Campamento Por Migrantes Deportados - Encampment for Deported Migrants, Tijuana, BC, Mexico

In early August, Mexico's government destroyed the encampments in Tijuana's riverbed after the notorious "El Bordo," where homeless people had been living for years, became international news.  A tent city soon sprang up nearby, in Tijuana's Plaza Constitucion, and has housed homeless migrants, largely deportees, since.

Of these deportees, almost 40 percent have lived in the United States for several years and identify as at least partly American; at least 5 percent identify as indigenous Mexican and speak very little Spanish; many need mental health care or addiction treatment, and nobody wants to be there. 

The encampment is administered by volunteers from Angeles Sin Fronteras, Angels Without Borders.  They offer food, a temporary place to stay, bathrooms and makeshift showers, and free haircuts to those looking for work. 

There are very few places that offer such services for the homeless and the "segun deportados," the twice deported, who have absolutely nowhere else to go. The ones that do exist subsist on very little support from the Mexican government.

Everywhere, handwritten signs are tacked up that read: "No militarizar la frontera" - Don't militarize the border.

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The Northwest Corner

Mexico's northwest corner is a neighborhood in Tijuana called Playas.  It is notable for its beautiful beaches, its American population, its seafood, and its wall.  La Fronteriza begins, or ends, here.

This is the border.  Once, both San Diego and Tijuana were seen as one region, and the two countries were only separated by a marker.  It still presides over the border, and the walls curve slightly to accommodate it.

After the marker came a threadbare barbed wire fence, and then a wall.  As the U.S.'s border becomes more militarized, it builds more barriers. Now at this particular shared corner of the countries, there are bars, a mesh fence, and a third fence, all of which end about a hundred yards into the ocean, crowned with a panopticon of security apparati.

Beneath this thicket of cameras and floodlights is a park.  Until 2009, you could go to Friendship Park and shake hands, hug, or share an international kiss through the bars.  Now there is barely enough space to press the tip of a finger through the fencing.  There is a system of gates by which transborder friends and families can walk into a common area and hug and hold one another under the watchful eyes of border agents, but more often than not, they remain closed.

"Here is where dreams become nightmares."

The American side of the wall is free of graffiti, but the less heavily supervised Mexican side is adorned with art, scrawled messages, and names of deportees.

A list of names of deported veterans of the United States military.

 

Beneath the cameras and floodlights and alongside the names,  the desperately scribbled messages and phone numbers, and protest art, stands one stark question on the rusty wall: ¿Estas de mi lado?

Are you on my side?

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Indigenous Peoples' Day

 

Chief Gary Harrison at the Matanuska Glacier, which has receded so quickly that grass has not had an opportunity to grow over the soil.

 

Today is the United Nations' Indigenous Peoples' Day.

Three weeks ago, I was sitting in a cabin in Chickaloon, Alaska, with its traditional Ahtna Athabascan chief, Gary Harrison. I had traveled there to ask him about whether Alaska's indigenous people – uniquely placed – have solutions to a climate that, in the Arctic, is changing more rapidly and dramatically than anywhere else in the world. 

The extreme weather changes are already creating the world's first "climate refugees," people left homeless when entire villages flood out or wash away.  Chief Gary, as he is called, says this is not surprising given how cavalier governments and corporations are about the world's environment.

"Look at the cumulative effect of all of these things going on," he says.  "Like the oil spills that they have out there that go basically unreported to the public, not only on these platforms but in the aging pipe systems that's crisscrossing the inlet, underneath the inlet and going to the old oil tank facility on the other side of the inlet to the now defunct refineries, and all of these leaky pipes... and you say that these things don't have a cumulative effect?"

Chickaloon is a remote and beautiful village, about a hundred miles from Anchorage. It is bounded by the Chickaloon River, which during the summer burbles merrily between homes and along the Glenn Highway. Salmon, moose, and bear are not just common sights, but essential food sources. The view of this part of Chickaloon is dominated by the majestic King Mountain, on which caribou, mountain goats, mink, and Dall sheep live and forage.
 

