The strange thing about Juárez car theft is that the cars turn up on their own—usually on the same day—which was a mystery to police until reporters like Pablo figured out that minor-league narcos were stealing cars, driving them across the border with drugs, coming back, and dumping them off.

Anyway, the Camry starts up and Pablo drives to the paper.

Pablo loves Juárez.

A true Juarense, he was born here, educated here, and would never live anywhere else. Admittedly, Juárez is surprisingly cold in the winter, miserably hot in the summer, and you just hope that either spring or autumn falls on a weekend so you get to enjoy it. The city is known more for its dust storms than its scenic beauty, more for its bars than its architecture, and its most famous invention is the margarita, but Pablo loves his town like a long-married husband loves his wife, as much for her flaws as for her virtues.

He’s also a little defensive about her.

Maybe it’s because Juárez has always been looked down on as a place you go through to get somewhere else. Even its original name, Paseo del Norte, proclaimed that it was just a place to cross the Río Bravo to the north, but Pablo likes to remind people—especially North Americans—that the city’s mission of Our Lady of Guadalupe was founded in 1659, when Washington, D.C., was still a malarial swamp.

The name was eventually changed to Ciudad Juárez to honor the old democrat who threw the French out of Mexico, and it boomed in the late 1880s under the leadership of the Five Families—the Ochoas, Cuaróns, Provencios, Samaniegos, and Daguerres—whose descendants still dominate the city. They created the central business district—the old Calle del Comercio (now Vicente Ochoa) and 16 September Avenue, named to celebrate independence.

Then again—and Pablo is proud of this—Juárez has always been a hub of revolution. Old Pancho Villa hung out here, arriving in the city with eight men, two pounds of coffee, and five hundred bullets, but eventually becoming governor of Chihuahua, beating Díaz, and even invading the United States. The fighting destroyed Juárez, though—it was a burned-out shell by 1913 and the Five Families had to rebuild the whole thing, which accounts for the city’s early-twentieth-century look.

Even the neoclassical cathedral was only built in the 1950s.

Then again, the ’50s were Juárez’s heyday, the old Tourist Zone, now called by the brutally ugly name PRONAF (Programa Nacional de Frontera), was the place celebrities went to have a good time.

People get sentimental—and, Pablo thinks, silly—about el Juárez de ayer, “Old Juárez,” the freewheeling city of bullfights, brothels, and nightclubs where Sinatra and Ava Gardner would paint the town. At thirty-four, he’s not sure he even knew the real “Old Juárez,” but the city he grew up in was enough for him.

Not that it hasn’t changed.

Enormously, and in two great waves, first in the 1970s when the maquiladoras—the factories from American companies—came to take advantage of cheap Mexican labor, and again in the 1990s when the maquiladoras left for even cheaper Chinese labor.

The first wave created gigantic slums as workers poured in from all over Mexico, but especially the poor, rural south. The city couldn’t hope to keep up with the population boom, and the colonias had little, if any, infrastructure—decent housing, electricity, running water, or plumbing. And because the maquiladoras’ management preferred women workers, it left thousands of men, shamed and bitter, to sit idly in the slums, drinking cheap beer and, increasingly, doing drugs.

The colonias were bad—when the maquiladoras left for even higher profit margins, they got worse.

Now most people—men and women—are unemployed.

And the desperately poor colonias—Anapra, Chihuahuita, and the others—edge the city like a necklace of worn beads, hard along the border with El Paso, just across the river.

Juárez has about a million and a half people, El Paso about a third of that, but El Paso has most of the wealth, unless you count the Mexican “partners” who got rich off the maquiladoras (and even most of them live in El Paso nowadays), or, of course, the narcos out in Campestre with their new McMansions, almost a parody of the American upwardly mobile suburban dream.

And that, whether Pablo likes it or not—and he doesn’t—is the central fact of the city’s existence: Juárez and El Paso are inextricably linked, in many ways one community divided by an arbitrary line.

A strong arm can throw a stone from Juárez’s downtown—El Centro—to El Paso’s, and you stand on one or the other side of the river and look across at the other city, the other country, and the other culture. But many residents of both towns have dual citizenship, almost everyone has family, or certainly friends, on the other side—El Paso is, after all, 80 percent Hispanic—and people go back and forth as a matter of course.

So the city’s most important structures aren’t its bars and clubs, its stores or office buildings, or even the old bullring or the fútbol stadium (Pablo’s beloved fútbol stadium, home of his beloved Los Indios)—the central structures are the bridges.

Four of them.

More than two thousand trucks and thirty-four thousand cars cross those bridges every day, carrying $40 billion worth of legal trade in a given year. And somewhere between $1.5 million and $10 million worth of illegal drugs (Pablo finds the wide range of the estimate itself instructive) go over those bridges every day.

Cash comes back.

Well, cash and guns, Pablo thinks, but that’s another story. Literally billions of dollars in cash—called “new money” in Juárez—comes back over those bridges, and a lot of it gets invested in the city’s businesses and real estate.

Pablo didn’t come from poverty or wealth. His parents—both university professors—raised him in genteel, comfortable middle-class shabbiness and have always been quietly disappointed that he didn’t pursue a career in academia.

He’s vaguely a “leftie,” like most journalists (not Victoria, though—as a financial journalist she’s a free-market true believer who thinks that PAN will be the salvation of the country; their political differences were symbolic of the other issues in their marriage).

So is Ana a leftist, but nothing like Giorgio, who with his long hair and wild beard is an out-and-out communist and presents himself as a latter-day Che except, as Pablo has pointed out to him, the photographer lacks Guevara’s seriousness of purpose. Giorgio cannot leave a bottle undrunk or an attractive woman unfucked, and those activities tend to get in the way of revolution.

Pablo hopes that Giorgio has left Ana unfucked, although he suspects that he hasn’t, because she’s strangely quiet on the subject even though she’s generally quite open about her love life.

Ana likes pretty men.

And I, Pablo thinks as he drives past the Plaza del Periodista—Journalists’ Square—am decidedly not a pretty man.

Not ever, and especially not this morning.

The topic of him and Ana going to bed has come up on several sodden occasions, and they even teetered on the brink of that cliff a couple of times, although they backed away from the edge with the conclusion that they were too close, too good friends to risk it, but the attraction (he can understand his for her, but not hers for him) is mutual and always there.

And apparently noticeable, because Victoria used it as the cutting edge for several arguments, observing that Ana, not herself, was Pablo’s true love.

That and booze (depending on her agenda), and chasing down sordid stories (ditto) of a degenerate street life that could only appeal to a degenerate readership, and why couldn’t he cover stories that mattered (by which she meant international economic policy or politics, both of which bore the shit out of him). Pablo loves to write about the old man selling flowers at the traffic circle, the kids spray-painting murals, the mothers who strive to raise families in the colonias.