A border, a bus, then school begins in New Mexico

With her backpack slung over one shoulder, Gabriela Corona strolls toward the US-Mexico border as casually as if she is crossing the street to school. Which, in many ways, she is.

At this early hour it is so black outside that the scrubland seems to disappear, though the bright lights of the US port of entry punch the sky. Gabriela passes walls of barbed wire, camouflage-clad Mexican officers carrying big guns, and US border patrol agents who sit on stools inside the entry building with their arms crossed. On the far side of the building, on United States soil, the passageway narrows.

None of this fazes Gabriela. A junior in high school, she has been doing this for almost a decade. She is one of the 850 students who cross the border every weekday in Palomas, Mexico to attend school in Luna County, N.M. The students are all US citizens who live in or near Palomas with their Mexican parents. It is an arrangement that has been in place for generations, long enough to become natural in a region where economic and ancestral ties lace across the manmade line that divides the countries.

Palomas seems to organize itself around the school-day outflow. Women sell home-cooked food from tables near where parents drop off their kids. On the other side of the barbed wire, an American school bus is waiting. For Gabriela and her younger siblings, Alejandra and Diego, the bus represents an opportunity to attend a better school, or even to attend school at all. In Mexico, public education typically ends at age 15.

“It’s just like, awesome, because I have [this] opportunity every single day,” says Gabriela.

Nearly two years

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