 

Most of the people here are Athabascan Natives, homesteaders, or both. Chief Gary Harrison grew up in Chickaloon and comes from a family of homesteaders. He speaks deliberately and passionately. His demeanor is quiet, even bookish. Yet what he says clearly communicates his passion for the land and his frustration at its abuses.

Harrison is fighting a proposed mine in Chickaloon. The majority of people in the village appear to oppose the mine, despite the promise of new jobs and infusions of cash and economic power similar to that which briefly made Chickaloon into an important stop on the Alaska Railroad. But Harrison says these are ephemeral benefits that come with a high cost.  First, he says, it will pollute at least three hundred drinking wells, which the company itself admits. And many of the people who lived there are horrified at the idea of building roads over and around the mountains, through King Mountain and Castle Mountain and the migration paths of the moose and sheep. 

"People who talk about 'clean coal,' that's an oxymoron," says Harrison, shaking his head. "There is no such thing as clean coal. And they say, 'well, it's cleaner than that.' Cleaner than what? Cleaner than coal from other places? Well, that's not saying much.

"And the fact of the matter is, they can try to clean it out of the air, it's still submitting CO2, and then they take the carbons, the sulfurs, and all of the other toxic waste that's in it, and they put it in the ground.... it then gets in the groundwater and it poisons entire cities."

Harrison is also fighting the same battle on a much larger front. He is, among other things, the representative of the Athabascan Nation to the United Nations and the Arctic Council.  Right now, mining is a major topic.

"At the Arctic Council, we're trying to make a treaty, or a binding agreement, on short-lived climate forcers, and one of the basic things in the short lived climate forcers is black carbon. Black carbon gets on the snow, it gets on the ice, and it melts it much faster every year than ever before."  He points to the Matanuska Glacier, which feeds the Chickaloon River, as an example of how quickly the climate is changing.  The glacier has been receding and melting so fast that it has left miles of black soil where ice once was, fertile soil that is so new that grass has not yet had a chance to grow in it.

Harrison says that as glaciers and sea ice crack and melt at an alarmingly rapid pace and the native flora and fauna die off, the only thing that can save the habitat now is traditional wisdom and ideologies, such as mutual respect, sharing resources, and looking out for the world instead of mere economic interests. The selfish people of the world made our world this way, he says, and it is up to the selfless ones to make things better.

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El Bordo, today

(Click through for a larger picture)

 

Earlier this week, Tijuana police, aided by money from Mexico's government, razed homeless encampments up and down the part of the Tijuana River known as El Bordo, or "The Edge."  Today, dozens, like this man who was standing near a footbridge trying to get passersby to toss money down to him, have returned.  Many here are drug addicts; most are deportees from the United States, unceremoniously dumped in Tijuana regardless of their state of origin in Mexico.

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A statement from Bobbi Gibb on the Boston Marathon attacks

Note: Ms. Gibb first ran the Boston Marathon in 1966, when it was commonly believed that women were physically incapable of running long distances. In doing so, she did more than make a statement as a runner; she became an icon for women who questioned the status quo. This year, Ms. Gibb was an honored guest at the Boston Marathon, serving as one of the event's grand marshals. -BB
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          First of all I want to say that my heart goes out to those who were injured or killed and their families. I hold in my loving thoughts and my healing prayers all those who were and continue to be affected by the horror that occurred on Monday. I want to everything and anything I can to help.

            To me the Boston Marathon has always been and it continues to be, a celebration of life. It’s something that occurs every spring in Boston. It’s a celebration of the renewal of life— the daffodils poking through the earth, the forsythia in bloom. Even more fundamental than a sporting event, to me, the Boston Marathon symbolizes this celebration of life and the celebration of the human spirit and it continues to do so.

