In the last decades, the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea has been characterized by deep transformations, which have changed the local regimes of mobility and reshaped the symbolic boundaries between Eritrea, Ethiopia and the Northern Ethiopian region of Tigray. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted in Mekelle, the main town of Tigray, this article aims at exploring the repercussions that some “critical events” (Das 1997) related to that border (Eritrean independence in 1993, the 1998-2000 EritreanEthiopian war, and the 2018 peace agreements) have provoked in the biographical trajectories of those people who crossed it from 1991 onwards, namely the Ethiopian returnees and Eritrean refugees. While these historical watersheds have brought about critical changes for the people and the communities involved, such as economic failures, forced mobility, an increase in feelings of insecurity and the reshaping of feelings of belonging, the ethnographic data highlights a number of elements that endured in time and in space. By combining the study of the event with a focus on space, and by focusing on the narratives and everyday lives of ordinary people, this article intends to contribute to current debates in the social sciences and Horn of Africa studies both on social changes and on political and symbolic borders.