Border Tripping in Aztlan: a journey from the Pacific to the Gulf: Prologue
The author at the border, at Las Playas de Tijuana
On July 2, 2022, I entered Tijuana as a pedestrian at the San Ysidro crossing. On the Mexican side, I took a taxi to the beach. My driver followed the Tijuana-Ensenada Scenic Highway west, through steep roadcuts crowned by dense residential units on both sides. The road followed the border fence almost until it ended, projecting out 300 feet into the Pacific Ocean. The taxi driver dropped me off near a sculpture spelling out “TIJUANA” composed of large and colorful block letters, just south of the border fence. On the base of the sculpture you’ll find the phrase “Aquí Empieza La Patria” (Here begins the homeland). It serves as a reminder that Tijuana is the westernmost city in Mexico, and in all of Latin America. It seems appropriate, as I write this now, that I begin my narrative of my 1,950 mile journey along the Mexican border, from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, at this sign.
In the last decade, I’ve crossed into Tijuana five times, a feat that has been made logistically possible by my parents’ retirement in San Diego. That is, I’m able to take brief day trips into Mexico whenever I visit them. (It’s a simple hop on the bus and a transfer to the trolley to get to the border from my parents’ house in La Jolla.) During much of that time (the late 2010s) I was writing for the alternative weekly NUVO, covering greater Indianapolis, which has since ceased print production. I found stories in Tijuana that seemed relevant to the Circle City, which has a growing Hispanic community, which is 13% of the city’s population, totaling 116,844, according to 2020 US Census data.
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But Tijuana is no Paris in the popular imagination. Inevitably, friends asked me about the zebra-painted donkeys (and donkey shows), the brothels, the cartels, and the violence. (By some estimates, Tijuana is the most violent city in the world.) While I didn’t gloss over the existence of these things in our conversations, or in my reporting, I wanted to paint a larger picture. That is, in Tijuana I found parallels to certain developments in Indianapolis, particularly in the arts, where several Hispanic artists and culture leaders who I knew were stepping into the forefront. I wanted my readers to feel the shock of recognition.
Woman looking out at the Pacific, and the border fence Photo by Dan Grossman
My 2022 trip to Las Playas de Tijuana was my first since 2019, before the COVID pandemic. Everything on the beach looked exactly the way I remembered it since my last visit. Everything that is, except for the stretch of fence along the tideline. On the fence there was now a massive mural stretching 150 feet long, featuring the portraits of 15 Mexican nationals—in grayscale against a sky-blue background—who had been brought to the United States as children. Some had been granted permanent resident or DACA status and some had been deported to Mexico. There was an oversized QR code on the fence that allowed visitors to find out more about the subjects of the mural, and more about the project which was created by Lizbeth de la Cruz Santana, an assistant professor in the Black and Latino Studies Department at Baruch University in New York City. The larger-than-life portraits had been painted onto polyester canvas and a crew of volunteers had glued these to the individual fence posts.
Along the top of the border fence were rolls of barbed wire, installed by the US Border Patrol during the Trump administration. But when First Lady Pat Nixon paid a visit to Border Field State Park in 1971, a waist-high barbed wire fence was the only barrier. The First Lady had come to the American side of the border to inaugurate what is now known as Friendship Park. It was envisioned as a beachside sanctuary for citizens of both countries.
“I hope there won’t be a fence too long here,” she said at the time.
For the next two decades, Friendship Park remained a place where families divided by the border could briefly reunite, where an American could chat with his Mexican friend without going through customs. But in 1993, during the Clinton administration, a 14-mile-long fence was completed on the border, including along the beach. This new fencing was made of steel slats reaching the height of between 18 and 30 feet high. This reduced illegal immigration in the San Diego area by 75 percent but it also made Friendship Park considerably less friendly. Until 2001, however, Mexicans and Americans were at least allowed to touch and exchange objects through the border fence. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, border restrictions multiplied. Steel mesh was added to the fence slats, so those on either side could only touch fingertips together. In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security not only closed Friendship Park, but extended the international barrier into the Pacific Ocean. Two additional parallel fences were constructed along the beach which, along with other measures, amounted to a full-scale militarization of the US border. In 2012, Friendship Park was once again opened in response to public protest. The dates and times when people on the American side could approach the fence, however, were severely restricted.