 

            Out of all the catastrophe that occurred that day what was really inspiring, and what we need to look at and take with us, is the love and compassion and empathy that spontaneously emerged from all the people there. Each and every person was a hero— the runners helping other runners, the spectators helping the injured, the police, the doctors, the nurses, the volunteers along the course, the National Guard, the Boston Athletic Association officials— everyone spontaneously worked together, without anyone telling them what to do, just worked together to help those who were injured and to help anyone in need.

 

            Thousands of runners were stranded without any money, warm clothes or keys. And what happened? People spontaneously took off their own jackets and gave them to the runners and took them into their homes and gave them beds and money and clothes and food. No one told them to do this; it was a spontaneous outpouring of love and I believe that this what is fundamental to human nature. This is what we’re all about as human beings. This is what it is to be American to work together for the common good, to help each other. This is the fundamental premise of any valid ethical, moral or religious system— to do for others what you would have them do for you, and to do it spontaneously and with love, and to treat your neighbor as yourself. And that’s what we saw on Monday, that’s what the 99% is all about. This other stuff is pathology…. It’s something gone wrong.

 

            Just as we’re all capable of getting cancer, we’re all capable of getting emotionally, spiritually, mentally or physically sick and that’s what we’re seeing in a very small percentage of the population who are acting out of a mistaken belief. It’s a dysfunction and we need to find a way of healing it, of stopping it, and of finding and dealing with people who would do us harm. The security forces, police, FBI, and all the people who cooperated to help, exhibited intelligence and heroism in doing what needed to be done, quickly and efficiently and our gratitude goes out to these dedicated men and women.

 

            And now it is up to us to carry on and to continue to reaffirm what is real in the human spirit, that is, love and care and empathy and this human ability to work together to help one another, to do what needs doing in the face of violence, greed, perversion and all the things that would divert us from the true nature of what it is to be human. From around the world come messages of love, caring, sympathy, offers to help, from all countries of the world and it is this spirit of friendship, and love and caring that we need emphasize and to continue and to strengthen. This is really what we need to take away from the horrific events on April 15^th.

 

    Thank you for giving me a chance to say what I think and feel. My heart goes out to everyone, here and around the world, with love and gratitude for the goodness of the human spirit, even as I feel great sadness for the hurt, pain, suffering and death of the victims and their families.

 

Many Regards,
Bobbi

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Bobbi Gibb and the Boston Marathon

The Boston Marathon is on everybody's lips this week, of course. I in no way want to downplay the extent of the loss and pain that people felt, but feel that the story of Bobbi Gibb deserves to be out there.

Young Bobbi Gibb. Source: Bobbi Gibb

Gibb lives part of the year in San Diego, where she went to school, and part of the year in Massachusetts, where she was born. I first heard about her in passing last year, and, curious, looked her up. Once I found out that she lived in San Diego, I asked her to meet with me to do an interview so I could profile her.

She has never really sought the spotlight, but she is very accessible. It turned out that she works at the Salk Institute, just across the street from my school, so we met in a café and talked for hours. She is a lively, fascinating, and engaging speaker; it was difficult, writing her profile, to winnow down the information to the best quotes.

Gibb first saw the Boston Marathon in 1964. Her father had taken her to see the runners at the marathon, and she fell in love, deeply and irrationally, and immediately began training.  The conventional wisdom at that time was that women would damage their bodies if they ran more than a mile and a half, but she knew she could do it, so she ran a little farther each day, waiting to collapse or for her ovaries to fall out, until she was running thirty to forty miles a day.  "I was very strong," she said.  She applied to the 1966 marathon, but her application was rejected by the Boston Athletic Administration because they were unwilling to take on the liability of a woman runner.

That is when her plan formed.  She hid in the bushes at the start of the race, slipping into the pack after the gun went off, and finished ahead of two-thirds of the men.  She was young, beautiful, and fast, and her story made international headlines.

