DOUGLAS —  As the sun set, about 150 people congregated by the side of the tall, steel wall dividing Douglas from Agua Prieta, Sonora.

Two rows of razor wire and a dirt road for patrols on the U.S. side of the border contrasted with a paved walkway with streetlights over Calle Internacional on the Mexican side.

Neighbors and families took their seats around the 12 tables flanked by two improvised stages on both sides, standing facing each other yet unable to see those across the the bollard fencing.

The March 12 event, a one-time performance and a multidisciplinary play reflecting on the past, present and future of the border, was the result of a three-year creative process involving about 30 artists, most young women coming from either sister city.

“What we're working on is not only a piece in itself, but it's actually a process,” said Jenea Sanchez, director of Border Arts Corridor and member of Las Fronterizas, the binational female collective that produced the event along with Rising Youth Theater and Safos Dance Theater.

The collective — formed by Sanchez, América Tovar, Ammi Robles, Paula Ortega, Xanthia Walker and Yvonne Montoya — interviewed roughly 50 community members in Agua Prieta and Douglas over a three-year span, asking them to share stories of love that had overcome barriers.

They talked to store owners, passersby, teachers, classmates and grandparents. For Robles, a member of the collective and a 24-year-old visual artist from Agua Prieta, one of her favorite experiences was approaching, audio recorder in hand, drivers waiting in the car line to cross into the United States, he said.

Robles, who works mostly with photography and video, arranged “story circles” at Cochise College, where she got a degree in communications. Participants would share with her stories of love and she would ask them to translate their words into movement. That expression led to choreography and a growing number of collaborators.

Blending dance, theater and visual arts in mirroring performances, “Mis amores fronterizos” was interpreted by the young artists on Saturday, March 12, after a two-year hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The greatest thank you goes to you. As our border community you inspired us to do this. Without you, this would not exist,” Robles said as the event came to an end. “To our families. Without you, these communities are nothing.”

Night fell as people sat down at tables decorated with desert-themed centerpieces of ocotillo branches, prickly pear cactuses and succulents. Projectors shone on both sides of the wall and a cloth screen on the side of the dirt stage provided a view of the performers on the other side.

In English, Spanish and Spanglish, the stories of love, separation and the pandemic unfolded in three acts. At several points during the performance, a Border Patrol vehicle crossed the stage set up on the U.S. side, as if on cue.

It felt like magical realism, Sanchez said.

As the event was about to start, two women talked to each other through the narrow openings of the border fence.

The young woman standing on the Douglas side and carrying a small child in her arms, heard about the play and made plans to meet her grandmother. The two hadn’t seen each other in two years. One has been waiting for paperwork and couldn’t leave the U.S.; the other didn’t have a visa to go through. An agent nearby gave them permission to talk but told them to stand apart.

“That is just the kind of story they are telling through art: how hard it is when family members can’t see each other. Touch each other,” said Iridra Laboria, mother of one performer.

The young woman, who was sitting by her side moments earlier, came back from the wall with eyes full of tears: “They didn’t let me touch her,” she told Laboria. “I better leave.’”

Other stories of love and barriers were interpreted that night through various art forms. The faces of relatives projected on the wall and in circular reflectors held by the dancers.

“Every word came from somebody in the community,” Sanchez said.

Making the play, conceptualized since 2018 but completed in 2022, the women in the collective interviewed one another and members of the cast.

They explored how the pandemic had affected them, further deepening the divide between their two homes. For nearly 600 days, people who used to go back and forth between the two cities almost daily could not cross the border. Many were blocks away from family and friends on the other side yet could not cross because they did not hold U.S. citizenship or residency. Their reasons for crossing were not considered essential. Only those traveling for studies, work or medical emergencies could go across.

Robles, who has lived in Agua Prieta her whole life, considers Douglas as her city.  The border reopening in November after almost two years of restrictions lifted a heavy weight from families and cross-border economies that depended on each other.

Store owners in Nogales maintained their businesses on a life-line because Mexican shoppers were not allowed to cross and sales dropped. Family members who didn’t have residency were not allowed to visit loved ones on the other side and care for each other.

As the meeting point between two cities, two cultures and two languages, the border represents opportunity for young artists straddling both sides.

Dance academies on both sides of the border facilitate that creative exchange, offering space to blend contemporary and traditional dances.

Douglas is just a jump across from Agua Prieta, yet folkloric dance, commonplace in Mexico, is still received with a lot of excitement on the American side, said América Tovar, a 20-year-old dancer from Agua Prieta and a member of Las Fronterizas.

