It was obvious to me this early in my trip that the border is not a discrete knife cut, a slash mark in the landscape, except in the minds of politicians and cartographers; it is like most other national boundaries, a muddled blur, and it is obvious in many places that Mexico does not butt up to the border but spills over it and puddles willy-nilly—troche y moche, as Mexicans say—giving many border towns a jumbled cultural ambiguity.