One headline: "Hub Bride First Gal to Run Marathon." Source: Bobbi Gibb

Gibb was grand marshal of the parade this year, along with the first winner of the officially-sanctioned women's division race in 1972.  That meant she was at the race's finish when the bombs went off.  "Horrible," she texted me, because the phones weren't working in those awful hours after the explosions.  "It was horrible.  My heart goes out to the victims and their families."

What should have been a triumphant and happy day was forever marred by those explosions.  But that doesn't mean that her story should disappear under its weight.  Bobbi Gibb was and remains a hero to those who challenge the status quo. At nearly 70, she looks and seems much younger, and she's still running every day.

I ran four miles with her just before she left for Boston, and could only keep up with her through sheer force of will.

You can find the audio and text of the story I did for The California Report on the indomitable Bobbi Gibb here: http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201304150850/b

Here is the text of the story.
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Bobbi Gibb found one of the great loves of her life in her early 20s.
“I saw the [Boston] Marathon for the first time in '64 with my dad, and then I just fell in love with it,” she said. “I mean, it was totally irrational, like falling in love. There was no money in it, there was no reason to run, it was totally outside the social and cultural norm for a woman to run, and it barely was in the social norm for men to run.”

Gibb, who was born and raised in Massachusetts, already had been running for as long as she could remember. As a child, she would run out into the woods, pausing to rest under trees, count clouds and commune with nature.

“It was always kind of a way of expressing joy,” she said. “I'd see a field or a beach and I'd just run like a dog.”

The Boston Marathon, then the best-known marathon outside the Olympics, was more than simply an elite race to her. In fact, to Gibb, the marathon wasn't a race at all -- it was a joyful annual ceremony.

“It hardly even occurred to me that it was an actual sporting event,” she said. “To me, it was like a celebration of spring.”

Men only
What Gibb didn't know was that she wouldn't be allowed to compete. She was born in 1942 and came of age during a time when women were supposed to want nothing more than to stay at home and be housewives, and they certainly never did anything as unseemly or potentially sweaty as running.

Gibb knew about the social pressures, but had no idea that the Boston Marathon was actually closed to women until she sent an application in 1966 from San Diego, where she was attending UC San Diego. By then, she had been training for the marathon for two years.

“I had no idea how to train,” she said. “I had no running books. There were no running clothes for women. I wore nursing shoes because I had been a nurse's aide – that was my first job after high school and they were sturdy shoes.”

She had also been waiting during that time to see if something horrible would happen to her physically, because the conventional wisdom of the time was that running more than a mile and a half was potentially deadly to women. She pushed herself more and more, until she was running 40 or 50 miles a day in her clunky nurse shoes.

“I got a letter back from Will Cloney [then the director of the Boston Marathon] that said women are not physiologically able to run marathon distances, and we wouldn't want to take the medical liability.

“And that's what everyone thought. I mean, this was a universal truth. Women can't be doctors, it's too much stress. Women can't be lawyers, it's too much stress. Women can't be in the government.... women can't run long distance. Women can't do anything except stay home and clean the house. It was like being in a cage. It was horrible.... It was just everywhere. It was ubiquitous.”

Gibb said that running was more than something that simply gave her happiness at that point. It was also an escape, the only way she could escape the anger and frustration she experienced daily at being bombarded with messages that she was weak, irrational, stupid and a secondary citizen.

“You can't be who you are. You can't do what you love, because you belong to a certain class of people that we consider inferior. So you're inferior, and you can't do this. ‘It's for your own good! It's for your own good, dear,’ ” she said mockingly.

Then she realized she had been given a brilliant opportunity to change things -- not in a huge, overarching way but in a tiny way that could have an enormous effect, and in the best way she knew how. Gibb would run the Boston Marathon, application or no application, feminine inferiority or no feminine inferiority.

