Why the wall was built

As the United States expanded into a global superpower, it simultaneously strengthened its national borders and began to limit who could come in and out of the country. In this week’s episode, the story of how one of the very first walls meant to divide people was built on the US Southern border. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for dirty air and water. That's why S E L C is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on. Because it's not political, it's fundamental. Learn more at S E L C dot org.

• 0:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from Throughline and NPR. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. Last week, we talked about the expansion of the United States into a newfound global power. But even as the country was expanding its borders around the world to include places as far away as the Philippines in the late 19th century, it was also limiting what was and wasn't part of the United States by creating boundaries and borders, especially along the border between the U.S. and Mexico.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  We need to be really clear about marking the space. And that leads a lot of government officials along the border to say, we need a fence.

• 1:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  Today on the show, Throughline producers Anya Steinberg and Christina Kim take us to the border city of Amboz Nogales to tell us the story of one of the first walls on the U.S. southern border. That story after a quick break.

• 1:29Speaker 03

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• 1:34Rund Abdelfatah?

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• 2:01Speaker 03

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• 2:38Speaker 04

  We're at a saloon in southern Arizona, known as the Exchange.

• 2:45Speaker 04

  There's men, sitting around, drinking and gabbing, just like any old-timey western saloon.

• 2:52Speaker 05

  The saloon is in a town called Amos Nogales. Well, actually, it's two towns. Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico. That's why it's called Amos Nogales. It means "both nogales."

• 3:05Speaker 04

  And the owner of this saloon, John Brickwood, has purposefully built it right on the border.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  So he could sell American liquor, without any duty on it, from inside the bar.

• 3:19Speaker 05

  This is Rachel St. John. She's a professor of history at UC Davis.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  And then he had a little box on the outside that was actually in Mexican territory. And so he could sell Mexican cigars from the box without having to pay the duties on them there as well.

• 3:35Speaker 04

  For most of the 1800s, there wasn't much going on here. The town was mostly railroad workers and the gambling saloons and brothels that served them. The railroad was finished in 1882, and it ran right through Amos Nogales. It brought merchants and traders to the town. The ability to move between the US and Mexico was actually a huge economic draw.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  And I think it's important to recognize that these government agencies and the border towns around them are initially made to support transborder movement.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  And things were pretty friendly between Mexico and the US along the border in these early years. A Nogales, Arizona newspaper wrote:

• 4:16Speaker 06

  "We speak of the two towns as one, for they are really such, being divided by imaginary line only."

• 4:25Speaker 02

  As those towns get more heavily developed, it becomes hard at times, particularly for government agents, but also for regular people, to distinguish between when they're in Mexico and when they're in the United States. Customs officers start saying, you know, this is impossible for us to police this space if people can just walk through John Brickwood Saloon and we can't see if they're entering the US or Mexico.

• 4:50Speaker 05

  So the US sent a survey team to mark the border more clearly.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  They put a new boundary monument, and they build it on the porch.

• 4:59Speaker 05

  A giant white obelisk, the new boundary marker, smack dab on the porch of the saloon. But that marker was just the first step towards something much larger. In 1897, then-US President William McKinley issued a proclamation to create a clear strip of land, 60 feet wide and 2 miles wide, right through Amboz Nogales. The goal? To demarcate the border more clearly. John Brickwood Saloon and several homes and businesses were knocked down. And for a few years, the border stayed that way. Until 1910, when the Mexican Revolution changed life on the border once again.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Border towns became particularly important because they had ports of entry where people pay their customs duties. So if someone can take over a border town, they can take that money.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  Different Mexican revolutionary factions would raid American towns along the border. And as Mexico became increasingly unstable, more Mexicans started emigrating to the US.

• 6:05Speaker 05

  Violence along the border increased.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  And then, in the middle of the Mexican Revolution, World War I began. That brought a whole new set of anxieties.

• 6:17Speaker 05

  The US feared that German spies could infiltrate through the border. All of a sudden, people who had long been neighbors were suspicious of each other. The US started to send all kinds of people to the border to address these different threats.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  The US government deploys the military to the border to protect people on the US side. You also have, you know, intelligence officers operating on the border, looking out for spies. More customs agents coming out trying to watch for smuggling of guns and money. And then you have immigration officials who are trying to manage the flow of refugees.

• 6:58Speaker 05

  Those big changes on the border were coming to Amboz Nogales, too. The mayor of Nogales, Mexico, ordered construction of a wire fence on the Mexican side to make it easier to manage the flow of crossings. But Amboz Nogales had already become a powder keg.

• 7:13Speaker 04

  And on August 27, 1918, the fuse was lit.

