Nogales spruces up for border
crossers with a cleaner image
Armando Gutierrez Jimenez, did not actually
seek to paint the entire target houses, but mere-
ly the two sides facing the border roadway in
neighborhoods like Los Encinos. Colors also have
been limited to yellow, blue, green, orange and
Troubled
Mexico
border town
undergoes
a facelift;
spruces up
for border
crossers.
The city of Nogales was once a buzzing U.S. border factory town in the maquiladora program of the North
American Free Trade Agreement, located in
Mexico’s Sonora state. But the city of some
200,000 has had a tough time maintaining an
attractive image for its citizens, much less
tourists, of late. About 200 people reportedly
have been killed in Nogales this year; over
400 pounds of cocaine were seized from a single northbound car one day in November; and
U.S. consular workers now are advised to conduct routine travel in armored vehicles.
However, new Mayor Jose Angel Hernandez
has come up with a scheme to brighten up
Nogales, including a program to paint more
than a thousand houses, once cement grey, in
the neighborhoods along the border crossing
between the United States and Mexico, which
hosts around 50,000 vehicles per day. Using
paint donated by the State of Sonora, and
funding from a variety of state and federal
sources, the mayor is priming the city’s Urban
Image department to literally transform the
look of the city. The federal secretariat for
social development, Sedesol, was one key federal supporter of the project.
International paint manufacturers often
adopt historic sections of a city, painting
buildings with significant architecture perhaps registered with organizations like the
United Nations. Other paint makers have
merged advertising and charity activities by
painting soccer stadiums across Latin
America. And some paint companies have
moved into the poorest parts of town to add
color to the lives of the local denizens.
But in the case of Nogales, the mayor intends
to get over 1,400 houses painted by the end of
2010, as new funding materializes. The program,
originally funded at close to $100,000 and led by
“Using paint donated by the State of
Sonora, and funding from a variety of
state and federal sources, the mayor
is priming the city’s Urban Image
department to literally transform the
look of the city.”
pink, ostensibly reflecting the five leading politi-
cal parties in the area. And the volume of paint
acquired for the program was originally set at
about 1,000 five-gallon buckets.
Similarly, in Nogales’s central Plaza
Pesqueira, the Urban Image department
has painted vendors stalls in orange and
green, to help liven up the area, and to give
it a more planned and maintained look.
Park benches are being repainted, and new
palm trees are being planted to appeal to
tourists and crime-wary citizens alike.
There may be a market opportunity for inter-
national paint companies to step up to the plate
in some of their deeply-troubled market com-
munities, like Nogales, and donate or subsidize
paint to help turn the tide of urban decay into
boot-strap gentrification. The risk, however, of
being drawn by name into the war between the
drug lords that terrorize such cities and the
government officials whom hope to dislodge
them, may seem too great a cost. Indeed, the
continuation of the Urban Image project in
Nogales may help to define a safe solution for
companies now on the sidelines. CW
