Please join me at the opening on Thursday, June 13, at 7 PM.

LOCATION: The Institute of Culture of Baja California of Tijuana (ICBC)        Boulevard Paseo del Centenario 3-10310, Tijuana, Baja California, 22318

Click here for the DRIVING DIRECTIONS link on Google maps

In this show, I will offer new images in an ongoing project to document the inscriptions left by migrants on the border wall as they wait, watch, and prepare to cross.  The names, dates, hometowns and short messages suggest stories, gesture to the hopes and frustrations of people in the process of migration, and reveal aspects of everyday life in Tijuana and San Diego, a life that is well-known but largely invisible in public life and discourse.

Please join me on Thursday, June 13!  Thanks!

Border wall built into the Pacific Ocean at the border of San Diego/Tijuana

In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security began the construction of a second, massive border wall along the US-Mexico border through private property, national and state parks, wildlife preserves, sacred lands. The construction was speeded along by a provision of the Real ID Act, passed by Congress in 2005. Section 102 of the Real ID Act gives unprecedented authority to the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to waive any local, state or federal law “to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads” for border security. Here you can reada legal analysis of this provision written by an environmental attorney who worked in both Clinton & Bush administrations. This provision of the Real ID Act allows the uncontested waiver of laws that protect the environment, local communities and the human right to a secure environment. The waiver authority, in the hands of one appointed official, contradicts the rule of law, and excludes the voices and ideas of environmental scientists, human rights advocates, and local community members from the democratic process.

Greg Rainoff’s film examines this process from the perspective of the San Diego/Tijuana region. You can watch it on Snagfilms here:

Massive 18-foot iron border wall cuts through the pristine Jacumba Mountains Wilderness area in Imperial County, California

In a surprising and welcome move this week, the national board of the Sierra Club voted on Wednesday to support comprehensive immigration reform.  The move unifies the Sierra Club and the already powerful  immigrant rights movement, bringing hefty political clout to the support of a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s eleven million undocumented immigrants.

In a statement released this morning, Sierra Club’s Executive Director Michael Brune and President Allison Chin affirmed the commitment of the club to work together with other organizations committed to democracy, equality AND the environment.

“The Sierra Club is committed to partnering with all who share our urgent concerns about advancing our democracy and fighting the climate crisis. It is time for us to work together,” they write.

“That is why the Sierra Club Board of Directors has voted to offer our organization’s strong support for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Such a pathway should be free of unreasonable barriers and should facilitate keeping families together and uniting those that have been split apart whenever possible.”

This new policy marks a major shift for the nation’s oldest environmental organization. The Sierra Club continues to oppose the construction of border walls, and opposes the waiver authority granted to the Department of Homeland Security secretary to speed construction of walls and infrastructure.  The club has articulated a clear critique of NAFTA, and has officially taken a stand linking undocumented  immigration to the economic crisis prompted by NAFTA in Mexico. But they have stopped short, until now, of taking a position on Comprehensive Immigration Reform that would enable to them clearly join forces with immigrant rights groups.

The difficulty of this kind of base building across disparate sectors in the world of public policy advocacy is the subject an emerging body of scholarship on human rights and environmentalism. As Romina Picolotti and Jorge Daniel Taillant pointed out in their introduction to the anthology Linking Human Rights and the Environment (Tucson, 2003), in spite of the fact that current problems of environmental degradation have a disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable, marginalized populations, human rights organizations and environmentalists have historically framed these issues in ways that travel along separate legislative tracks.

The Sierra Club forged a position of official neutrality on the question of immigration in the course of a lengthy crisis of identity and political integrity.  As early as 1996, nativist forces began attempting to sway environmentalists to the anti-immigration camp, framing popular racist arguments  about immigration and population control in terms of “environmental  ethics” and the commitment to sustainability.

In 1998, the internal division reached a crisis point, when the Sierra Club’s nativist forces joined together under the name Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization (SUSPS) and joined anti-immigrant groups eager to mobilize the Sierra Club’s membership to oppose immmigration reform. When faced with the decision whether to adopt a nativist plank, the Sierra Club rejected the anti-immigrant hysteria and voted 60% to 40% to remain neutral on the question of immigration.  The SUSPS then changed tactics, and over the course of the next five years, began a stealth campaign to elect nativist members on the national board of the Sierra Club.

Alerted to their nativist agenda by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Sierra Club leaders successfully mobilized membership to oppose nativist, anti-immigrant policies. But the opposition left them with a position of neutrality.

Thus, the Sierra Club’s decision this week is a huge step forward. Building bridges between human rights and environmentalism may also help shine some light on migrants’ struggles to preserve the integrity of their communities and natural environment.

Members of the community of Granjas Familiares in eastern Tijuana fight to preserve the Arroyo Alamar

The struggle to save the Rio Alamar (Arroyo Alamar in Spanish)  is a case in point. For over a decade, the immigrant communities of Chilpancingo and Granjas Familiares in Tijuana have been working together with San Diego’s Environmental Health Coalition to preserve the natural environment and fight back against local factories who dump toxic wastes into the Arroyo Alamar.

