Yes, people really have played volleyball over the US–Mexico border fence. The best-known example comes from the twin towns of Naco, Arizona, and Naco, Sonora, where residents began holding a cross-border match in 1979 as part of a shared town festival, with the boundary fence serving as the net. Local players nicknamed the game “walleyball.” The tradition became a symbol of how closely linked many border communities are, even as the barrier between them grew taller and harder to cross.
This article explains where the game started, how it was played, how changes to the fence affected it, and what is known about whether it still takes place, because published accounts do not fully agree.
The photo above appears to show a casual game on a beach, with the ball sailing over a fence of tall steel posts. It gives a sense of how a border barrier can be turned, for an afternoon, into sports equipment.
Two towns with one name
Naco sits in the high desert of southeastern Arizona, a short drive south of the old mining town of Bisbee. Directly across the line lies its Mexican namesake in the state of Sonora. The name is often said to come from an Opata word for the nopal cactus. Congress made Naco a port of entry in 1902, and the crossing is still open around the clock.
The American side is tiny. The 2020 census counted 824 people in Naco, Arizona, down from 1,046 a decade earlier, and the two towns together have fewer than 10,000 residents. In places like this, families, shoppers and workers have crossed back and forth for generations, and it is common for relatives to live on both sides.
Naco has a dramatic footnote in history too. In 1929, during a rebellion in Mexico, a pilot working for the rebels dropped homemade bombs on federal positions across the line, and several landed on the Arizona side. It is described as the only known case of a US town being bombed by aircraft working for a foreign power.
How the border volleyball game worked
The match was part of a joint celebration known as the Fiesta Bi-Nacional. Teams lined up on their own side of the boundary, picnic tables and food stands were set up nearby, and the ball went back and forth over the fence. The format followed ordinary volleyball, though reporters who watched it described a faster, scrappier version shaped by the uneven ground and the height of the barrier. The video above shows one of these cross-border games.
In the early years the “net” was a barbed-wire fence. According to Univision, the wire kept puncturing balls, so players draped a rubber tarp over it. Residents also remember a gap in the fence, known locally as “El Hoyo” (“the hole”), that people used to cross for groceries and errands.
The spirit of the event is captured in a remark by José Lorenzo Villegas, then mayor of Naco, Sonora, who told Reuters in 2007: “What’s unusual is that both the Mexican and US teams are playing at home, with the fence as the net.”
Because members of the same family could end up on opposite teams, the match worked less as a contest between two countries and more as a reunion with a ball in it.
How a taller fence changed the tradition
Border policy shifted sharply in the 1990s. Operation Gatekeeper, launched in 1994, stepped up enforcement, and in the late 1990s the wire fence at Naco was replaced with welded metal beams. Univision reports that the new barrier sealed off more than 300 of the roughly 362 miles of the Naco sector, and that the volleyball games had to move to stretches where a ball could still clear the top.
When did the matches stop? Here the sources differ:
- Univision, writing in 2017, quoted local officials and the town historian saying the last match was played in April 2007, and that nobody plays across the fence anymore.
- Remezcla, in August 2015, still described walleyball as an annual event in the Nacos that had lasted more than 30 years.
- Earlier coverage of this story said the video above was filmed in 2012, which, if accurate, would suggest informal games continued after 2007.
The most careful reading is that the organised festival match ran from 1979 to about 2007, and that smaller or occasional games may have happened later. Readers planning a visit should not expect a scheduled match today.
Similar cross-border games
Naco was not the only place where people turned the barrier into a playing field:
- Calexico and Mexicali. In 2010 a soccer match was played along the fence between these two cities, with defenders passing the ball through the bars to forwards on the other side.
- San Diego and Tijuana. Where the border fence runs into the Pacific, beachgoers have reportedly knocked volleyballs over the posts for impromptu games.
- Seesaws at Sunland Park. In 2019 architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello slid pink seesaws through the border wall at Sunland Park, New Mexico, opposite Ciudad Juárez, so that children on both sides could play together for a short time.
Remezcla also links walleyball to a much older tradition. Ulama, an ancient Mesoamerican ball game that survives in parts of Mexico, is played with an imaginary line dividing the two sides, and versions of it once reached into what are now Sonora and Arizona.
What the story shows, and what it does not
It would be easy to overstate what a volleyball game can do. The match did not change immigration law, stop smuggling or soften enforcement; the fence went up regardless. Nor was every part of border life peaceful. Its value was smaller and more human: it reminded people on both sides, and outsiders watching the coverage, that the border runs through communities, not between strangers.
Older residents quoted by Univision remembered a time when there was little tension along that stretch of the line, and they described the end of the games as a real loss. That memory matters for anyone trying to understand border towns, where daily life is shaped as much by family ties and shared festivals as by politics.
A few practical points if the topic interests you:
- Check the date of any article you read about the Naco games, since the situation changed after 2007.
- Look for local voices, such as the Historical Museum of Naco, Sonora, which keeps records of town life.
- Remember that “border” stories from Arizona, California and Texas involve different terrain, fences and communities.
Why it still resonates
A ball flying over a wall is a simple image, which is why it keeps being shared. It shows two groups who cannot easily cross a line still finding a way to play together, follow the same rules and cheer the same good rally. For the people of the two Nacos, that game was part of growing up, and for many readers it remains a reminder that neighbours are neighbours, whichever side of the fence they live on.
Sources: Univision (2017): When neighbors played volleyball over the U.S.-Mexico border fence; Remezcla (2015): The cross-border walleyball game; Wikipedia: Naco, Arizona. Earlier reporting by Rafa Fernandez De Castro for Fusion, Reuters (2007) and an original post by True Activist.
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