The Battle During WWI Between the US and Mexico that Brought a Permanent Fence to the Southern Border

It was late afternoon on a blazing August day in 1918. Zeferino Gil Lamadrid was on his way home from doing some business on the Arizona side of the Nogales, a city that straddles the border between the Mexican state of Sonora and American Arizona. He carried a package but didn’t stop at the U.S. customs house along International Street, which ran between the two towns.

Longtime residents often crossed from one side of the border to the other without a second thought. That day, however, would be different. The simple act of crossing the street would nearly spark a shooting war between Mexico and the United States.

It was Aug. 27, 1918, and the United States was at war against the German Empire and its allies. A series of uprisings and rebellions against Mexico’s federal government began in 1910, and violence occasionally poured over the border. Tensions on the border mounted when the U.S. occupied the Mexican city of Veracruz in 1914, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa began raiding American towns in the Southwest and the U.S. Army responded by entering Mexico in a failed attempt to hunt down Villa.

The U.S. began reinforcing border towns with armed troops as American officials, including the local field commanders, increasingly suspected Germany was advising Mexican forces and agitating for violence. Racial and political tensions were both very high, and nowhere was that more apparent than in Nogales.

The aftermath of Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916. (U.S. Army)

So it’s no surprise that a series of confusing events that day led to an American infantryman firing his rifle at a carpenter, the death of Nogales’ Mexican mayor and, eventually, the first permanent fence built to keep people from freely crossing the border between the two countries.

The bad blood at the border didn’t start in Nogales. Mexico and the United States clashed long before the Texas border was established. The two went to war in 1846 over a strip of desert between the Rio Grande and Nueces rivers, a border dispute that went well beyond that slice of territory. Texas had joined the United States while Mexico never recognized that Texas was independent of Mexico in the first place.

By 1909, destiny had been manifested, the U.S. stretched from sea to shining sea and the frontier was closed. There were no southern border disputes — none that should have led to a shooting war anyway. In Nogales, no one needed a border fence. The wide boulevard Calle Internacional-International Street was enough — until it wasn’t.

→ Read the entire article on the Military.com website.
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