The course of the Arroyo Alamar crosses back and forth several times between the United States and Mexico. Thus, the toxic wastes dumped by maquiladoras on one side of the border have deep impacts on the people and communities of the entire watershed.

Significant impacts can be felt in both San Diego and Tijuana. The community of Granjas Familiares, first impacted by the presence of toxins in their drinking water and air, are now threatened by a plan to channelize the river. Waste products of all kinds make their way down river, crossing into San Diego and ending up in the rivers & wildlands of San Diego County.  Thus, the potential success of migrants in Tijuana will go a long way in preserving the integrity of San Diego as well.

The struggle for the Arroyo Alamar demonstrates two important points: first, that  immigrants care deeply about environmental preservation.  And second, that environmentalism cannot be separated from the struggle to protect people, families and communities.

As Brune and Chin write in their statement, “We must ensure that the people who are the most disenfranchised and the most affected by pollution have the voice to fight polluters and advocate for climate solutions without fear.”

Migrant, citizen, legal resident, California native: the environment belongs to us all.

Banished Veteran mural designed by artist and U.S. Navy Veteran Amos Gregory

Yesterday, in Playas de Tijuana, my friend Maria Teresa and I came upon the group Banished Veterans painting a new mural on the border wall.

Click here for photos on Flickr.

Designed by the San Francisco artist and U.S. Navy veteran Amos Gregory, the mural is an expression of the feelings of an estimated 50 veterans of the United States military and armed forces living in Baja California who were DEPORTED from the United States. Hundreds of veterans who served honorably in the U.S.military have been deported in recent years.

The mural is a depiction of the American flag hung upside down, the universal signal of distress. Next to the red & white stripes, an SOS is painted in white, and along the east-facing surfaces of the bars of the border wall, the names of deported veterans.

U.S. immigration law makes no distinction for military status in deportation cases. And so, these veterans have been deported after serving the U.S. with honor.

I spoke to Hector Lopez, Fabian Rebolledo, and Alex Murillo, organizers of the Banished Veterans Support Group of Baja California and they told me their story.

Please join them in their efforts to support veterans in need.  Find them at Banished Veterans on Facebook

And check out this new film about these veterans and their struggle.

Deported Veterans Mural Project trailer from Lowkey RiderOne on Vimeo.

Alex Murillo, U.S. Navy from 1996-2000, was deported a year and half ago.

Alex Murillo is one of an estimated 50 U.S. military veterans living in Baja California–not by choice–but because he and the others were deported from the United States. Because U.S. immigration law makes no distinction between military veterans and other U.S. residents who have not completed the naturalization process, these veterans were deported with no consideration of the sacrifices they have made for the United States.

In a zealous effort to appease anti-immigration forces nationwide, the Obama Administration has set deportation records for years, deporting far more people than the Bush Administration. In the fiscal year 2012, the Obama Administation deported 406,849 people. In his first term in office, Obama has set a new record for deportations, having deported a total of 1.5 million people so far.

A new independent film about these veterans living  in Baja California is now coming out by filmmakers Elaine Cromie and Griselda San Martin, called “Deported Veterans: The Fight to Return Home.”  Check out the trailer here, and please give these veterans a shout out.  They served our country with bravery and patriotism.  Thank you for your sacrifice!

Join the Banished Veterans support group on Facebook  These men live in Rosarito, and they can use donations of clothing, shoes, other items for basic living needs. Please help if you can.

Learn more on BanishedVeterans.com

Check out the film Deported Veterans: The Fight to Return Home  And watch the trailer here!  

Thank you for your support!

Anthony Paul Marchetti's photograph from the exhibition Occidente Nuevo: Recycled Tijuana

Opening Saturday, April 6, from 1-3 pm at Mariposa Studios in Colonia Federal Tijuana

This new show features photos of Tijuana’s fascinating and sometimes disturbing built environment.

In their artist statement, the photographers explain:

The exhibition, Occidente Nuevo: Recycled Tijuana plays off Robert Adams’s seminal series The New West, a stunning photo essay about newly developed tract homes that sprang up throughout the barren western landscape during the mid 1970s. In an ironic departure from Adams, this work captures a new west created from the debris of what has now become the old west. Housing developments in Tijuana, Mexico are being created through re-use of old housing stock from the San Diego area. The process of relocating entire houses and cast-off housing debris has been occurring over recent decades, resulting in several Tijuana neighborhoods built almost entirely out of recycled architecture. These homes have been passed down generation-to-generation, and inhabited with pride.

With their first exhibition of this work in Tijuana, photographers Anthony Paul Marchetti and Laura Migliorino continue in the tradition of a number of Tijuana and San Diego artists who have focused on the innovative methods of “construction by necessity” in Tijuana’s colonias.

Photographer and border artist Maria Teresa Fernández focuses on the unique aesthetic qualities of the random combinations of materials in the dwellings of community members in the most vulnerable informal settlements of the city. Her 2011 exhibit Architects by Force/Arquitectos a la Fuerza  featured photographs of the community Chilpancingo, now demolished by the City of Tijuana to make way for the channelization of the river.