• 7:22Speaker 05

  It was just after 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

• 7:27Speaker 05

  A Mexican carpenter named Zeferino Gil La Madrid was leaving the US after finishing work. He was carrying a bulky package under his arm as he approached Mexico.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  He was ordered to halt by American officials.

• 7:41Speaker 05

  They wanted to inspect the package.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Mexican officials told him he should keep coming.

• 7:48Speaker 05

  The US customs official raised his rifle to force Gil La Madrid to come back for an inspection. What happened next is still disputed today.

• 7:58Speaker 04

  Someone from either side of the border, it's unclear who, fired the first shot.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  And violence broke out, actually, between the two sides of the border.

• 8:14Speaker 04

  It was chaos.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  Mexican civilians grabbed guns and joined the fight.

• 8:26Speaker 05

  It's immortalized in this Mexican song.

• 8:46Speaker 05

  El corrido de Nogales tells the Mexican version of the battle.

• 9:00Speaker 05

  The song goes, "When a Mexican crossed the borderline, a gringo fired a shot at him." That was the beginning of the story. The corrido is all about the bravery of the Nogalenses. It says,

• 9:22Speaker 05

  "There were 1,500 gringos, all were federal troops, and the people of Nogales did not let them advance."

• 9:35Speaker 04

  But things were escalating. At some point, a Mexican consul tried to negotiate with an American soldier. If they both raised a white flag, it could all be over. The American replied,

• 9:47Speaker 07

  "Go to hell. American troops don't carry white flags and don't use them. If the Mexicans don't hoist a white flag within 10 minutes, US soldiers will march in and burn Nogales Sonora."

• 10:02Speaker 04

  The Mexican side raised a white flag.

• 10:15Speaker 04

  The battle lasted more than two hours.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  As many as four Americans and 129 Mexicans were dead, including the mayor of Mexico's Nogales. And hundreds of people were wounded.

• 10:31Speaker 05

  After the Battle of Amboz Nogales, people on both sides expressed regret.

• 10:35Speaker 06

  The shooting was an unfortunate affair, started by irresponsible persons under undue stress of excitement.

• 10:45Speaker 04

  But the damage was done.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  And that leaves a lot of government officials along the border to say, "We need a fence. We need to be really clear about marking this space."

• 10:55Speaker 05

  And so, one of the first US-built fences meant to divide people was built through Amboz Nogales.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Whenever I think about this, I think of the Robert Frost poem, where he talks about how good fences make good neighbors. That these fences are built in a very different mindset than the border wall of today. This is not seen as an imposition by the US government on Mexico, but rather a joint effort to better demarcate where Mexican and American space end.

• 11:37Speaker 05

  The fence wasn't about keeping Mexican people out of the US.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  No one cared about immigration at all on the US-Mexico border until the very late part of the 19th century.

• 11:47Speaker 05

  And if people were concerned about who was coming through the southern border, that concern was mostly about Chinese immigrants. Which isn't to say immigration wasn't a big issue in the US. It was.

• 11:59Speaker 04

  In 1924, Congress passed one of the most restrictive immigration laws in its history, setting strict quotas for who can enter the US. Congress also established the Border Patrol to control immigration.

• 12:15Speaker 05

  By the mid-1920s, the infrastructure of the border, the fences, the manpower, and the law enforcement, the tools that we use today, were all in place.

• 12:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  Today, there are over 700 miles of border wall between the US and Mexico. In 2025, President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocated over $170 billion over four years towards increasing immigration enforcement. Roughly $50 billion of those dollars are intended for new construction and reinforcement of the border between the US and Mexico. The administration has said it aims to complete the entire southern border wall by the end of President Trump's second term.

• 13:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit. If you want to hear more about the first border wall, check out the full-length episode, "Line, Fence, Wall," which is a part of our larger series on how immigration enforcement became political and profitable. And join us next week when we go back and look at the people in America who were literally fighting for change from within.

• 13:41Speaker 08

  There's this idea that the whole community is invested in this. If Johnson wins, the Negroes around the country are going to riot, they're going to revolt, they're going to get the idea that they can fight back, they're going to get the idea that they're not inferior.

• 13:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  The story of Jack Johnson, the first black American heavyweight boxer in the world, who fought for much more than a title. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Mogadam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the Throughline production team. Music, as always, by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Naguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Miner, and Lindsay McKenna. We're your hosts, Rande Abdelfattah.

• 14:28Speaker 09

  And Ramtin Arablouei. Thank you for listening.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  This message comes from Live Right, publisher of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, "The Gales of November: A Chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 Shipwreck." "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims it's destined to be a classic. "The Gales of November," now in paperback.