More than a thousand dentists have set up shop in Los Algodones. Their patients are mostly Americans who can’t afford the U.S.’s dental care.
On weekday mornings in late winter, they start to arrive before dawn. They drive in from Arizona or California, catch a shuttle from Yuma, or park their car in a lot in the Sonoran Desert and cross the border on foot. The path for pedestrians follows State Route 186, past a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses offering free Bible courses, along a twisting corridor of razor wire and chain-link fence, through passport control, and into Los Algodones. By noon, more than a thousand people will have walked from the United States to Mexico, in the shadow of the thirty-foot wall that divides them. They come on bicycles and in wheelchairs, pushing walkers and leaning on canes. They come to be healed or transformed or to put an end to their pain, preferably at deep-discount prices.
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Los Algodones is part Lourdes and part Costco. It has no cathedral, shrine, or holy well, yet it draws more than a million pilgrims every year. For most of its history, the town has had little to offer the average visitor. It sits with its back to the Colorado River, in the empty floodplain where the Quechan people first raised crops—algodón means “cotton” in Spanish. Ranch hands and migrant farmers arrived in the eighteen-hundreds, followed by bootleggers, bartenders, drug runners, and pimps. In the nineteen-twenties, when all of Yuma had gone dry with Prohibition, Los Algodones had forty-eight bars and strip clubs a ten-minute stroll from the border. I spoke to one local man who grew up in San Luis Río Colorado, twenty-five miles to the south. As a teen-ager, he recalled, he used to ride to Los Algodones on horseback, swim across the river to the United States with a backpack full of weed, and return home to Mexico, flush with cash. “It was all whorehouses and cantinas here,” he said.
Then came the dentists. In 1969, Dr. Bernardo Magaña, newly graduated from dental college at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, set up shop directly across the street from border control. Within a year, he was treating dozens of patients a day, most of them Americans. It would be more than a decade before many other dentists joined him. The town was just too rough, Magaña’s son, Bernardo, who now runs the practice with his brother and his mother, told me. “So my dad took it upon himself to clean it up.” In the early eighties, Magaña was elected mayor of Los Algodones. Backed by the state government in nearby Mexicali, he cracked down on vice and shuttered the most notorious establishments in town. Year by year, the bars gave way to dental clinics, the partygoers to patients. According to Roberto Díaz and Paula Hahn, who run a website about medical tourism called Border CRxing, Los Algodones now has the highest per-capita concentration of dentists in the world: well over a thousand in a population of fifty-five hundred. It’s known as Molar City.
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