Tijuana artists Ingrid Hernández and Alejandro Cartajena have been working on these themes for the past decade.  They will contribute photos from their own large bodies of work to explore this theme alongside the Minnesota artists in this show.  (The two have exhibited their work along with  Marchetti and Migliorino in Minnesota as well).

And in particular, the widely celebrated border work of architect Teddy Cruz has examined the “entreprenuerial energy” and “high density co-existence” in Tijuana’s colonias. In both scholarship and critical practice, Cruz has sketched the outlines of a vital cross-border cycle of consuming and discarding, reusing and reinventing housing materials–discarded by affluent homeowners in the United States and picked up by Mexican entrepreneurs and builders for a second life in Tijuana.

It was this productive cross-border cycle that inspired Migliorino and Marchetti to document the houses of Tijuana’s colonias.

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I interviewed the photographers last week, and learned a little more about their process.

Laura Migliorino was in a show with Teddy Cruz at Minnesota’s Walker and the Carnegie Museum in 2007 when she first learned about this phenomenon of houses transported across the border from San Diego to Tijuana.

Migliorino recalls, “Teddy and I started chatting at a panel discussion at the Carnegie Museum and he introduced me to this phenomena of Tijuana houses which had been literally flatbeaded, hoisted off their foundation–flatbeaded in total–and taken over the border. I thought this was totally fascinating: that you virtually have an entire city built out of the debris–architectural debris–from the United States.”

And the enthusiasm was mutual. “After I told Anthony,” Migliorino says, ”he got on a plane and flew out.”

Anthony Marchetti made his first two trips to Tijuana in 2009 and early 2010. Migliorino joined him later on the trips in 2010, and the photographers completed the project in six trips of 4-5 days at a time.

Travelling with a guide, Hector Lizarragga of Rosarito, the photographers criss-crossed the city, driving for ten or twelve hours a day. Migliorino recalls, “We would get up at 7:00 in the morning and we would shoot until we lost the light. Sometimes we were so fried that I felt like we were drunk.”

Although they had originally planned to rent a car and drive around Tijuana themselves, the artists were relieved to have help: “We could never have completed the project without Hector’s assistance,” Marchetti told me.

Lack of a pre-existing history of this phenomenon made the initial stages of the project more challenging. Marchetti notes that on his first trip, he didn’t take any photographs at all, and it took a while for the pair to find the types of structures they were looking for.

Marchetti explains, “There weren’t any images online, we couldn’t find any images anywhere. Most everybody in Tijuana knows about this phenomenon, but they didn’t really put it all together.”

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1941, the Linda Vista Federal Housing Project begins (Defense Housing Project #4092)

The story, as did the houses, begins in San Diego. Historian Mary Taschner and architect Christine Killory completed studies of this boom and the housing policies that followed, published in the Journal of San Diego History.  Killory writes that at the onset of WWII, San Diego experienced a severe housing shortage as factory workers in war support industries arrived for new defense jobs. In 1940, approximately fifty thousand people moved to San Diego increasing the ranks of defense industry workers to 90,000, with more expected in the coming years.

The sudden economic boom prompted a massive crisis that the city of San Diego was reluctant to face. Christine Killory notes, “In the twelve months prior to March 1942, 32,000 families and 6,000 single men had filed applications with the local Homes Registration Bureau.”

Taschner describes how the crisis put tremendous pressure on workers and their families. “For over a year, aircraft workers and their families poured into San Diego at the rate of 1,500 a week. The results were immediate — there was no place to live. People trudged the streets looking for a place to sleep, any kind of place. Stories filled the press about families sleeping in their cars or even in all night theatres for lack of a better place. People shared hotel rooms with night shift workers using the room during the day, while day shift workers slept there at night. Some beds were never cold.”

And yet, in spite of the crisis, San Diego city leaders refused to establish a Housing Authority that would have enabled them to manage and build public housing for the new workers. As Killory explains, “The businessmen, realtors, lawyers, and architects who comprised San Diego’s civic elite had fashioned a strategy for growth based on tourism and military development, and excluding such distasteful aspects of industrialism as the immigration of undesirable groups—racial minorities and the poor. The plan was predicated on a process of urban decentralization whereby the entire city, supported by extensive federal military investment, would be available for the construction of single-family housing.”

Thus, in 1941 in response to a crisis that was now beginning to threaten the war effort, the federal government acted unilaterally, appropriating land in San Diego and building twenty separate federal public housing projects throughout the city.  The largest project was in Linda Vista, where 3000 homes were built for over 13,000 people—in a miracle of mass production—in just 300 days.

Yet, San Diego city leaders continued to consider these communities and the people in them mere temporary residents of San Diego. And so they did little to create the infrastructure that would enable Linda Vista to develop into a long-lasting, close knit community. In spite of well-designed urban plan for the Linda Vista community, neither the City of San Diego nor developers were willing to pay for the construction of the parks and public spaces, shopping malls, costly sewer and water systems and schools that were envisioned in the master plan.

Killory writes, “When the Linda Vista Federal Housing project opened in 1941, the one route in and out of Linda Vista was a narrow, winding, very dangerous two-lane road usually clogged with traffic, its grades too steep for buses to negotiate.”

