Naco Arizona

 

We left Tucson in the soft blue of early morning, that liminal hour when the city hasn’t quite decided to wake up. Lorraine and I pointed the car southeast, I‑10 unspooling ahead of us, Naco and Bisbee somewhere past the horizon line and past the familiar routines of Tucson life. Monsoon had already done its good work—desert soils briefly forgiving, ocotillo flushed green and reaching, whole fields painted in that impossible, temporary color you only get when water remembers us.

Driving into the borderlands

The closer we got to Bisbee, the more the landscape opened itself up: isolated stretches where it was just us, the road, and a ring of mountain ranges holding the sky. The Mule Mountains started to come into view—one of the Madrean sky islands that rise like interrupted sentences out of desert grasslands, linking Chihuahuan desert scrub, semidesert grasslands, and woodlands in one vertical story. To the south, beyond the line on the map and the more literal line of steel, the Sierra San José anchored the horizon on the Mexican side, another sky island in the larger archipelago that lets jaguar move, lets water collect, lets seeds find somewhere to land.

Bisbee, at that hour, was still half-asleep. One coffee shop open, barista already swapped into small-town therapist mode, locals talking art, music, and how to keep an eccentric desert town from being reduced to a brand. I sat with my cappuccino, that brief ritual before stepping back into the heavier work—history, border policy, people, plants, all braided together whether we acknowledge it or not. I wasn’t there for Bisbee’s galleries, though; I was there for Naco, for Camp Naco, and for the land that holds both the scars and the memory.

Naco: a town, a crossing, a scar

Naco announces itself quietly, but the border wall does not. Lorraine and I traced the wall by car, following its rusted geometry as it cuts across grassland and through histories, a vertical wound pretending to be a solution. We swapped migration stories—bones and bodies Indigenous to the Americas, families that crossed other borders, plants and animals whose movement is older than our nation-state imagination. It is hard to be here and not feel how much this structure interrupts; jaguar corridors, mule deer routes, coatimundi trails, even the flight paths of raptors and migratory songbirds are reshaped by this human insistence on division.

Naco has been a military vantage point for over a century, long before the modern wall. With the Mexican Revolution destabilizing the region in 1910, the U.S. War Department installed soldiers at this crossing to watch rail lines, protect American interests, and exert control over a border that has always been more porous culturally than officials would like to admit. Out of this tension—and out of federal anxiety about revolution and labor—Camp Naco was born.

Camp Naco: adobe, Buffalo Soldiers, and memory

Camp Naco sits about six hundred yards north of the border, its adobe buildings now bearing fresh lime plaster, a crisp white bandage over a hundred years of weathering. It was one of thirty‑five permanent camps built along the U.S.-Mexico border after World War I, part of the Mexican Border Defense Project: a chain of Emancipated Black soldiers instead of steel, a constructed human barrier from Brownsville to Nogales. Here, African American soldiers from the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and later the Twenty‑fifth Infantry—Buffalo Soldiers—held the line, serving in a segregated army while stationed on Nahua, Opata and Apache land.

Only two of those border camps were built of adobe, and Camp Naco is the last one still standing with its historic integrity. Today, restoration crews are layering lime over those old earthen walls—five applications in some places because the adobe, thirsty from decades of exposure, keeps drinking it in. That absorption is a kind of metaphor for the site itself: it has absorbed war, racism, federal neglect, and now, slowly, the care of people trying to turn it into a gathering space, an interpretive site, a crossroads of stories rather than a fortress.

When I visited, Michael, the general contractor and project manager, walked us through the work—the scaffolding, the lime, the plan to rehabilitate buildings into a community and arts center that can hold conversations about African American heritage, borderlands, and stewardship in one frame. Camp Naco is no longer just a defensive architecture; it is becoming a place where descendants of Buffalo Soldiers, local residents, and visitors can interrogate what “security”, culture, migration and the borderlands has meant here and what it could mean if we centered land and community instead of extraction and enforcement.

A garden on the edge of a Mesquite bosque

Leaving the camp, we met David, a board member of Camp Naco and, more importantly, a caretaker of the land around it. His property feels like a hinge between worlds: adobe history nearby, border wall down the road, and then this garden buzzing with pollinators, butterflies, rescued burros, and roadrunners with a multi‑generational kinship line to his wife Lori. Lori told us how, three generations ago, she nursed an injured roadrunner back to health, and how its descendants still show up, still call for mealworms, still maintain a respectful two‑foot distance while remaining unmistakably in relationship.

Above us, Skyhawks circled, ravens stitched black arcs into the blue, drawn by the same rich edge habitat that keeps the roadrunners coming back. This is the everyday ecology of the borderlands—raptors riding thermals over reclaimed gardens, scavengers patrolling the tree line, and ground birds threading through shrubs—and it is as much a part of Naco’s story as troop movements and diplomatic incidents. The garden is not separate from the surrounding plant communities; it extends them, diversifies them, inserts human intention into an already complex matrix of grassland, desert scrub, and woodland.