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The first time I visited the Tijuana beach was in the fall of 2016, when the only artwork on the tideline stretch of border fence was a 12-foot wide section where the individual steel shafts were painted sky blue. This was titled “Borrando La Frontera” (Erasing the Border.), the work of San Francisco-based artist Ana Teresa Fernández. During a phone interview with Fernández some months later, I told her that, for a brief moment, I got the impression that I could just walk right through the border. She told me that was what she wanted people to think. She had painted the fence dressed in a black cocktail dress and pumps and documented this performance in video and photography. The only way to see this work now is through those mediums (on view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields) as the original mural no longer exists. Her work has been superseded by other projects, most recently by the aforementioned Playas de Tijuana Mural.
Left to Right: “Borrando La Frontera,” by Ana Teresa Fernández in 2016, Las Playas de Tijuana Mural Project led by Lizbeth de la Cruz Santana in 2022, Mexicans at the border fence waiting to talk to talk to people on the other side, beach front at Las Playas de Tijuana.
Nothing painted along the tideline is permanent, given the inevitable corrosion by saltwater spray. But above the tideline, the environment is slightly more forgiving. Climbing up the hill from the beach, along the fence, I found an American flag depicted upside down, a symbol of distress, with crosses for stars. It was painted by Mexican-born US military veterans who have been deported for infractions large and small—from drug felonies to failure to appear for a court date. (Military service does not guarantee US citizenship to the foreign-born, but it can smooth the path to citizenship.) When I think of this mural, I think of the failure of the US Congress to pass comprehensive border reform which would provide work permits and a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented.
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In July, 2018, when I returned to the Tijuana beach, I met Dan Watman, coordinator of the Bi-national Friendship Garden of Native Plants inside Friendship Park. I found him watering gardens of native plants along the border fence. He was wearing a “Friends of Friendship Park” T-shirt and a wide-brimmed straw hat. He told me he was a part-time Spanish teacher, an American citizen, who lived in Tijuana. He explained to me that his organization’s intent was to have maintained garden plots that extended across the border, on both sides of the fence.
“That’s the way it was when we founded it back in 2007,” he told me. “And for a few years after that. But in 2009 they put in this secondary wall here and from that point on things got a lot more restrictive on the US side.” By “they” Watman meant the US Border Patrol. “So they still give us permission to go in on the US side but it's still very restrictive,” he continued. “On the Mexican side of course it’s wide open. And on the Mexican side we’re able to do a lot of workshops and things like that even if we can’t convince the Border Patrol to let people in on the US side."
The organization that Watman is part of, Friends of Friendship Park, didn’t have official nonprofit status but it operated on both sides of the border.
“It’s a coalition of human rights organizations, environmental organizations and individuals who want to advocate for more access to the park,” he said.
Because of the restrictions on access on the US side, most of the organization’s activities and programming take place in Mexico. These activities have included building raised food beds that have provided food for nearby homeless and hungry people.
I noted the hopeful nature of his group’s activity in contrast to the restrictive and punitive Trump administration border policy.
Watman agreed with my assessment. “It’s kind of like the garden and the painting and all the activities going on in Friendship Park are kind of like a way of creating an oasis of hope and friendliness in the middle of a really draconian US policy at the border,” Watman told me.
Our encounter was brief. I said goodbye and wished my namesake luck. (He would need it, as the Border Patrol would bulldoze the gardens on the American side in January 2020, claiming the brush created a haven for criminals, only to allow replanting a few weeks later.)
Watman reminded me a little of my younger self, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1990s, in Niger, West Africa. My big project was to build a community garden. It was a project, let’s just say, that didn’t work out nearly as well as I had hoped.
Dan Watman, coordinator of the Bi-national Friendship Garden of Native Plants inside Friendship Park
*
My next visit to the beach was almost exactly a year later, on July 20, 2019. I had come on this day in particular for a group painting event organized by Enrique Chiu, the creator and organizer of the Mural de la Hermandad (the Brotherhood Mural). His ambition was to use the entire 700-mile length of the border fence—what had so far been constructed along the border stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico—as a canvas. He referred to the mural, to the mile-and-a-half stretch that had already been painted, as the world’s largest. But he couldn’t paint it all on his own, so he periodically put out calls for volunteers.