Tovar has performed in plays produced in Nevada and California, and in 2018 was invited to dance in her hometown at the binational Shared Spaces event. The encounter of dance companies convening around the Agua Prieta-Douglas wall led to the birth of the Las Fronterizas collective.

Many other cross-boundary art events have taken place across the dividing line in the past.

Concert Without Borders, a binational event with musicians performing next to one another in the two cities, started in 2012. Conceived and organized by the Bi-National Arts Institute, a nonprofit based in Bisbee, the project has grown and inspired similar events.

Concerts and shared performances “build upon an empathic creativity,” said Lori Keyne, executive director of the Bi-National Arts Institute and music instructor at Cochise College. She believes in the power of art as a common language.

“This sharing and empowering each other is a gift from which world peace can be born,” she added.

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Other projects have happened on the southern side of the steel wall in Agua Prieta with colorful art. In 2015, the Mexican Consulate sponsored “Dreams Without Borders,” a series of murals, executed by seven artists with volunteers from Mexico and the U.S.

In November 2021, less than a week after the U.S. lifted restrictions on “non-essential travel” after the pandemic separation, artists and neighbors from both cities took part in the Binational Art Walk, an event organized yearly since 2015 by Border Arts Corridor. For such events, Agua Prieta and Douglas close streets near the border and community members take part in activities and exhibits organized on both cities.

The contrast of performing both at the border and further inside in the U.S. made Tovar, dancer and Fronteriza member, see her own community differently.

“Realizing how they see us opens my vision even more on what it means to live here," Tovar said.

Halfway through the play, two young female characters reflected on the past of the border; a time when neighbors had a closer, kind relationship and the physical barrier didn’t feel so real.

One said she liked to visualize her two cities united, without a border.

“You gave me an idea,” the other responded.

Over the 18-foot-tall wall, the light from the projector moved in waves. The solid lines of the steel bollards danced in curves and moved away from each other in a vertical ripple.

"How did you make the fence disappear? It's dissolving,” the young actress cheered as the permanent wave on the wall repeated. “It’s so beautiful. Just as I had imagined.”

Actors talked enthusiastically to one another across the now “dissolved” wall. But a new figure emerged from the projector and rising over them in the fence, questioned what they were doing on the other side of the wall. He could not see the magic of the dissolved border. The wall had not disappeared for him, it was still in his head, the actresses concluded.

In reimagining border communities, the artists would like to remove the physical and mental barriers dividing them.

“I feel that my community has a lot of culture, a lot of potential,” Robles said.

She hopes that making this kind of unusual and visually striking performances will encourage the community to participate and “wake up the art within them.”

Because young adults from the borderlands were involved in the making of this site-specific play, the narrative has a caring tone. They talked about family separation, migration, death and the pandemic “in a loving way, in a respectful way,” Robles said. A contrast to the usual media narratives that frame the border negatively, as a place of “doom,” she added.

The process of making the play took Las Fronterizas collective to other borders. They wanted to reflect on how community-engaged creative processes can be applied in other international boundaries.

In 2019, they went to the Mexico-Guatemala border, collaborating with a local artist, to interview families in a border town. They held small workshops, presented poetry and pictures of their sister cities.

In a joint workshop with Mexican residents in the Chiapas borderlands, Las Fronterizas proposed a dance dynamic where both groups would interpret in movement how their border feels. The Fronterizas would interpret how they experience the U.S.-Mexico border, and the people from Chiapas would interpret how they experience the Mexico-Guatemala international boundary.

Then they put the movement into words.

"Our kind of movement, in general, gave the feeling that we were very hard, very rigid," Tovar, Fronteriza dancer, said.

During the visit to Mexico's southern border, Tovar was surprised to see no fencing. In one town, the only division from Guatemala was a speed bump. The same play they performed this year in Douglas, Arizona. and Agua Prieta, Sonora, would be completely different in that place, Tovar thought.

What made the play special and site-specific, was the community; the lives and love stories of daily commuters, business owners, family members, teachers and classmates. Robles is convinced her two communities have incredible value.

"The border has much more to offer," Robles said, reflecting on the negative portrayal of the border she sees daily news. "There many stories from our own community that we still don't know, and they are good stories."

Have news tips or story ideas about the Arizona-Sonora borderlands? Reach the reporter at cmigoya@arizonarepublic.com or send a direct message in Twitter to @ClaraMigoya.