“If I can show that a woman can run 26 miles, and run it well  -- stride for stride with the men -- that is going to throw all the rest of the prejudices and all the misconceptions and all of the so-called reasons for keeping women down that have existed for the past how many centuries? Centuries of this stuff! And so I sort of chuckled to myself and thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be fun! I'm going to turn the whole thing on its head.’ ”

She spent nearly a week on a bus to get from San Diego to Massachusetts and when she got there the day before the 1966 Boston Marathon, she announced her plan to her parents, who thought she had suffered a break with reality and was suffering from delusions. Her father stormed out of the house, but Gibb managed to convince her mother to take her to the starting point of the marathon.

“That was really a turning point [in our relationship], because it was the first time she ever was on my side to help me become more of who I was, really was, and not just fit into the mold, and also I convinced her. I said, ‘Mom, this is going to set women free, because people are going to see that women can do this stuff.’

“I wanted to show that women could run, but I also wanted to kind of inspire the idea that ordinary people can run. I was like, boy, I feel so good when I run, if everybody could feel like this, this sense of joy and physical well-being and strength and autonomy you have when you run, how much better the world would be, you know?”

Crashing the Marathon
She borrowed an old pair of her brother's Bermuda shorts, put on a swimsuit and a hooded sweater over it, laced on her running shoes, and went with nervousness and great anticipation to crash the Boston Marathon.

“I figured, ‘I'll hide in the bushes as near to the pen as I can get.’ And then I had a blue hooded sweatshirt on and I said, ‘Well, I'll get into the race and then I'll kind of see where to go from there.’ So the gun went off and I jumped into the middle of the pack.”

She ran with the pack of men until she heard the comments from behind her, and realized the men behind her had figured out she was a young woman. It had taken about 30 seconds. She knew they could easily shoulder her out or report her, so instead of ignoring them she turned around and smiled. To her surprise, delight and a little chagrin, the crowd of men welcomed her.

“We got talking and they said, ‘Gee, I wish my girlfriend would run. I wish my wife would run.’ They wanted to share their love of running with the women in their lives.”

At this point, Gibb recalled, she started to get hot. She wanted to take off her sweatshirt, but knew her body and long bright blonde hair would give her away to the judges, the crowd and everybody else.

“If I take it off, I said, they might throw me out. The guys said, ‘We won't let them throw you out. It's a free road.’

"That was another item on my agenda, to end this stupid war of the sexes. Why do we have to be fighting a war of the sexes? We're on the same side in this! Men can have feelings. Women can have physical bodies that are strong.... you can be who you are.”

The Big Reveal
She took off her sweatshirt and the crowd went wild. Reporters quickly figured out that a woman was in the race and started phoning ahead; a local radio station started broadcasting regular updates about where “the girl” was in the race. As Gibb ran by the crowds, she saw their reactions. Men were cheering and clapping, and women were jumping wildly up and down and weeping.
“I thought, “Oh my God, this is incredible,’ ” Gibb said, her voice warming. “This is really blowing peoples' minds. I mean, women didn't know they could do this!” She finished ahead of two-thirds of the marathon runners, dehydrated and exhausted.

Of course, change didn't happen all at once. “HUB BRIDE FIRST GAL TO RUN MARATHON,” trumpeted one headline.

But little by little, more women came. Gibb ran the next year, as did a second woman, Kathrine Switzer. The year after that, Gibb ran the marathon again, with several more women. She applied and was turned down for medical school, went to law school instead, became a lawyer, pursued her art, had a baby, wrote a book, changed careers (she now researches neuromuscular disorders for labs in San Diego and Boston. and just finished writing a second book) and through all that she kept running.

In 1972, six years after Gibb first ran the marathon, the Amateur Athletic Association changed the rules so that women could run in an officially sanctioned race in Boston. The rest is history.

Gibb is still as lithe and lean as the 22-year-old who ran that first race. She now splits her time between San Diego and Massachusetts, and she never stopped running. She hopes to train for the 2016 Boston Marathon, where she will run to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the time she took her first steps down the long path to equality.

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Mis quince minutos

I made it into a Univision special about the Xolos' effects on Tijuana:
I'm just glad my story made it out into the world before this great piece did! 

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Vamos Xoloitzcuintles!

