The Day Two Nogaleses Went to War

The border fence that divides Nogales, Arizona from Nogales, Sonora today did not always exist. For most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the two towns, collectively known as Ambos Nogales, meaning both Nogaleses, flowed into each other with a painted line, a few customs booths, and little else. On August twenty-seventh, nineteen eighteen, that changed permanently.

The context was an extraordinary convergence of crises. The Mexican Revolution was still grinding through its final years. World War One had the United States military on high alert. Persistent fears of German agents operating through Mexico kept the border tense. American soldiers, including units of the Buffalo Soldiers of the Tenth Cavalry, one of the storied Black regiments of the post-Civil-War Army, patrolled the boundary.

At approximately four in the afternoon, a Mexican carpenter named Zeferino Gil Lamadrid crossed from the American side toward Mexico without stopping for a customs inspection. American soldiers called for him to halt. Shots were fired. What followed was two hours of sustained cross-border gunfire, with small arms and machine guns firing from both sides. American troops advanced into Mexican territory, capturing high ground on the hills above Nogales, Sonora before a ceasefire was arranged by late evening.

Five American soldiers were killed and twenty-nine wounded. Mexican casualties, including civilian deaths, were higher, though precise figures have never been established. The governor of Sonora at the time, Plutarco Elías Calles, would later become president of Mexico.

The immediate consequence was the agreement, between the two governments, to build a physical barrier dividing the towns. A chain-link fence was constructed, making the Battle of Ambos Nogales the event that produced the first permanent border wall between the two Nogaleses. The communities that had been one organic place became, in the space of an afternoon, two separated cities that have been growing apart ever since.