Three Miles to Go in New Mexico

Columbus is sparsely built and sparsely populated: fewer than 2,500 people, living in trailers, RVs and modern ranch homes in the desert, with low, dry scrub never more than a rabbit?s hop away. Each downtown block contains at most four buildings, painted yellow, blue or pink, and between them are dusty lots. From the outside, it can be hard to tell whether anything ? three cafes, a library, the chamber of commerce ? is open, so still is the air and so empty are the streets. It?s like a well-tended house awaiting its owners? return from vacation.

The Pink Store and Restaurant

By contrast, Palomas is dense and lively. Concrete buildings cluster around the port of entry into the United States, and street vendors sell decorative saddles and paletas (similar to Popsicles) to American tourists. Errant mariachi bands patrol the streets, and at noon men sit under shady trees in a park to hide from the sun. When it rains, the streets, many of them dirt roads, flood badly, and shoeless children appear even more pitiful as they beg for pesos. Farther from the border, the houses are frequently unfinished gray concrete shells with ?For Sale? signs hanging in glassless windows. A few kilometers out and you?re back in the desert.

This border zone might not seem like a pleasant place for any traveler, frugal or otherwise, to spend a few days, yet it appealed to me for two reasons. First, with immigration a hot political topic, I wanted to witness life as it?s lived on the front lines. Second, Columbus is home to Martha?s Place, a bed-and-breakfast with raves from TripAdvisor.com (?Charming & Comfortable,? ?An Oasis in the NM Desert?) and an eminently affordable room rate: $40 a night, since I was staying three nights. Most nightly rates are $60 to $70.

Just after 5 p.m., following a daylong drive from Odessa, Tex., during which the front wheels of the Volvo made a worrisome sound like a helicopter?s whump-whump-whump, I arrived at Martha?s Place. It is a wide adobe-style building, with balconies and a homey interior that lived up to the Web reviews. Martha Skinner, a real estate agent and the town?s former mayor, showed me to a pale-blue bedroom and gave me my first tutorial in Columbus life: If I wanted to eat, she said, I?d need to do it soon ? all the restaurants close at six o?clock. Fifteen minutes later, I was tucking into a ?wet? burrito ($7), full of luscious shredded beef and smothered in red chili sauce, from the Pancho Villa Cafe (327 Lima Avenue, 505-531-0555).

The restaurant?s name, it turns out, comes from the town?s history. The next morning, I visited the Columbus Historical Society Museum (505-531-2620), in an old train station full of archival photographs, old newspapers and other artifacts. There I met W. Lee Robinson Jr., a talkative, balding man who said everyone calls him Radar because he looks like Radar from ?M*A*S*H.? Back in early 1916, Radar explained, Mexico was in upheaval, and Pancho Villa, a revolutionary general, was feuding with the federal government in Mexico City. This conflict might have stayed within Mexico?s borders, except that Woodrow Wilson decided to end his support of Villa and back Mexico City instead. In revenge for this slight, Villa sent his forces across the border on March 9, 1916, to raid Columbus. They burned buildings, looted businesses and killed 10 citizens and 8 soldiers before being routed.