I have always loved Tijuana. Even when the city's future seemed at its darkest, it still contained a raw vitality and an energy that few others seemed to possess.  Los Angeles has it, Mexico City has it, Tangiers has it, a vivacious bustle and friendly hum as everyday life goes on all around.  I was always surprised when others, even people who lived there, were willing to dismiss it as nothing more than a waystation, a pit of cheap bars and cheap people where sunburned tourists rubbernecked through Revolución looking for weed and donkey shows.

Paradoxically, its bad reputation has changed Tijuana for the better.  After 9/11 and the much-publicized drug wars, tourism slowed to a trickle, and in the absence of the tourist industry that once sustained so much of the city, Tijuana has begun to find out what it really is: not just a place where people pause before they cross the border, not just a den of drugs, underaged prostitutes, and would-be Americans who live in the long shadow of San Diego, not just a den of trafficking, but a unique fusion of cultures.  Tijuana is not a city without problems (what city is?) but one where its people are transcending them to find their footing and their identity. 

Much has been made of the food and arts scene there, but not as much attention has been paid to the role Tijuana's relatively new team, the Xolos, has played in the revitalization of the city. 

The team's playing style is feisty and relentless, like the dogs that give the team its name, and it has served them well. They're a young team with an unprecedented streak of success: they're currently first in the Liga MX, the Mexican football league, and people are going crazy over it.  After going to a game, I can understand why.  Best of all, it's bringing thousands of people in from the U.S. side, a new kind of tourist, ones who see what is happening in Tijuana and adore it.

The following is the text of the story I wrote for Fronteras Desk.

The audio and more photos can be found here.

TIJUANA, Mexico — Tijuana's vibrant tourist scene has all but disappeared. But in its absence, the city is becoming a place for a new type of culture: one forged by people who live between countries and see themselves as part of both.

Tijuana's soccer team is part of that. The enormously popular Xolos (pronounced "Cholos") boasts a dedicated fan base that stretches from Sinaloa to Las Vegas.

Dean Mitchell isn't ashamed to admit it: He's a fanatic.

“So I've been a soccer fan all my life but I've never had seen success – LA, San Diego – so I had to go to Portland, Seattle, places like that to see it. But I always knew Mexico loved it," he said.
Mitchell's having a beer with friends in the dirt parking lot at Estadio Caliente, Tijuana's soccer stadium, where the Xolos are about to play a match. He lives in San Diego, but he makes the sometimes hours-long trip across the border and back every time there's a game in Tijuana.

 

Mitchell says it's the most fun he's had going to soccer games in years.

“The whole city's going nuts and they haven't had anything before. So you got this city with a real bad reputation and it's showing off to the League how great an experience it is to be here," Mitchell said.

Xolos is short for Club Tijuana Xoloitzcuintles de Caliente. Xoloitzcuintles are hairless dogs, sacred to pre-Hispanic cultures and noted for their unflagging energy, scrappy tenacity and loyalty -- kind of like the team and its rambunctious, rowdy fans.

Inside the stadium, Agustín Díaz is smoking a cigarette by a food stand. He lives in San Diego now, but he was born and raised in Tijuana. Everything he's wearing has the Xolos logo on it, right down to his cape and the big stuffed dog on his hat.

 

A xoloitzcuintle, the mascot of the Xolos, in its team's jersey. The jersey also serves to keep it warm, as xoloitzcuintles (also known as Mexican Hairless Dogs) have almost no fur.

“Now that we've got a team right here I'm 100 percent with them. I wear my pet Xolo, I wear my wristband, and even on my cell phone is the Xolo, the big dog and everything," Díaz said. "I am Super Xolo. Even if they go down to the Second Division I'm still gonna be a Xolo.”

Five years ago, the Xolos were a little-known Second Division team. Now they're in the lead in the Mexican League's First Division, ahead of legendary teams like Chivas and America. This means in the soccer world, they're a full-fledged meteoric phenomenon.