When the war was over in 1945, there was widespread support in San Diego for the immediate demolition of these neighborhoods.

As Killory explains, “Post-war, San Diego created a new form of slum—tracts of bungalows abandoned first by their original residents and then by mass transit. As opponents of subsidized housing had hoped, there was widespread support for razing the wartime housing to build houses for returning soldiers and their families.”

Over five thousand dwellings were automatically reclassified from temporary to permanent so they could be sold and relocated in unincorporated areas of San Diego County, where the building codes were less restrictive or nonexistent. Some of the demountable housing was partially refurbished and retained for further use; some was sold to Mexico.”

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Given the hostility of San Diego city elites to the possibility of permanent working class neighborhoods in the city, it is no surprise that this history, like the history of the houses themselves, was so hard for the photographers Migliorino and Marchetti to piece together.

Thus, the project contributes as much to local history as it does to photography, filling in a huge gap in our understanding of urban development. While many Tijuanenses are familiar with the use of garage doors and other discarded industrial materials to build homes in the new outlying settlements of Tijuana, what is less well-known is that the history of this cycle of repurposing and innovative borrowing began back in the 1940s and 50s.

Migliorino notes, “There were tens of thousands of homes transported. The buyers would transport these homes to the San Ysidro side, where the Walmart is now, and he would take them over to a lot where the Home Depot is in Tijuana. And potential buyers would go and buy their houses there.”

“One compound we saw was owned by a woman named Christina, she had four or five houses of barrack housing, and her grandfather had brought them down. We heard about one man, Federico Chavez, who had a big business selling these homes. And supposedly his daughter Marta Chavez is still in the real estate business.”

“Essentially, as I understood it,” Migliorino continues, “there’s a long tradition of Mexican construction workers in southern California. When the war ended they were going to destroy these houses, and people were, ‘well, we will just take them off your hands.’  The Mexicans are the ones who came up and took them. It became a relationship between developers and Mexican brokers over a period of time. So when the next wave came, the same thing happened. The Mexican brokers came in and took them away.”

Much of what the photographers learned came from conversations with the Tijuana homeowners themselves.

Migliorino notes, “They seemed to know a lot. It depended on the family, but most of them knew quite a bit about the houses. And for most of them it was their parents and grandparents who brought the house down.  The grandfather, or the father, brought it down from San Diego, and passed it down through the generations.”

And, Migliorino recalls, the pride of ownership was clear in conversations and in the condition of the homes:

“These were family homes, and so they were very interested in the history of their houses. And they were really excited that somebody else was interested in their house. And they were all very proud of it… They were all working on their houses, expanding this, remodeling and adding on. The homes are very much about a legacy for the families.”

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Anthony Marchetti’s photographs in Occidente Nuevo focus on the houses themselves, while Laura Migliorino pairs portraits of the families with their homes.

Marchetti’s work explores space and place, and the sometimes troubled relationship between humans and the built environment. Shaped by the strong lines of architectural detail, Marchetti’s evocative photos explore the human intervention in landscape, the visual traces that form narrative and memory.

Accompanying the Occidente Nuevo: Recycling Tijuana project, Marchetti has developed two other series focusing on the built environment of Tijuana, “Little Boxes” and “Ruinas.” Marchetti’s photographs of endless rows of tasteful but lifeless Mexican modernist cubicles built during the recent boom in Baja California evoke Adams’s vast suburban landscapes and gesture toward the folly of unfettered development in Tijuana.

Marchetti’s photos reference and reframe  Robert Adams’s 1974 series The New West.  Devoid of the people and human touch that make houses into homes, the work might too swiftly be read as a one-dimensional, lifeless depiction of foolhardy suburban sprawl. Yet another of Marchetti’s projects—“Apartment for Rent”—gives us a more nuanced view of the complexity that Marchetti is reaching for.

Marchetti photographed apartments during what he identifies as “in between moments” after one tenant has left and before another has moved in. The simple white palatte heightens the emotion in these images of empty apartments and everyday objects: a single blue recliner facing a corner in an empty living room, a lone shelf holding a stack of neatly folded shirts and a rolled up rug, dirt stained carpet marking spaces where furniture once stood.

Marchetti’s empty rooms express both melancholy and humor as they gesture to the lives once lived there.   Marchetti explains, “Assuming the dimensions and depth of portraiture, the resulting images reveal partial narratives about people’s lives. Rooms have become containers for evidence: each mark on the wall, imprint on the carpet, and abandoned object offers a glimpse into private lives of previous residents” (Apartment for Rent).

Marchetti’s photographs in Occidente Nuevo of Tijuana’s transplanted houses also capture these details that convey  the personal choices and agency of  Tijuana’s colonia dwellers, and the details hint at a bigger story.  Delicate cast-iron grillwork, and bright colors transform anonymous buildings into genuine homes. It is precisely this suggestion of a story that give Marchetti & Migliorino’s photos in Occidente Nuevo such pathos.

Laura Migliorino focuses on portraits and engages with the tensions of suburban sprawl, drawing on the famous 1950 Life Magazine feature on the new Levittown suburbs.

