M E X I C O

NOGALESCROSSROAD©Alessandro Gandolf i

Nogales (Mexico), a view of the city with the 2011 metal

fence separating the city

Paul Theroux describes the fence in Nogales as “the oddest frontier I have ever seen”. A metal fence divides the city into two: on one side boring Arizona with villas and shopping centers, on the other side extravagant Mexico with mariachi, night clubs and low-cost dental clinics.

After years of shooting and murders in the street, the drug cartels have stopped fighting and Nogales is again a rich crossroads where the world’s North and South meet.

Americans who want to have fun and save on their dental surgery come here (prices are 70 percent lower than in the USA). Desperate immigrants from Central America come here to enter the States illegally. Here southern Mexicans, too, come looking for a job, attracted by a fast growing economy.

“We have a university, hospitals and hundreds of businesses, it is like a happy island in the middle of the desert” says Nogales’s mayor. “We are the new Tijuana, but there is no danger here”.

Nogales (Mexico), Koali Pontual-Thorne in the studio of the dentist José Luis

Espinoza. Koali lives in Alaska but flew to Mexico to save money

Nogales (Arizona, USA), a border guard of Border Patrol has just caught two illegal immigrants in the countryside near the border

Nogales (Mexico), the bride Mayra Alejandra Jimenez hugging a friend at

the Divina Providencia parish

Sahuarita (Arizona, USA), old overalls kept at the Air Force Facility Missile Site 8, a nuclear missile base active from 1963 to 1982. Nogales tourist attraction, in Mexico, is related to the presence of important US military bases near the border. Soldiers used to go to Nogales to have fun and for their dental care

Nogales (Mexico), a dancer getting ready at the Bolero night club before opening

Nogales (Mexico), workers unloading hay for cows in a farm next to the metal border, built in 2011, separating Mexico from the United States

Nogales (Mexico), drug addicts, alcoholics and illegal immigrants with a dependency problem are hosted at the Centro de Integraciòn para Adictos y Alcohòlicos en Recuperacòn

Nogales (Mexico), a view of the border between Mexico (on the left) and the United States

Nogales (Mexico), a dance course taught by Maribel Acosta at the Centro Imfoculta

Nogales (Mexico), two US couples having a rest at Salon Regis, a

Nogales historical bar founded in 1928

Nogales (Mexico), Koali Pontual-Thorne (on the right) buying medicines in a

pharmacy near the border. Koali lives in Alaska, she came to Mexico to save money

Nogales (Mexico), the city’s oldest cemetery few kilometres from the metal fence built in 2011

Nogales (Mexico), tourist police checking two suspects

Nogales (Mexico), a man with a donkey walking in the street

Nogales (Mexico), people queueing at the border to enter the United States

Nogales (Mexico), an old photo of the border between Mexico and the United States kept at Casa de la Cultura

Nogales (Mexico), Plaza Pesqueira, a street with several dental clinics

Nogales (Mexico), a girl putting make up on a bus along the border between United States and Mexico

Nogales (Mexico), few kilometers from the city the metal fence built in 2011 ends all of a sudden. Many illegal immigrants cross the border

without being seen through this point

Nogales (Mexico), young people doing artistic gymnastics in a gym

Nogales (Mexico), a family in a games room in a shopping centre in

the souther part of the city

via Donatello 19/A MIilan- info@parallelozero.com - www.parallelozero..com - +39 02 89281630