Mesquite bosque: plant communities as habitat

In David’s truck, we bounced along dirt roads into a Mesquite bosque, that semi‑shaded world where Prosopis trees gather around subtle drainage lines, their roots reaching down into water that is seldom visible on the surface. Bosques like this often act as corridors, tracking ephemeral creeks or washes, stitching upland desert scrub to grasslands and providing critical cover and forage for mule deer, javelina, coatimundi, and the smaller mammals that sustain raptors overhead. Under the mesquite canopy, you get a layered community: native grasses and forbs, the occasional cactus, lower shrubs, all of this forming a vertical mosaic that offers nesting sites, perches, and hunting grounds for everything from roadrunners to kestrels.

In the Mule Mountains conservation strategy, agencies explicitly name Madrean woodlands, semidesert grasslands, and Chihuahuan desert scrub as coexisting habitats, each supporting different suites of species. Plains and Chiricahua leopard frogs follow the water, Broad‑billed and Lucifer hummingbirds ride floral abundance, Montezuma quail and scaled quail work the grasslands, while Golden Eagles and American Kestrels survey it all from above. Plant communities here are not static backgrounds; they are active relationships—grasslands feeding pronghorn and deer, oaks and junipers sheltering predators, mesquite and acacia offering seeds for birds and small mammals, all of which in turn feed the raptors and, occasionally, the jaguar passing through under cover of night.

Sky islands, jaguar routes, and border interruptions

The concept of “sky islands” helps make sense of why Naco feels both intimate and globally relevant. These isolated mountain ranges—Mule Mountains, Sierra San José, Huachucas, Chiricahuas—rise up out of desert basins, acting as ecological steppingstones between the subtropical Sierra Madre in Mexico and the temperate Rockies to the north. Climatic gradients along their slopes create stacked life zones: desert scrub at the base, then grasslands and chaparrals, then woodlands and higher conifer forests, each layer hosting distinct plant communities and animal assemblages.

For jaguar and ocelot, these islands are literal survival routes, linking habitat patches across political boundaries. For migratory birds, they are both nesting grounds and stopover sites—Cave Creek in the Chiricahuas, for example, is documented as having the world’s highest diversity and density of nesting raptors. David worries about human presence eroding these functions: mining in Bisbee has already disturbed topography and water quality, and the border wall interrupts both wildlife movement and the continuity of grassland habitats.

When he pointed south and said that on the Mexican Naco side you can find pristine, lush grassland—protected almost accidentally because mining and heavy extraction never took hold there—it was hard not to feel how unevenly we distribute harm. On one side: tailings, altered watersheds, and fragmented plant communities; on the other: still‑intact desert grassland supporting robust wildlife and their predators. The same line that militarized Naco for the Buffalo Soldiers now acts as both barrier and shield, depending on which direction you face.

Birds, raptors, and the language of presence

Throughout the day, birds kept inserting themselves into our conversations. The roadrunner insisting on mealworms while I explained medicinal plants in Lori’s garden and the landscape was one kind of presence—a reminder that reciprocity is possible in the everyday. Above the garden and bosque, Skyhawks and ravens patrolled, archetypal figures in the borderland sky, opportunists in an ecosystem where human activity creates both threats and new sources of food.

In the broader Mule Mountains region, field biologists catalog species like American Kestrel, Golden Eagle, Loggerhead Shrike, Bullock’s Oriole, Black‑throated Sparrow, and Montezuma Quail as “strategy species” for conservation planning. Each one is tied to plant community—kestrels to open grasslands and perches along field edges, orioles to yucca, agave, or riparian trees, sparrows to desert scrub dotted with seed‑producing shrubs. It’s not enough to say “save the birds”; you must save the grasslands, the bosques, the desert scrub and their patient plant partners, or the flight paths and nesting densities that define sky islands begin to unravel.

Leaving Naco, thinking about stewardship

By late afternoon, we had looped through Camp Naco, the garden, the Mesquite bosque, and a stack of stories about Apacheria, Buffalo Soldiers, mining, and jaguar routes. We ended the day the way you should end any long borderlands drive: with water, with conversation about books, and eventually with a tamale back in Tucson, the sky turning that particular Sonoran purple that makes you forgive, temporarily, everything that’s wrong with policy.

What stays with me is how this small place—Naco, a town many Arizonans will never visit—holds so many intersecting lines: Indigenous homelands under military installations; Black soldiers stationed on Apache land to defend a border drawn by someone else; jaguar slipping between sky islands while we erect steel and adobe to insist on separation; roadrunners and raptors rewriting those lines in the air. Camp Naco’s adobe may be the most visible restoration project, but the deeper work is in tending plant communities, listening to the birds, and letting the land teach us what a different kind of border might look like—one rooted in stewardship instead of control.