Shakespeare is in New Mexico. Tombstone, in Arizona. Both are old mining towns near the U.S.-Mexico border. They came into existence in the eighteen-seventies, during the silver strike, but soon suffered the same fate as most of the other mining towns in the region: boom, depression, abandonment, and then a strange kind of afterlife.

Some years ago, I spent a summer in the Southwest with my then husband, our daughter, and my two stepsons, and we visited both places. It was 2014, the immigration crisis was very much in the news—unaccompanied children from Central America were arriving at the border in unprecedented numbers, seeking asylum—and I was beginning to do research on the situation. My husband and I were obsessively meeting deadlines, and the kids were getting impatient with us, feeling that we had scammed them into a vacation with no vacation plan. So we looked online and found that Shakespeare and Tombstone offered family-friendly activities: stagecoaches, historamas, and Wild West reënactments.

Apparently, some of the biggest legends of the Wild West had passed through Shakespeare. Dangerous Dan had been there. Curly Bill, too. And Bean Belly Smith. To be honest, I had no idea who these men were. But, reading their names out loud to the kids, I showed enthusiasm. At least I had heard of Billy the Kid, who, it was claimed, had washed dishes at Shakespeare’s only hotel—the Stratford, on Avon Avenue—after escaping from jail in 1875.

Tombstone had a world-famous reënactment show, “The O.K. Corral,” which was staged four times a day. It had museums, theatres, and another form of entertainment: “While you are enjoying the festivities you can be hung or have someone hung by the Tombstone Vigilantes at the hanging scaffold.”

We took a vote. Two adults versus three offspring. Shakespeare was closer. Shakespeare was called Shakespeare. Shakespeare won.

When we got there, it turned out that we hadn’t done our research well: the town was privately owned and open only by appointment, and only for guided tours. At some point, Shakespeare had ceased staging reënactments and had become a rehearsal space for reënactment groups from other parts of the country, a place to practice gunfights and hangings. Now it no longer served that role, either.

So we continued on to Tombstone, which, to our relief, was everything the kids could have hoped for. It was like walking onto the set of an old Western. The streets were lined with haunted brothels and restored saloons, little museums and souvenir shops. On corners, frugal cowboys smoked cigarettes down to the butt, and announced the next gunfight in loud, hoarse voices. Horse-drawn stagecoaches passed by, their mostly senior passengers gazing abstractly out the window toward an invisible but vivid past.

“The O.K. Corral” re-created a dispute that led to a thirty-second shoot-out between outlaw cowboys (the Clanton brothers, the McLaury brothers, et al.) and Tombstone’s lawmen Doc Holliday and the brothers Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt Earp, in the course of which lawlessness was defeated by lawfulness—or, at least, by a different kind of law.

While the kids watched another reënactment, I waited outside. I wanted quiet and solitude. But horse-drawn carriages kept passing by, and a man dressed as a kind of harlequin-cowboy occupied a shady corner nearby and began singing country songs. I was asked for a light, and then a cigarette, and ended up smoking with a mildly depressed and very talkative Doc Holliday. At some point, he was greeted by another Doc Holliday, who also asked for a cigarette. The town, it seemed, existed not only in a loop of embodied repetitions of odd historical moments but also in a kind of cut-and-paste of the same people. It is entirely possible that, at any given moment in Tombstone, Wyatt Earp is having a beer with Wyatt Earp.

What were these towns? Shakespeare, as we had seen, had never quite recovered from the post-boom depression, and was now a ghost of a ghost town. Tombstone had recovered, and was a tourist destination visited by almost half a million people a year, though in many ways it was also a ghost town, a kind of Hades, ruled by the law of eternal return. It was a space where the past had been replaced by a peculiar, repetitive, and selective representation of the past.

Before leaving, the kids insisted on having a family portrait taken—one of those kitsch, sepia, barrels-in-the-background, rifles, and hats kinds of portrait. We were given a menu of costumes to choose from. We could be Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, or one of the Clantons—or an “Outlaw Mexican” or a “Native American.” We had our portrait taken, and that was that for our visit. But I was, of course, left with questions and thoughts about why some people get to have a name in history while others remain a generic category, why some identities are mapped into history and others are mapped out.

I returned to Shakespeare and Tombstone again this year—with my friend Pejk Malinovski, a writer and audio documentarian with whom I’d collaborated before—looking for answers. Or maybe I was looking for better questions. Since my last trip to Arizona, the national fixation on “the border crisis” had reached a fever pitch, and the treatment of undocumented migrants at the border had hit record lows. It was a good moment to return to these places which, although they are near the U.S.-Mexico border and along the most common migration corridors in the U.S., seemed, at least at first glance, oblivious both of history and of the current political reality.

It’s late April, and Pejk and I meet in Tucson. We visit two local friends, Francisco Cantú and Karima Walker, to get their perspective on the towns by the border and on immigration. (Cantú worked for some years for the U.S. Border Patrol, and later wrote a book about the experience, called “The Line Becomes a River.”) Walker asks if we’re going to interview Chris Simcox, who was a founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a Tombstone-based civilian border militia group. After working as a reënactor in one of the gunfights performed in Tombstone, Simcox bought and began editing the now defunct Tombstone Tumbleweed. And, in 2002, using the newspaper as his platform, he issued a call to arms, inviting volunteers to take part in a new citizens’ border militia: “Join together and protect your country in a time of war!” The M.C.D.C., which was connected to the deaths of multiple migrants, disbanded in 2010, but Walker’s question reinforces my sense that there may be a connection between these places which glorify and commodify a violent frontier past and the violence that is so frequently directed toward undocumented immigrants in the area. That night, I Google Simcox and discover that he is now in prison, for reasons unrelated to his Minuteman activities. (He was found guilty of child molestation in 2016 and is serving a nineteen-year sentence.)

Vigilante and civilian patrol groups like the M.C.D.C. have existed for as long as the frontier has existed; the difference is that the perceived enemy is no longer Native Americans but undocumented immigrants, most of whom are also, by the way, indigenous Americans (from America the continent). Indeed, the nineteenth-century narrative of the “savage Indian” is not so different from that of the “illegal immigrant” today. Most of the current discourse that condemns immigration across the southern border, from the White House on down, has to do with the supposed savagery, criminality, and illegality of the “invaders.” The M.C.D.C. no longer exists, but there are other groups. Most of them have Facebook and Web pages, some of which you need to be approved for before joining. In Arizona, there is Arizona Border Recon. In New Mexico, there’s the United Constitutional Patriots, founded in 2014 and led by Larry Mitchell Hopkins, who also goes by Johnny Horton, Jr. Videos posted on the Facebook page of the U.C.P.’s spokesman, Jim Benvie, show civilian militiamen in military-style uniforms driving down dark roads at night, following and then detaining migrants, and forcing them to sit or kneel on the ground to await the arrival of Border Patrol agents. Two weeks before our trip, the group posted a live video showing its members detaining two hundred migrants, among them children, at gunpoint. Hopkins was arrested and charged with illegal weapons possession soon afterward, and, in early May, after Paypal and GoFundMe shut down the group’s donations page, the U.C.P. rebranded itself as Guardian Patriots.