In one of Migliorino’s portraits at a show at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center about suburbs, “Egret Street” in the 2006 exhibition “World’s Away: New Suburban Landscapes” a family is standing proudly in front of the entrance to their home. The tall, smiling figures of father, mother, and preteen son and daughter dominate the photo, framed by the banal architectural details of a typical tract home garage door, with its brick trim, and Home Depot colonial style porch lantern.

The family home appears in the far background, dwarfed by the family. What distinguishes Migliorino’s portrait from the Levittown photos featuring the Bernard Levey family is that this is a family of Ethiopian immigrants, resettled in a typical American subdivision dressed in typical middle class American style.

Critical but not cynical, and intimate without being sentimental, Migliorino’s family portraits capture the tension between the anonymity and stasis of cookie-cutter suburbs and the dynamic social mobility that suburban life has always promised.  Processed as a double exposure, the photo allows the outlines of the tract house and garage to cut through the figures, as if to suggest that this American life will leave its mark.

Migliorino’s portraits of Tijuana families capture many of these same tensions, and through conversation, stories would unfold, relationships developed.

And this conversation gives the photos a genuine intimacy. As Migliorino explains,

“And so we started interacting with the locals, and that became a big part of what we were doing. We would start conversing with them about the history of their house just to see how they would respond.

I knew that I would want to pair the houses with the people. But the project is as much about the process as the result.”

Equestrian rider meets a friend at the old fence at Friendship Park in 2009

Nobody ever thought keeping a little park open would be so much work. But protecting public access to Friendship Park has turned into a full-time job for members of the Friends of Friendship Park.

After two weeks of uncertainty and an announcement from Border Patrol on March 18 that the park would be closed because of the sequester, Friends of Friendship Park are pleased to announce today that San Diego Sector Chief Paul Beeson has decided that he WILL KEEP THE PARK OPEN to the public.

For decades it was a normal public park, enjoyed by families for Sunday afternoon gatherings. Then DHS built a huge wall. They blocked off Friendship Park, and suddenly Sundays felt like visiting day at a maximum security prison.

Tourists pose in front of Boundary Monument 258 on the Playas de Tijuana side of Friendship Park

Then last fall, in October 2012, Friendship Park opened up again.  After many years of negotiating with the San Diego Sector Border Patrol, Friends of Friendship Park were delighted in the fall of 2012 when San Diego Sector  Chief Paul Beeson made the decision to staff the park gate. A grand opening was celebrated, featuring elements of a new park design by Jim Brown of PUBLIC Architecture and Planning.

Now Friendship Park is open, Saturdays and Sundays, 10-2, like clockwork.

And so, in the wake of the federal sequester cuts, the Friends of Friendship Park braced themselves for another dramatic interlude.  Fortunately, in a rare instance of Congress doing its job to protect the public good, the Border Patrol has been spared from the furloughs and overtime cuts resulting from the sequester.

Public gathers at the gate entrance for the 40th Anniversary Celebration of Friendship Park, founded in August 1971 by First Lady Pat Nixon

Thus, Friends of Friendship Park welcomed today the announcement by San Diego Border Patrol Chief Paul Beeson that until further notice routine public access WILL CONTINUE at Friendship Park, the historic meeting place overlooking the Pacific Ocean on the U.S.-Mexico border.  Border Patrol staff will ensure that the public will be allowed to visit with family and friends at Friendship Park each Saturday and Sunday from 10 am to 2 pm. 

While celebrating the news, leaders from the community coalition called on the community to exercise continued vigilance, as Chief Beeson was unable to commit that the park would remain accessible to the public permanently, in light of continuing uncertainty surrounding federal funding of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

“We call on San Diego Border Patrol officials to seek every possible avenue to expand rather than reduce public access to Friendship Park, and to seek every opportunity to invest in good relations with our neighboring ally, Mexico,” said Dan Watman, a member of the Friends of Friendship Coalition.

Girl smiles as she visits with her sister through the fence

For generations people from both nations have met at Friendship Park, the only place along the entire US/Mexico border that was established specifically to promote cross border relations.  Members of families separated by immigration status often travel great distances to be reunited with their loved ones at this historic location.

Border Patrol reports that the park welcomes 130 visitors per month.  And park visitors who drive down from Los Angeles or Riverside to visit with family members who live in Mexico can be assured that the park will be open.

Friendship Park is also a significant cultural and historical landmark for people of both nations, the monument standing at its center marking the spot where the first border marker was set in place at the end of the US-Mexico War. 

Leaders from the Friends of Friendship Park community coalition have negotiated in good faith with San Diego Border Patrol officials during the past three years to keep the park open so that the public could visit with friends and relatives at the border fence.  

“The decision to think first of closing Friendship Park when threatened with budget cuts reflects a short-sighted view of what the border is all about,” said John Fanestil, another leader of the community coalition. 

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THE FRIENDS OF FRIENDSHIP PARK is dedicated to the proposition that promoting friendship between Mexico and the United States enhances the security of people living in both nations.