Wes Braddock is a principal at a San Diego County high school and holds season tickets called Xolopasses, which cost up to 3,800 pesos, or $300.

“Boy, when the Xolos advanced out of what they call the Liga de Ascenso, the Ascending League, and I was at the game that they won that put them into the American, into the Mexican Premiere League," Braddock said. "It was very similar to me, almost more emotional, than when the [San Diego] Chargers went to the Superbowl in '94. I mean, people were riding up and down the street, honking their horns, waving flags. In this city it really has been good for the image of the city and the people of the city.”

 

Most of all, he says, it brings residents of San Diego and Tijuana together and showcases their similarities rather than their differences.

Roberto Cornejo agrees. He's the Xolos assistant general manager and a resident of both the U.S. and Mexico. Bringing together the two cities, he says, was his vision all along.

“Soccer in San Diego is very big. The majority of kids play either [recreational] or some type of club in their life as they're young," Cornejo said. "San Diego's an educated population in terms of soccer, and Tijuana has I think more links to San Diego than, say, Mexico City or farther south.”
Several of the Xolos' players are from the U.S. side, like midfielder Joe Corona, who grew up in south San Diego County and has played with the U.S. Men's Under-23 team.

 

In the last two years, the team has expanded northward, opening youth academies in San Diego's South Bay and in Riverside County.

“In the academies we're trying to develop players. If they make it pro with us, that's great. If they're able to get a college scholarship and get their college degree via soccer and through their training then that's just as good for us," Cornejo said.

This Sunday the Xolos play Chivas in Guadalajara. If they stay in the top four, which is likely since they're currently number one, they advance to the league playoffs.

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The re-opening of Friendship Park

Photo courtesy Jill Marie Holslin (www.attheedges.com)

I wrote and covered this story for Fronteras Desk over the weekend.  I wasn't sure how it would turn out, but I really like it.
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SAN DIEGO — San Diego's Friendship Park, or Border Field State Park, is tucked into the extreme southwest corner of the United States and the extreme northwest of Mexico, with fields on the U.S. side, the city of Tijuana on the other, and the blue Pacific Ocean to the west. The park itself is tiny, bisected neatly through the middle by the border wall.

Friendship Park used to be one of the very few places along the United States-Mexico border where people could meet face-to-face. First, there was no border marker, and then there was just a fence and a monument; for years after that, only a chain link fence separated the two sides, which allowed visitors in each country to speak together, pray, sing, or just hold hands across the border. Gardeners on the U.S. side planted flowers at the fence, and a gardener in Tijuana helped water them.

That changed after Sept. 11, 2001. In the intervening years border security became tighter, and more fences went up. Finally, in 2009, Homeland Security closed down Friendship Park entirely, saying they needed to construct a new fence to discourage drugs and weapons smugglers before it re-opened.
Whether or not it would ever be accessible to the public again was a matter of debate. While it was possible to ask Border Patrol agents to open the primary gate so people could go up to the fence, those requests were not always granted. At one point, Homeland Security agreed to re-open the park, but with a third fence keeping people several feet away from the actual border.

Now, after negotiation and public pressure from activist groups, the public can once again enter the park and talk to people directly through the fence -– although it has changed. The tattered chain link has become a thick, dense mesh that is difficult to see through. Instead of holding hands, people can just barely touch the tips of their fingers through openings in the steel wire.

A view of Tijuana through the U.S. side of the border fence at Friendship Park.

People on the Mexican side of the border, out for a morning stroll, stopped to chat with the small group of people on the San Diego side of the border. Closer to the ocean, a man in Tijuana named German Castañada, visible only as a shadowy figure, leaned into the fence, hands cupped against his face, to talk quietly to his two young children and their mother on the San Diego side.

“I haven't seen my kids in three years,” Castañada said. “I got kicked out of the country.” He said he had been in the United States since he was 4 years old.

“If I would have known, I would have tried to fix my papers. I don't have anybody over here, technically -– my whole family's out there.”