I had arrived on the beach a little before Chiu, who showed up soon after wearing a paint-splattered red vest, glasses, and a trim beard. With him were two young female assistants. I was able to watch as they set up a table with paint and brushes to hand out. Once the table was set up, a group of about a dozen volunteer painters lined up to pick up supplies.
Chiu greeted me buoyantly, a big smile on his face. I had met him before, the previous year, in his storefront-sized gallery further inland, near the airport. I had promised, at that time, to come back to observe his group painting activities.
I asked Chiu if he had painters volunteer from across the border.
“Yes, there are volunteers from the States,” he said. “They come from all over the world, but also many from Mexico, particularly from Tijuana. A lot of people like musicians from Mexico, known musicians and actors, come to paint. We’re getting a lot of promotion about the liberty of expression, about the border and to promote human rights for the immigrants."
On March 13, 2018, when Donald Trump visited wall prototypes in San Diego, in sight of the existing barrier, Chiu and his volunteers were painting the fence on the other side, he told me. It was, in response to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, that he had started the Brotherhood Mural in 2016, not long after Trump was elected president.
“I started to paint on Thursday, Dec 1,” Chiu continued. “I was thinking ‘whatever’s coming, I’m going to buy some paint. Whoever shows up can paint with us.’ When I got there there were five women and girls there waiting plus Channel 6 and Univision from San Diego. We painted from 9 am to 1 pm. On Friday, Dec. 2, when I got there in the morning, it was 50 people. Some of them were like ‘Hey can we come back tomorrow.’ I said, “Yeah. We’re going to be painting every Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday Dec. 4, it was like 200 people.”
More than 3,600 would show up over a two-year-period. Often they came with their own brushes, paint, and rollers. Some of those who came had specific ideas about what they wanted to paint. Others needed guidance, as well as paint and brushes, which Chiu was happy to provide, and he has organized many painting sessions in cities spanning the length of the 1,954 mile long border. Incorporating the work of many painters, some of them children, the mural on the Mexican side of the border fence resembles more of a tapestry of individual quilts than a singular work.
Chiu has experienced life on both sides of the border. Born in Guadalajara in 1981, he has spent 14 years living in the US, receiving a B.A. in marketing, design and audiovisual arts from Long Beach and Santa Ana Universities. But he began his art career in Tijuana, where he currently lives, and he has exhibited his artwork all over the world. It seemed fitting that one of Chiu’s favorite subjects to paint, as an artist, was his titular subject in The Little Prince, written by French writer and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In this novella, Saint-Exupéry’s most popular work, the Little Prince abandons his house-sized planet and visits six different asteroids inhabited by various deluded adults. He also visits the Sahara Desert. It is there that he meets a pilot who has crashed his plane, a fictional stand-in for Saint-Exupéry himself. The story, with its simple illustrations, points out the pomposity and silliness of so much of adult life. It also expounds on the importance of maintaining ties with those who you love.
In his belief in the power of art to transform reality, Chiu reminded me of the Little Prince. It didn’t surprise me that Chiu had captured the public imagination with his Brotherhood Mural, and that he had no shortage of eager volunteers. During our conversation, Chiu encouraged me to go talk to them.
So I walked up to Bhavana Gesota, who staked out the section of wall closest to the water to paint. The Indian-born Gesota had originally come across the border for a pretty conventional reason: she had sought low-cost treatment for a dental infection.
“Just when I showed up to Tijuana to get it fixed, I found out about Enrique,” she said. “Somehow he showed up in my Facebook newsfeed. And that's a great project. I'm also an artist. So I thought I would like to paint a little on the wall. That's how it all happened.”
Walls, she says, are nothing new. “You know that from the Berlin Wall to the Great Wall of China; walls have been there throughout human history. But that doesn’t mean they need to stand indefinitely,” she said. Gesota pointed out that the Berlin Wall, which separated East and West Berlin for most of the Cold War, is no more. Scattered remnants of it function as an art gallery. Seeing all the beautiful imagery on the fence is a positive thing for immigrants approaching it, she said. “For those who are trying to get across the border in the immediate moment it represents hope for a better life.”
*
I was reflecting on what I had seen in these previous visits to the beach, in 2016, 2018, and 2019, as I walked along the fence in 2022. Post-pandemic, I saw no evidence of Gesota’s work along the tideline. Her work, and the work of other Brotherhood Mural painters—like that of Ana Teresa Fernández—had been replaced by the supersized faces of the Playas de Tijuana Mural Project participants. (Chiu and friends were still working on the Mural de la Hermandad elsewhere.)
