The Project
Hector is a promising 6th grader at Columbus elementary school. He plays the trumpet. He
wants to be a musician.
Susie is an 8th grader. She lives with her mother and wants to be a teacher.
Franklin is in the 10th grade. He has a steady girlfriend, and plays baseball for the high school
team. He wants to go to college.
These are three ordinary children joined by an extraordinary circumstance; they are Mexicans who
reside in Palomas, but they travel each morning along with 500 others like them to attend American
schools, paying no attention to the international border.
This tradition of shared education is the only one of it’s kind across the border states. It dates back
over fifty years when inadequate medical facilities in the Palomas area forced local women to give
birth in the closest hospital located in Columbus, New Mexico, an accident of geography which
resulted in American citizenship for the children.
In 2009, the situation remains unchanged. The Palomas health clinic is open just three hours a
day. Women going into labour, outside those hours, are rushed across the border. Educational
facilities in Palomas are also limited. The elementary school operates two shifts daily to handle
overcrowding. The lone secondary school demands payment from students for tuition, books, and
supplies, putting it beyond the reach of most town residents. The majority trek to the border where
they are met by a fleet of yellow school buses. The youngest make the short trip to Columbus
elementary school. Teenagers travel an additional forty miles north into Deming to attend middle
and high school. Their parents, barred from entering the US, cannot be present at baseball games,
mariachi band concerts, or prize-givings. Deming educators have even been known to cross into
Palomas for emergency parent-teacher conferences.
Yet, for the border kids and their families, this chance of an American education is a source of hope
in an otherwise blighted social reality. Palomas has been hit hard by the US clampdown on illegal
immigration and badly affected by increased drug-war violence. Forty-six people were killed and 18
others disappeared last year alone. So many have fled that its once thriving 13,000-population has
been halved. The barren dusty roads, the poverty, the lifeless buildings combine to create a ghost
town, but while Palomas may look dead, between its cracks are cradled the hopes of school-kids
with dreams every bit as big as those of their American classmates.
Hector is a promising 6th grader at Columbus elementary school. He plays the trumpet. He
wants to be a musician.
Susie is an 8th grader. She lives with her mother and wants to be a teacher.
Franklin is in the 10th grade. He has a steady girlfriend, and plays baseball for the high school
team. He wants to go to college.
These are three ordinary children joined by an extraordinary circumstance; they are Mexicans who
reside in Palomas, but they travel each morning along with 500 others like them to attend American
schools, paying no attention to the international border.
This tradition of shared education is the only one of it’s kind across the border states. It dates back
over fifty years when inadequate medical facilities in the Palomas area forced local women to give
birth in the closest hospital located in Columbus, New Mexico, an accident of geography which
resulted in American citizenship for the children.
In 2009, the situation remains unchanged. The Palomas health clinic is open just three hours a
day. Women going into labour, outside those hours, are rushed across the border. Educational
facilities in Palomas are also limited. The elementary school operates two shifts daily to handle
overcrowding. The lone secondary school demands payment from students for tuition, books, and
supplies, putting it beyond the reach of most town residents. The majority trek to the border where
they are met by a fleet of yellow school buses. The youngest make the short trip to Columbus
elementary school. Teenagers travel an additional forty miles north into Deming to attend middle
and high school. Their parents, barred from entering the US, cannot be present at baseball games,
mariachi band concerts, or prize-givings. Deming educators have even been known to cross into
Palomas for emergency parent-teacher conferences.
Yet, for the border kids and their families, this chance of an American education is a source of hope
in an otherwise blighted social reality. Palomas has been hit hard by the US clampdown on illegal
immigration and badly affected by increased drug-war violence. Forty-six people were killed and 18
others disappeared last year alone. So many have fled that its once thriving 13,000-population has
been halved. The barren dusty roads, the poverty, the lifeless buildings combine to create a ghost
town, but while Palomas may look dead, between its cracks are cradled the hopes of school-kids
with dreams every bit as big as those of their American classmates.
© Living Imprint & Woolfcub Productions
Children crossing the border each
morning to go to school
morning to go to school
The wall between Las Palomas and
Columbus, New Mexico
Columbus, New Mexico
A home in Palomas
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