RELATED STORIES: 

Imperial Beach Patch, story by Khari Johnson April 3

KPBS April 4 Khari Johnson story

ABC News

ABC Channel 10 News

San Diego Reader 

Tijuana artist Nestor Mondragon (Spel Uno of the well-known HEM crew) painting the wall

It is often said that Tijuana is a “ciudad de paso.”  That is, a place of passage, a city where tourists come and go. A launching pad for migrants who are only just passing through on their way to the United States.

Indeed, after John Spreckels financed a railroad line from Yuma to San Diego between 1909 and 1911, passing through Tecate and Tijuana, American and Mexican investors built an entertainment empire in Tijuana, dedicating much of the city’s public space to providing entertainment and escape for American tourists.

And yes, for each of the U.S.’s many mass deportation movements–the “Mexican Repatriation” of the 1930s, “Operation Wetback” of 1954, and the mass deportations today under the Obama Administration– Tijuana’s location on the border has provided the displaced with a place to land.

Yet this narrative of Tijuana as a “ciudad de paso” obscures as much as it reveals.

Spel and Monica buff the wall white

Ciudad Habla, or “The City Speaks,” offers a more nuanced and complex history of our city. CiudadHablaTijuana is a project initiated by a group of Tijuana residents, whose aim is to give voice to the people of Tijuana through the medium of urban art projects.  Their practices in the visual arts combined with a commitment to community development give organizers of the project a common frame of reference. Photographer Gabriela Posada del Real, director of Reacciona Tijuana, painter and UABC professor Garzón Masabó, along with a private donor who years ago started painting murals in Tijuana, developed the project to activate the consciousness of Tijuanenses by celebrating the rich and diverse visual culture of the region.

The project involves the community directly in telling its own story through the process of design and production of works of art. Using general surveys as well as personal interviews with community members, the organizers solicit the people’s ideas and preferences. What colors do you like to see in the city? What locations do you feel are most important for public murals?

Through direct solicitation, the community learns to develop their own aesthetic and ethical values. And in the process, Tijuanenses consciously improve the visual character of their city’s public spaces. Many believe that when residents take ownership of the spaces where they live, people will then be more likely to engage in positive democratic political processes. Art raises consciousness, not only aesthetically but politically.

Eliza Zapata and Janis Romerales of Colectivo Tripié present their proposal

Ciudad Habla solicits proposals from local artists, and the artists themselves work with the community. Local artists have presented their proposals in open discussion and critique sessions at UABC, under the direction of  Professor Garzón Masabó.  The  selection process is thus both cooperative and competitive, and the winners are awarded stipends of $10,000 pesos  ($850 dollars) to produce their work. The project guidelines require that the artist must include the community in some way.

The project selected by Ciudad Habla for the month of March is called “En pocas palabras: Tijuana” or “In a few words: Tijuana.”  Artist Nestor Mondragon (Spel Uno of Tijuana’s well-known HEM crew) proposed a mural consisting of one hundred words that they felt best describe their city, solicited from a cross-section of Tijuana residents.  Mondragon spent two weeks doing interviews with residents of colonias across the city: El Florido, Altamira, Buenos Aires, Pípila, Otay and the Centro.

Wall below the old railroad bridge on the Via Rapida Poniente in Tijuana

With these words, Mondragon has designed and is painting a mural underneath the old railroad bridge on the Via Rapida Poniente. The mural replaces a now faded mural painted several years ago, and participates in a fifteen year long tradition of public arts and murals in the city.

Tijuana’s rapid growth and its location as a major world city on the northernmost border of Latin America and on the eastern edge of the Pacific Rim contribute to a rich, diverse culture of immigrants. Families come, and they put down roots.  And they bring their local cuisine from Oaxaca or Nayarit, rich musical traditions like Son Jarocho from Veracrus, the city’s open, friendly quality, shaped by the character of its Sinaloenses.

Like many world cities, Tijuana has experienced rapid growth in the 20th century. The Border Industrialization Program of the 1960s offered factory jobs and daily wages to thousands of migrants from rural Mexico. Tijuana from a tiny pueblo of 250 inhabitants to a city of 153,000 in 1960. Between 1960 and 2000, the population of Tijuana grew by 662.7%, and in 1995, one year after NAFTA, Tijuana’s population had grown to 991,000.  Today, it is estimated that 1.5 million people call Tijuana home.

And it is said that Tijuana’s footprint grows by one square kilometer per day.

With the support provided by Ciudad Habla, perhaps more of what is said about  Tijuana will come from the residents themselves.

Man gets a haircut at the 28th Street Barbershop in Sherman Heights. One of San DIego's oldest neighborhoods, Sherman Heights was established in 1868

Does Washington really “get” the border?  As we on the southwest border watch our leaders in Washington D.C. debate the complexities of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, we often feel that Washington is out of touch with the everyday realities of California.

To cross the border at San Ysidro to go buy some groceries at Sprouts or Whole Foods, it is likely that you will spend a minimum of 2 hours sitting in your car, oftentimes 3 hours, to move a mere 3 miles. Funding to ease the flow of legal and legitimate crossing at the official Ports of Entry has been slow in coming.