But this time around I was feeling a little like the Little Prince, bewildered and out-of-sorts upon arrival in the Sahara, and in the middle of a minor personal crisis of my own making.
For starters, I had arranged no interviews with anyone on the Mexican side. I had no fixed agenda on the beach this time-around other than to see the border fence. On previous visits I had a strict timeline: people I needed to talk to this person, I needed to arrive at that location by such and such a time. This was because I was no longer writing for NUVO, as I had recently quit my role as managing editor (the publication still had a small online presence) after fighting with the publisher over editorial issues. Now, as I walked up along the border fence, I felt a little lost. I was trying hard to find my reference points.
One of those reference points involved poetry.
I kept looking for the section of fence near above the tideline where I had seen the words "LA POESÍA ES GENTE CON SUEÑOS” (Poetry is people with dreams) on my previous trips. But I couldn’t find it. I’ve since wondered about the makeup of the group Acción Poética that painted this on the border wall and looked them up online. According to the website Culture Trip the group was started in northern Mexico by poet Armando Alanís Pulido, whose objective was to engage passers-by in public spaces “with romantic ‘micro-poems.’”
Alongside that end goal, per the website, “the Acción Poética movement also sought to promote the act of reading—particularly of reading poetry.”
Reading about Acción Poética reminded me of the various groups of poets that Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño wrote about in his novel Los Detectives Salvajes (The Savage Detectives). I wondered if the group took inspiration from that book, which was a phenomenal bestseller in Latin America as well as in the US. Another sign Acción Poética is said to be responsible for various roadside paintings, per the website, that read “SIN POESIA, NO HAY CIUDAD” (without poetry, there is no city) which seems appropriate for Tijuana, even though I can't explain how exactly.
Section of border fence in 2018
A Black woman who was wearing a faded print dress and a pink headscarf called out to me, distracting me from my reverie. I wondered if she was from Haiti, a new arrival or recent refugee.
“Frutas?” she asked. She was selling plastic bags of cut papaya from a big blue plastic tub.
I declined and headed up away from the beach.
I needed a cup of coffee. I walked up the street to Huerto Urbano, an organic cafe where I ordered a latte and a cheesecake muffin and recharged my phone. It was the kind of eatery that would fit easily into the San Diego neighborhood of Ocean Beach, and to me represents the hope of a younger generation in Mexico.
When I asked the man who served me when the cafe had opened, he told me it had been four years. They had remained open for carryout during the worst of the pandemic in 2020, even though the entire beach had been shut down during that time. As we spoke, a motorcyclist with Uber Eats pulled up in front of the restaurant.
There were two women in the cafe speaking to each other in English. Both seemed to be in their late 50s or early 60s. By listening in on their conversation, I got the impression that they were permanent residents like 90,000 other US citizens who call Tijuana home, rather than tourists.
If you want to know what is driving Americans to live south of the border, all you need to know is that, as of July, 2022 the average studio apartment rent in San Diego was $2,789 and that 13.5 percent of San Diego home prices exceeded one million dollars. The prices in Tijuana are much cheaper, but no longer the bargain they once were, as the influx of Americans was driving up the market. The exodus of US citizens south is not part of the narrative the talking heads repeat ad-infinitum on Fox News, but it is part of the reality of the border, nonetheless.
Aided by the caffeine, I was starting to get my footing again. It suddenly occurred to me that I had missed an opportunity on the beach to talk with the fruit-seller, who I assumed, rightly or wrongly, was Haitian. Whether or not she was, I felt for sure in my bones that her story was compelling. Talking to her was part of my responsibility—if I considered myself to be a journalist, that is. I paid for my food and headed down to the beach. But when I arrived there, she was gone.
I resolved, then, to make the most of the time I had left in the city. So I hailed an Uber to the Tijuana Cultural Center in the Zona Rio District, where there were things I wanted to see. The first time I had visited the Centro was back in June 2001, when I had crossed the border with my father. This was during the time when he and my mom were in the process of moving from Carmel, Indiana to San Diego for retirement. I had convinced my dad somehow to cross the border and we visited not only the Museo de los Calfornias at the Cultural Center but also the Tijuana Wax Museum where the only vaguely realistic figure was that of Michael Jackson. My dad was less than impressed about everything in Tijuana, except for the Museo de las Californias, and he hasn’t been back since.
