Lina and I have joined a Community Peacemaker Team in Agua Prieta, Mexico, a large town directly across the border from Douglas, Ariz. We are here to learn about the situation at the border and also to see how CPT goes about its mission of “building partnerships to transform violence and oppression.”

Douglas and Agua Prieta grew up around a large open-pit copper mine and the copper smelting operations that began in the early 1900s and ended in 1987. Since then, Agua Prieta has become home for many maquilas, the factories owned by multinational corporations where Mexican labor makes products, assembled from imported components, for the US and international markets.

Between 1991 and 2007, the North American Free Trade Agreement displaced 4.9 million Mexican farmers no longer able to earn a living from their small agricultural plots. The maquilas drew those people north to work in sweatshop conditions. With the raising of the minimum wage along the border, many corporations are now closing their maquilas and moving south and into the interior of the country, where the minimum wage is lower.

These two towns are intimately tied by geography, history, culture and economy. And a wall runs between them, 18 to 30 feet high. The border crossing is busy, with workers crossing back and forth, as well as Mexicans going to shop in Douglas, at the Walmart and other stores on the U.S. side, and occasional Americans, such as ourselves, visiting Mexico. This is not a tourist town like Juarez, Nogales or Tijuana.

Our group is staying in Agua Prieta at the Presbyterian Church “Lirio de los Valles,” or “Lily of the Valley.” A long mural decorates a wall along the east side the compound, behind a basketball court. The mural shows a road that winds from Central America through Chiapas on the Guatemalan border. It passes through the mountains of central Mexico to Bavispe (less than 100 miles to our southeast), and continues north.

Above the road we see a group of Mexicans celebrating Christmas with huge platters of tamales, and below a park and three people talking. Two are holding a Bible.

The road winds behind the globe, held in the hands of God, through Arizona to Colorado. A man in a wheelchair is preaching in a church, perhaps the church where we are staying, which has an active ministry to migrants.

How interesting that the artist has chosen Pennsylvania from among the many states the migrant might travel to! I’d like to think because this is because Philadelphia is “The City of Brotherly Love” and the site of the Liberty Bell!

Below, a man plays the guitar in the open air, a soccer ball lies near his feet and a green field invites a game, and in the distance the “D” marks the mountain in Douglas, just across the border.

Four women drink coffee from Cafe Justo in a gap torn from the wall. (I will soon introduce you to Cafe Justo and to the wall.) The quote from Ephesians 2:22 can be translated as: “And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”

We are here to imagine how all people, residents of the U.S. and Mexico and migrants from other countries, indeed the entire globe, might become a dwelling place for love and justice.

P.S. What does it mean that we have “joined” a Community Peacemaker Team? A perceptive question! We have joined a delegation to see the work of the CPT, but we are not yet members of this or any other team. That would require a rigorous six-week training and then a period of discernment before an invitation could be extended or accepted.

David Blair of Harrisville is co-founder of the Mariposa Museum in Peterborough. The column is reprinted with permission from his blog, orionblair.wordpress.com.