Yet Congress is quick to respond and generous with the cash when the defense industry calls for more spending to militarize the border. A recent study shows that the U.S. spends more on immigration and border enforcement than on all other federal law enforcement combined: a whopping $18 billion was spent in 2012 alone.  And according to the Migration Policy Institute report, Immigration Enforcement in the United States: The Rise of a Formidable Machinery, 187 billion federal dollars have been spent on immigration enforcement in the last quarter century.  That’s an average of about $7.2 billion every year.

Jaycee's Market, a lively neighborhood hub in San Diego's Golden Hill

Many individuals and groups who live in the southwest believe that Washington doesn’t really understand the border.  The active, aggressive militarization of our borderlands through disproportionate spending on border enforcement does not make our border safer or better.

Rather, the hasty development of the border enforcement apparatus that we see today–giant walls, faulty technologies, seismic sensors, laser landscape imaging, night-vision cameras mounted to towers or drones–will do little to make our border better if human rights and the integrity of families and communities are not also protected.

Mural on the side of K Street Market, in Sherman Heights, San Diego

Many of us who live in the towns and cities of California understand that a better border means safer, more secure communites. Communities where residents celebrate local history and can trust their law enforcement officers and not live in fear that reckless and unchecked enforcement efforts will cost innocent lives.

For the past month, the California Immigrant Policy Center and the National Immigration Law Center have worked together with local organizations and advocates in the state of California to draft a values statement and policy recommendations.

Only with policies that focus on true security–the security of families, of communities, the integrity of our local natural habitats and enviroment–can we hope to have true border security.

We can best ensure a better border with immigration reform developed by and for the people, families, and communities who live here.

Instilling Values at the Forefront of Immigration Reform Legislation
California Values Statement on Immigration Reform

California is home to the largest population of immigrants in the United States. Immigrants are our family members, friends, neighbors, and co-workers – and many of us are immigrants ourselves. From the fields of the Central Valley to downtown city skyscrapers, immigrants help to drive California’s economic and cultural engines.
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More than one in four (27%) of California residents are immigrants. This amounts to over 9.9 million people.
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45% of California’s immigrants are citizens.ii Immigrants and their communities make up a crucial part of the voting public. For example, from 1994-2012, the total number of voters in California grew by 3.5 million. Nearly 90 percent of these were Latino and Asian American voters.iii
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Immigrant workers are important to California’s economy – comprising more than one-third of California’s labor force.iv
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Immigrants from Latin America (55%) and Asia (35%) compose the majority of the foreign-born population in California.

However, and for far too long, our rash and unworkable federal immigration policies have disproportionately and unfairly impacted California. Each and every day, aspiring citizens live in fear of detention and deportation – a fear worsened by federal initiatives that inappropriately coerce state and local law enforcement agencies to act as immigration agents. Moreover, current border enforcement policies have been inefficient, costly, and deadly and have been implemented without allowing California residents along the U.S.-Mexico border to have a say on policies that impact their communities.
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There are 2.8 million undocumented Californians – more aspiring citizens than any other state.vi
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Over 90,000 Californians have been torn from their families and deported as a result of the controversial “Secure Communities” program – the highest number in the country.vii
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Since 2010, unchecked enforcement at California’s southern border has resulted in the death of three residents at the hands of Border Patrol agents.viii
California’s communities need commonsense immigration policies that uphold our basic values and protect the rights we hold dear. We urge the California Congressional delegation to be champions for our families and communities. Our representatives in Congress can play a significant role in protecting families, creating a workable immigration process that provides a roadmap to citizenship for 11 million new Americans, and upholding our basic rights.

Instilling Values at the Forefront of Immigration Reform Legislation
California Principles on Immigration Reform

1. Protection of the unity of the family must remain at the heart of immigration law and policy. We recognize that there are many types of families and our immigration laws should respect all family members, regardless of race, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation, contact with the criminal justice system, country of origin, or current immigration status. We call for immigration reform that respects the value and fundamental right to protection and unity of the family, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) families. Immigration reform must reunify and keep families together by expeditiously clearing out the family visa backlogs. Family unity requires that the family visa backlogs – which have caused families to separate for as long as 23 years – be immediately and quickly cleared out.

Road to Citizenship
2. Immigration reform must create a road to citizenship for 11 million new Americans. Any road to citizenship should be based on keeping families and communities together, including those family members who have had past contact with law enforcement or immigration officials. The road to citizenship should be as broad as possible and not contain roadblocks. The path also should not include long wait periods.

Ending Unjust Detentions and Deportations
3. The foundation of all immigration law and policy should be the inherent dignity and equal rights of all people. As Americans, we believe all people are created equal and that our laws should treat all people fairly and with respect, no matter the color of your skin or the country of your birth .We oppose penalties for immigration violations and the criminalization of our communities. While all communities feel the impact of harsh enforcement laws and policies, the current system imposes particular burdens on women, members of the LGBTIQ community, people of color, and those who have had contact with the criminal justice system. We call for scaling back laws and policies such as the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) which have resulted in massive deportations of aspiring citizens and compromised the fundamental right to a day in court. Local law enforcement should not be entangled in the federal enforcement of immigration laws. Programs like Secure Communities and the Criminal Alien Program as well as ICE detainer requests should be eliminated because they undercut community policing and due process.

