Capturing what life is really like at Mexico’s border with the USA

Growing up in Mexico City during the ​’90s, photographer Arturo Soto remembers his father weaving together fascinating tales of life in Juárez, the border city up north, during long car rides to visit family. By the time Soto was a teen, he noticed a distinct discrepancy between the city of his father’s youth and the dilapidated endless sprawl that he encountered. Set on the other side of the border from El Paso, Texas, the city was once a fabled Prohibition-era boomtown and favourite destination of American soldiers on leave from nearby Fort Bliss, Juárez had lost its lustre over the years. ​“It seemed like a different era,” says Soto. 

“For a lot of people, Juárez is a site of drug trafficking and illegal migration,” he continues. ​“At the end of the ​’90s, there was a series of murders of hundreds of women, and never a clear explanation of what happened. For a while, Juarez became the symbol of death, violence, and instability. But like any place where there’s conflict, people still live there. I became aware that the image I was seeing in the news didn’t correspond to my experiences there.” 

As an urban landscape photographer, Soto imagined a Juárez that lived both in the present and past – in memory, poured concrete, and glass that sparkled with histories that had gone untold until now. With Border Documents (The Eriskay Connection), Soto crafts a layered portrait of the city, combining the eye of New Topographics photography with the practiced ear of a family storyteller. 

• Read next: A window into the lives of young Moroccan migrants stuck in legal limbo

While Juarez has long had a reputation as a macho town on the frontier, Border Documents reveals another side that its population carry in their hearts, which Soto distils in his pictures. ​“I’ve always been fascinated by cities, and I wanted to bring attention to Juárez,” he says. ​“The perception of ​‘Mexicaness’ at the border is very different from the one of Mexico City. Northerners are supposed to be more direct and nicer, but also louder because there’s the cowboy stereotype.” 

Soto takes us to La Estrella, a grocery store on Calle Ignacio Aldama, where his father worked during the summer of 1966. There he recounts the story of El Compa, a musician who enjoyed his breakfast of choice right at the counter. As he dined on bananas, sardines, jalapeños, crackers, and a litre of Coke, as well as a home cooked meal from the proprietor, Mrs. Cabello, he would perform a few impromptu romantic ballads on his guitar, adding just the right touch of casual glamour to the day’s events. 

Pairing his father’s stories alongside contemporary landscapes where they occurred, Border Documents meditates on the relationship between people and place that is often hidden in plain sight. Soto and his father first travelled to Juárez in 2015 to make the photographs. ​“He usually goes once a year to visit family, and some of the street corners he hadn’t seen in years,” Soto says. ​“It was touching to see his face reacting to these places, reliving the memories, and sometimes getting emotional at seeing them again.”

• Read next: Meet the Kumeyaay, the indigenous peoples split by the US-Mexico border wall

Border Documents by Arturo Soto is published by The Eriskay Collection.

Miss Rosen is a free­lance arts and pho­tog­ra­phy writer, fol­low her on X.

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