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“Now that you’ve been here, it’s your responsibility to have an opinion.” Diego told us. My friends and I had arrived at El Paso. After spending four months in the chilliness and drought of Montezuma, warm days in the Sun City thrilled us. We were far from guessing we would end up playing football with a group of strangers in El Segundo Barrio and that our view of the US/ Mexico border would suffer a reform. On a walk downtown, two of my friends spotted an empty street-football cage. “What a perfect place to sunbathe”. No one opposed. We lacked vitamin D, and our pale skin was an easy prey to a chance of being kissed golden. It was not too long until someone noticed our presence. “Hello. Would you like to play with us?” Antonio asked us. He had a thick Spanish accent. A few minutes in the cage were enough to attract other players. We could hear mumbles of Spanish as they approached the cage. Two men and one boy, who was kicking a football ball as it rolled through the floor, joined in. The sun burned our bare legs as we focused on trying to hit the ball. We were so taken in by the jaunty ambiance, the repercussions of our language and cultural differences appeared non-existent. There was no “us” versus “them”. “Where are you from? What are you doing here?”. They did not mask their curiosity to find out how we ended up there. We explained that we were on a school trip and came to learn about the US/ Mexico border. “Oh, my family is from Mexico. We think what they are doing to people at border patrol is bad”. Antonio was around forty, and when he said this, he looked at his kid, Miguel. His voice was exempt from pain, but anxiety and dread permeated the holes in his words. His body language confirmed it. Images from the news of the children separated from their families when crossing the borders came to my mind. A more optimistic man, Saul, interrupted him. “Welcome to Borderland, ladies”. He smiled a lot and seemed to enjoy talking. We laughed; never had we heard the term. I stayed reflective of “borderland”. El Paso and Ciudad Juarez make up borderlands. A wall separates the two towns, but everything else unites them. My thoughts drifted away from the conversation as I gazed at the mountains in Mexico. From where we stood, you could read “CD Juarez, la Biblia es la Verdad. Leela” carved on the hill. “Do you go south of the border often?”, I inquired as an instinctive response to the thoughts running through my mind. Saul was eager to answer my question. “We go every weekend; my wife goes to the hair salon there. She says it’s cheaper.” Our conversations about the interdependence between borderlands reminded me of Diego, who we had met earlier on the trip when visiting a local shelter for migrants. Diego had shared his struggles around his binational or transborder identity. “I am not American when I’m in the US, I’m not Mexican when I’m in Mexico. I am from the border.” After that unexpected football match, to me, the border was not about diplomacy anymore. It was a humanitarian matter. Antonio, Saul, Miguel and Diego’s stories about the interconnectedness of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez introduced me to a peculiar sense of belonging, characteristic of border communities. For the people from the border, feelings, values and traditions transcend the physical limitations of a wall. I now understand that the US/Mexico border is nothing more, nothing less than a symbol of political presence, and that it cannot stop the social connectedness of borderlands. It got late; we knew it was time we headed back. We shook hands with our new friends, grabbed our bags and walked away. I glanced at the mountains in Mexico once again and thought, “I think I have an opinion’.