4. Detentions and deportations must end because they violate our most fundamental rights to liberty and freedom. We call for immigration policy reform that ends the reliance on cruel and costly detention as a cornerstone of immigration enforcement, including the ending of mandatory deportation. All persons detained should be treated humanely and granted access to quality medical and mental health care, counsel, legal information, and other protections. Immigration law and policy must ensure the protection of refugees, women, LGBTIQ, and other vulnerable migrants in detention. Judicial discretion, judicial review, and a fair day in court must be restored to the immigration system in order to ensure due process.

Workers’ Rights
5. Our immigration policies should reflect our country’s core values of fairness and respect for work. Immigration law should protect all workers’ labor and civil rights. The U visa should be expanded to make it a more effective tool for immigrant workers defending their civil rights and to protect them from immigration-based retaliation. The antidiscrimination provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act should be expanded to cover all workers and to ensure an effective remedy for workers who are discriminated against on the basis of national origin, citizenship, and immigration-status.

6. Our immigration policies should uphold labor and employment standards and should ensure that the enforcement of immigration law does not undermine the enforcement of labor and employment laws and standards. Workers’ rights should be protected during employer compliance activities, including I-9 audits. Ensuring the transparency of the Department of Homeland Security must be at the core of immigration policies and programs.

7. Our immigration policies should restrict, rather than build on, a burdensome employer sanctions framework. As such, mandating electronic employment verification lessens the power of all workers and threatens the jobs and privacy of many citizens and work authorized immigrants.

Border Justice
8. A better border is efficient, humane, and a cornerstone of economic prosperity for all. 9. A dignified quality of life for border communities depends upon accountable border agencies with oversight mechanisms that uphold basic civil and human rights protections. 10. We believe border communities are gateways for bilateral trade and bilateral relationships. Immigration reform should transform border enforcement by establishing modern, efficient and safe ports-of-entry that generate bi-lateral trade and economic development, promote public safety and create a welcoming environment for port-of-entry users.

Click here to download the 2013CAValuesStatementPolicyRecommendations, a pdf file of the full statement and policy recommendations.

]]> http://www.attheedges.com/2013/03/13/working-toward-a-better-border-california-values-statement-on-immigration-reform/feed/ 0 http://www.attheedges.com/2013/02/17/tijuana-alley-art-at-visual/ http://www.attheedges.com/2013/02/17/tijuana-alley-art-at-visual/#comments Sun, 17 Feb 2013 23:19:33 +0000 Jill Holslin http://www.attheedges.com/?p=2192

March 9, 2013  SATURDAY NIGHT 

6-10 PM

VISUAL Shop  3524 Adams Ave  San Diego, CA 92116 

With wheatpaste art & paintings by Tijuana artists: 1102, Panca, and Spel

Teodora Craft beer by Francisco J. Garcia of Studio 2287, Tijuana 

The concept of my exhibition is to explore—through my photos— “that which remains” in the alleys of Tijuana.  Often, graffiti writers arrive at a spot to paint, they paint, and they leave, and they don’t come back again. “That which remains” can be the remembered image, the photograph, or a video of painting, or even the stories we tell and continue to tell. In this way, “that which remains” links space and time—the past, present and future of a space remains inscribed on the wall. The photograph participates in the history of these urban spaces, documenting these ephemeral expressions of everyday life.

The name of the exhibition “Tijuana Alley Art,” gestures to the forgotten spaces of the city, more often than not considered dead spaces, without value, dirty and abandoned.

Norman Klein, a Los Angeles urban historian, identifies these empty spaces as “phantom limbs.” The phantom limb is the perception that an amputated limb of the body is still connected. The subject feels physical sensations, as though the limb is still functioning along with the rest of the body.

Klein notes that the traces of the past function like phantom limbs: these “dead” urban spaces continue to provoke stories, personal histories, mythologies—histories that are incited by the very absence of what once was there.  Thus, these spaces and what remains there point in two directions: first to the past, bearing witness to once thriving, vital communities. And secondly, to the future, as those of us who wander through these spaces create new communities and find new uses for the walls and sidewalks and alleys.

Klein writes:

“The “phantom limb” is often an empty lot where a building once stood, perhaps on Sunset Boulevard. Scraps of lathe and facade mix in piles with broken brick. The foundation is momentarily a ruin, like a photo of someone’s toothless mouth held wide open. The grading left by the bulldozer’s form ridges along the dust. It seems that if you could simply rest your ear close enough to the point where the blades have sheared away the joists, there might be the faint echo of a scream, or a couple talking at breakfast. Your imagination tries to see those people, based on the evidence, but doesn’t find enough at first. A car passes. Someone watches through the windshield for an instant, as it they knew who used to live here. But no conversation is supposed to take place. The cars graze at the light, and disappear.”

It has been said that the streets and best galleries of the city. In fact, the alleys of Tijuana’s downtown are living galleries, the art is painted over, and new images appear. Paintings on the wall and those that are erased still exist together in our memory, in history, in our stories.