One Mountain, Three Voices

Before there was a wall, before there was a Border Patrol, before most of the roads in Doña Ana County, there was a priest looking up at a bare mountain. In 1933, Father Lourdes Costa — twenty years pastor to the smelter families of San José del Río — looked out his back window at the peak and saw what it was for. On October 28 of that year he climbed it with sixteen companions; the next day his congregation pledged to build.

What happened next was not a construction project. It was a procession that lasted five years. The Esmeltianos — smelter workers, their wives, their children — volunteered three times a week for nearly five years, hand-building the road and hauling water, timber, cement, and finally tens of tons of Cordova cream limestone up the rock. At the top, the sculptor Urbici Soler worked the scaffold from four in the morning to sunset for over a year, carving a Christ whose palms turn down — not crucified but blessing, in the words of the old histories, "a sublime gesture of peace": arms open toward both nations at once.

The Diocese did not seize this mountain. It acquired the land from the State of New Mexico^F3, and for nearly ninety years it has done with it exactly one thing: kept it holy and kept it open. Forty thousand pilgrims a year climb it in prayer; eight to twelve thousand on Good Friday alone. Some come barefoot. Some finish the last ascent on their knees, keeping promises. It asks no ticket. It has no gate.

And when the government asked to put an access road and motion sensors on this land, the Diocese said yes — in 2021, and again in 2023. Remember that: we are not the party that refused to cooperate on security. We are the party that drew a line at a wall.

Now the federal government has moved to take a fourteen-acre strip across the mountain's base — filed May 7 in the federal court of New Mexico, $183,071 deposited and called justice, blasting already begun below the trail. The government promises its wall will stand a thousand feet from the shrine, as if profanation were a matter of setbacks. Our deacon said it better than any brief: build it, and beneath a Christ whose open palms bless two nations you will read a thirty-foot sign that says Keep Out.

Understand what is being priced. Not acreage: a way. The law itself — the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed almost unanimously by Congress — says the government may not burden the exercise of faith when a lesser means exists. And a lesser means plainly exists: the mountain is already its own barrier, and the government's cameras can watch an escarpment without bulldozing an altar.

We do not question that the nation may secure its border. We say only this, and we will say it in court and on the mountain: you cannot buy a way. You can only walk it. This one has been walked for ninety years, and with God's help it will be walked for ninety more.

The Feast of Cristo Rey is the last Sunday of October. Come and climb. See what $183,000 is supposed to buy.

In the 1930s, the State of New Mexico made a decision about one of its mountains. Through the Public Land Office, it conveyed the Mount Cristo Rey tract to the Diocese^F1 — not for a mine, not for a subdivision, but so that the people of this borderland could raise a monument and keep a pilgrimage. For ninety years that decision has stood. It has cost the taxpayer nothing, and it has given the state one of its most recognized landmarks: a cross visible from three states and two nations, climbed by forty thousand pilgrims a year.

This spring, the federal government moved to unmake that decision without asking. A complaint in condemnation filed May 7 in the federal court of New Mexico; a motion for immediate possession of a fourteen-acre strip across the mountain's base filed May 20; $183,071 deposited on June 15 and called title — though the court's own opinion calls that title "defeasible," and reminds the government that the right to possession "does not mean the right to immediate, actual possession." And blasting crews at work below the trail since April.

New Mexico is not a spectator here, and this is not the project's first bite of New Mexico. The same wall campaign already moved to condemn state trust land near Santa Teresa — land whose revenue funds our schools — after our Land Commissioner refused what she called doing business with thugs. And here is the detail every New Mexican should sit with: for that seven-acre state parcel, the government's own appraisers found $798,500. For fourteen acres of Cristo Rey — twice the land — they deposited $183,071. We do not have to argue about prices to see what those two numbers, side by side, say about respect: the government's arithmetic changes depending on whether it thinks anyone is watching.

And for what? The mountain already carries the government's own equipment. The Diocese said yes to a Border Patrol access road and motion sensors in 2021, and renewed that permission in 2023; a CBP surveillance tower stands on the mountainside today. The terrain that remains is a cliff face. What Washington proposes is maximum concrete for minimum marginal protection, on the one stretch where geology and cooperation were already doing the work — a scar across a pilgrimage route, purchased with our patience.

There is one more thing New Mexico should say, because no other state can say it as well: we are expert in exactly the thing the condemnation form cannot see. For three centuries this state's acequias — the communal ditches that still water our valleys — have been governed by the families who share them, and our law recognizes each one as a political subdivision of the state: a ditch and its people, one legal body. That is not nostalgia. It is a third way of holding what matters — neither the market's commodity nor the government's parcel — older than the republic and still working. The state spends millions a year inviting the world to see "New Mexico True"; here is the truest thing on the brochure — a mountain held open by the people who love it, ninety years, no fence, no fee. The government's complaint can price the acreage. It has no column for what the acreage is: land and people, one thing.

Congressman Vasquez said it plainly on the mountain this month: we can protect a sacred site and have border security both. That should be the whole state's position, plainly and bipartisanly — the Governor, the Attorney General, and our delegation in Washington^F5 insisting on it: in the courtroom as the tenure record, in Washington as the alternative that already exists on the mountainside, and at home as a simple principle.

New Mexico's land. New Mexico's say. And if our own three centuries mean anything: the land and the people are one.

Stand at the top of Mount Cristo Rey and turn slowly. Texas. New Mexico. Chihuahua. One river below you, two countries, three states, and at your back a limestone Christ with his palms turned down — blessing all of it, refusing to choose.

Our grandparents built that. Not a government, not a contractor: the smelter families of Smeltertown, volunteering three days a week for five years in the middle of the Depression, hand-cutting the road and hauling the stone, because their priest looked out his back window and said the mountain was meant for it. Ruben Escandon still keeps the trail his grandparents built. Rebecca Escarciga Lehman still flies in every year to climb it for her Tía Güera — a promise made at a hospital bed, kept across seven hundred miles. Some climb barefoot. Some take the last stretch on their knees. Forty thousand of us a year, from Sunland Park and Anapra, from El Paso, from Juárez when the crossing allows — the way our mothers carried us, the way we carry our own kids now.

Now they are blasting at the bottom of it. Papers filed in May, $183,071 dropped with a court, crews and dynamite working the base of the mountain since April — a wall across the foot of the one place where three generations of this valley learned what it looks like when two countries share a blessing instead of a fence.

Nobody up that trail is confused about the border. We live it daily; we cross it for work and family and funerals; we know it better than anyone in Washington ever will. And we are not all of one mind — ask around Sunland Park and you will hear neighbors who want the wall finished. But hear Ramon Garcia, seventy-three years old, who has climbed every Good Friday of his life and climbed it again this year with the machines grinding below: "There is no need for a wall… they are just stealing the land, land that belongs to us." The cameras are already on the mountain. The sensors are already in the ground — the church said yes to those years ago. The cliff guards itself. A wall there stops no one. It only stops us.

Imagine it the other way. Imagine the one place on this whole hard border where the two countries look up at the same time and see the same thing — kept open, kept climbed, kept lit. That place exists. Our bishop calls it the people's mountain. It has existed for ninety years. We are not asking anyone to build it. We are asking them not to break it.

Last Sunday of October. Sunrise at the trailhead. Bring water, bring your kids, bring your questions. The mountain will answer most of them by the second switchback.