Why Why?’

I am not Paul Theroux. I think it’s pretty easy to answer why Why. Why? Because it’s crazy beautiful. Because at night when you hear the coyotes laughing it up, a part of you, the genetically imprinted part of you that wants to build fires and sit around smoke holes and go on vision quests, sighs happily. Because it is the God-given right of every American male to speed down desert highways while rocking out to classic rock. Remember how I mentioned ‘Break on Through to the Other Side’ earlier? You haven’t heard the Doors till you’ve heard ‘em under a blue-indigo-viole-treddish star speckled Southwest night sky.

And besides the beauty, as I said before, there’s the Border, which attracts workers from either side of its dividing line. Mexicans looking to work in America, obviously, but also American working to keep Mexicans out. All the motels in Ajo are flashing the ‘No’ on their ‘No Vacancy’ signs because of an influx of guys installing security cameras east and west of Sonyata, Mexico. I asked a skinny, shirtless old man smoking a Lucky outside of his Motel/RV Park how far said cameras would extend; he guessed 40 miles in either direction of Lukeville, AZ, smack on the border, home of the Gringo Pass Hotel. When I asked him if he thought the cameras would make the border more secure, he shrugged.

I doubt it was a shrug of apathy — just ignorance. No one here seems neutral on the hot topic of immigration and its latest policy child: SB 1070, the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act , which makes it a misdemeanor “for an alien to be in Arizona without carrying legal documents…and cracks down on those sheltering, hiring and transporting illegal aliens.” 1070 has become a border — a dividing line — all its own down here. You see brown and white kids running around with anti-SB 1070 ‘Legalize Arizona’ t-shirts in Tempe. You see brown and white families scared shitless of violence that seems poised to spill into El Norte.

If the worries about security are real — and you’d have to be pretty damn naïve to think they aren’t — so are concerns over racial profiling. As much as Southern Arizona is a blend of Anglo and Mexican culture (not to mention plenty of Native American bedrock) it’s also a product of tensions between these two cultures. Maybe because it’s a land where so many people are from somewhere else, be they brown (Sonora) or white (Southern California), and there’s a sense of competition among transients (although, to be fair, there’s more native Arizonans with deep roots in the state than I expected).

Maybe it’s just good old prejudice. I can’t say for sure. But for all the lovely blending of the Anglosphere and Mexi-verse you see around here, I’ve picked up on some distinctly prickly vibes too — the sweet old lady who wonders why ‘they’ don’t learn English, or the Mexican-but-Mexico-City-born-and-pale bartender who curses her under his breath (in English, ironically).

The thing is: some folks come here to southern Arizona to pass through borders. Others allow themselves to be held by them. They take in the sunshine in towns like Tubac, or the ritzier subdivisions of the Valley of the Sun, and are happy with this light, and will tolerate no disturbances to this perfectly manicured bubble, except that bubble doesn’t have enough water to be sustainable and the perfectly manicured children of these perfectly manicured communities don’t want to work the perfectly shitty jobs of gardening, pipe laying, ditching digging, dish washing, etc that keep said communities functioning.

In the meantime, the border stays open. Folks cross, seeking freedom (because if staying behind a border is an act of being held, passing through one is surely an act of liberation). In Ajo, you seem them every day. Mexicans coming north seeking the freedom of safe, reliable work. Americans — from the look of it, Harley heads who wear their veteran badges on their sleeves, the sort of guys my own veteran dad, who never publicly flashes his service in anyone’s face, says never saw combat but want you to think they did — head south seeking the freedom to quad bike across Sonora. And as the rest of the country debates the border, the stars peek out over Ajo, and I have an excellent burger — most American of foodstuffs — topped with green chilis — the fruit of Sonora.

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