Castañada said because he was deported, he has to wait at least a decade to reapply for a visa, with no guarantee it will be granted.

Architect Jim Brown, who headed the redesign of the park to allow people to meet face-to-face without compromising border security, is a member of a group called Friends of Friendship Park, which successfully petitioned for its re-opening. Brown said the park is designed for flexibility, so that if border security is ever eased the fences can be scaled back for greater access.

Jill Marie Holslin (attheedges.com)

German Castañada, who cannot return to the United States after his deportation, meets with his family at Friendship Park.

“We make no claims that this is a beautiful park,” Brown said. “It's a horrendous park in some ways. But it's a symbol, a really important symbol, of friendship between the citizens of two countries.”

For people like German Castañada, whose children can only see him as a shadowy figure behind a fence, it's not the same as making a life with his family -– but as Castañada said, it's better than nothing.

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The story of San Diego's Chicano Park

The following is a story I wrote and produced for the California Report.  The audio, along with a slideshow, can be found here.
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Artist Guillermo Rosette in front of one of his murals

When you drive down Interstate 5 south toward the San Diego-Tijuana border, you go through a neighborhood called Logan Heights. It's a stretch of industrial buildings and run-down concrete walls.

But suddenly, the gray is broken up by flashes of bright colors splashed over the freeway walls and pillars. The scenes depict the struggles and triumphs of the Chicano Pride movement and the history of Mexicans in the United States. They have become a landmark since they were first painted in 1973.

Muralist Victor Ochoa is touching up a mural he made four decades ago, of a group of Chicano activists called Brown Berets. Ochoa was part of the original movement that birthed the murals and its surroundings, Chicano Park.

"The community before the freeway came in was a very sprawling barrio; we used to call it the 'ombligo de Los barrios,' the bellybutton of the barrios," Ochoa says. "Logan and National, were like the downtown section, and then the other streets were residential."

But in the 1960s, San Diego built the interstate right through the downtown section over the protests of its residents, effectively cutting the neighborhood in half.

"So just in these few blocks, they took over 5000 families out. They went through our barrios pretty terribly. That was a death blow to this neighborhood," Ochoa says.

But Guillermo Aranda, another of the original muralists, says what really tipped people into action was when the city reneged on its promise to build a park and planned a parking lot instead. On April 22, 1970, hundreds of men, women and children came down and formed human chains around city workers.


"People said 'Hey, if we want a park we have to claim this park ourself,' explained Aranda. "And people came and they brought cactus and maguey and picks and shovels. I remember this one guy came in with a bulldozer and dug up the earth and everybody worked to make it a park. So that's how Chicano Park came to be."

It took nearly two weeks of constant occupation, but the city finally gave the people their park. A few years later, artists began painting the walls of the overpass to commemorate the struggle, and to tell the history of the Chicano rights movement in the United States.

"Once we did the murals here at Chicano Park, it exploded, and Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas...even back to the east coast, murals began to explode all over," Aranda said.

The murals began attracting tourists from all over the world. Fast forward to the early 90s, after two deadly earthquakes rocked Southern California. At the time, Marty Rosen worked for CalTrans as part of a team that was retrofitting Highway 5.

"I was just blown away. I mean, just these monumental murals on these bridge columns that vary from about two stories to maybe five stories high," recalled Rosen. "My initial thought that came out of my head was that this is the Sistine Chapel of California."

Rosen pushed to have the murals recognized as a historical resource, although they were barely twenty years old at the time. Eventually, he collaborated with the seven original artists on a CalTrans administered grant, called a T-grant, to restore and preserve their murals. It took nearly 20 more years.

"There were many years there where we just weren't sure if it was going to happen.We finally in 2011 started the actual mural restorations," says Rosen.

Restoration is continuing on what has become a symbol of the struggle against a faceless bureaucracy that tore apart a community, and how that same bureaucracy is helping preserve its voice. Artists are putting the finishing touches on the newly revitalized murals in time for a celebration this weekend.

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