This time around, I had a specific event in mind. The Cultural Center, which encompasses the the Museo de Las Californias, was holding a weekend-long event “FestiArteXX” on its outdoor esplanade. The website promised vendors galore, for food art, and handicrafts, as well as live music
I arrived there at 1 p.m. The band onstage, Los Coyotes, sounded a little like Los Lobos meets No Doubt—roots rock meets Ska. The lead singer played a keytar and sang passionately and the band behind him rocked at ear-splitting volume. His seated audience, however, barely cleared the single digits signaling that the Tijuana Chamber of Commerce's high hopes for post-Covid tourism weren’t being realized.
While coronavirus restrictions had been lifted since November, 2021, that does not necessarily mean that Tijuana (or San Ysidro on the other side of the border) has come roaring back to life economically. The US State Department hasn’t been helpful in this regard. Their warning of March 16, 2022 stated that US citizens should reconsider travel to Baja and Tijuana. They warn that those who chose to go anyway "should remain on main highways and avoid remote locations,” because of the increased danger of homicides and kidnappings.
But probably the most danger I put myself in—up to this point in my trip at least—was spiking my cholesterol by buying a “Superdog” with sautéed onions from one of the many food stands at the Festival, in the shadow of the ball shaped dome that serves as an IMAX theater— the centerpiece of the cultural center that has become an iconic symbol for Tijuana since it was built in 1982. Afterwards, I explored the Cultural Center, which was featuring the winners of the Trienal de Tijuana painting contest.
There were many engaging works of art, I recall, but for me there was a singular standout.
An oil painting by Diego Peña, “Watching the American Debacle” struck me with its very strange depiction of an American flag. It eclipsed Jasper Johns in its literalness with its attention to detail, down to the wrinkles in the fabric. But the gravitational pull of the center point pulled at the flag fabric, as if into a whirlpool or around a singularity. It was a different kind of flag than the one created by deported veterans near the beach. Peña’s flag incorporated a view across the border into the United States with its culture wars and political chaos. The wall text inevitably mentioned Trump, his quasi-genocidal rhetoric, and his use of social media to incite his followers.
“Watching the American Debacle” by Diego MTZ Peña
Walking back towards the border an hour later, thinking about Peña’s flag, I began to envision my current writing project.
Art is not just news, but it is news. Art is also politics. You cannot discuss political art without mentioning politics. In the final review I wrote for NUVO, I had insisted on giving what I felt was the political context for an exhibition of Black Lives Matter murals at the Indiana State Museum. The exhibition was, I noted, taking place at a time of increasing backlash against social justice causes. My publisher insisted that I delete the paragraphs where I discussed that backlash. I insisted on keeping those paragraphs, and I wound up publishing the review in my own blog and leaving NUVO shortly afterwards.
In September 2023, I’lll be extending my exploration of the borderlands beyond San Diego and Tijuana to the rest of the Mexican border but I’ll be doing so on my own. For this particular project, I have no publisher aside from my Indy Correspondent blog. I will travel by car along the southern boundary of the US, traversing what Hispanic activists call Aztlan—the ancestral home of the Aztec people—and try to make sense of this contested geography. I’ll visit the monster manufacturing hub hugging the border known as Otay Mesa. I’ll go to the town of Nogales, Arizona and walk across the border into the city of Nogales, Mexico and report on what I find there. I’ll travel to Juárez, across from El Paso, where 39 migrants died in a fire while locked inside a detention center in March, 2023. I’ll go to the Rio Grande where the state of Texas is currently inserting rows of buoys barbed with concertina wire to deter, if not kill, immigrants. I’ll visit the Alamo, over which battles over Mexican-American history continue to be fought. I’m thinking of Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s cancellation of a book discussion at the Bullock State History Museum in 2021. (The book, titled Forget the Alamo, attempts to correct myths about Texas history.)
I’ll talk to residents on both sides of the border, and on both sides of the immigration debate.(Perhaps immigration war is a more apt phrase.) I plan to talk to immigrants, law enforcement, activists, scholars, artists, and—hopefully—poets. If anyone can imagine a better world, it is poets, after all. As Armando Alanís Pulido put it on the Tijuana border fence, Poetry is people with dreams.
