Borderlands: San Ysidro

I took the Blue line trolley from San Diego Old Town to Beyer Blvd in San Ysidro, one stop before the international border. I was going to meet with Casa Familiar, South San Diego's most important community-based organisation and one of Estudio Teddy Cruz's longest standing collaborators.











Casa Familiar officially began in 1973, serving the monolingual Spanish-speaking residents of San Ysidro, it has since expanded to serve all of South San Diego's residents, regardless of background, although the demographics of the area guarantee that their clientelle is overwhelmingly Hispanic. Casa Familiar provides a wide variety of services to the community, from assistance with immigration, tax preparation, financial and family counselling to computer literacy, aerobics-for-seniors and Aztec dance classes (for more information see Casa Familiar's home page).

Tonight Casa Familiar is holding a Thanksgiving dinner for the community. Andrea Skorepa, Casa Familiar's heart and CEO, tells me that the Anglo tradition, with it's rather doubtful of native-pilgrim friendship, is a kind of 'exotic cultural experience' for the mainly Hispanic attendees. It is an impressive sight, over 1200 people will be fed tonight, over 4 sittings, served by an army of volunteers.

Andrea draws the raffle.

The volunteer waiters include a large presence from the local border patrol. I wonder how the community here feels about close proximity of the force whose illuminated sign at the Mexican border 2km away boasts of 1200 'wanted felons' aprehended in their neighbourhood, coincidentally the same number of people they are helping to feed tonight.

Tonight is also a celebration of the centenary of San Ysidro's founding in 1908. Today San Ysidro is probably known best for being home to the world's busiest border crossing.

Andrea welcomes me heartily and when I mention my association with ETC she responds 'Teddy Cruz! We made Teddy Cruz!". We discuss Casa Familiar's housing program in the community hall kitchen while volunteers scoop cranberry sauce into tiny plastic cups.

She tells the story of the of the Casitas de las Florecitas, a complex of 8 affordable houses for first time home owners, to illustrate the disriminatory, anti-logic of many official housing regulations. A common feature in many Latin American homes is a sink, built at ground level, by the back door for use in mopping, washing feet after the beach and party ice-buckets. The San Diego City Council had not seen such an item before and labelled it illegal. After some negotiation the SDCC agreed to recognise the legitimacy of such an item (now refered to as a 'janitorial sink') but still refused to allow it's construction, flagging it as a potential problem of mixing sewerage and storm water. Accordingly the architect, David Flores, designed a movable rain cover for the sink. The SDCC also rejected this, as it could be left open during rain. Finally Flores designed a fixed awning for the entire area, which met with the SDCC's approval despite Flores' own contention that rain rarely falls straight down. 'As we get more civilised, sometimes we don't get any smarter' Andrea concludes.

Later I continue the discussions with Flores himself who became involved with Casa Familiar in 2001 by being awarded the Rose Fellowship to fund his work with the organisation. He outlines the numerous mismatches between the planning regulations, the structures of grants and subsidies for affordable housing and the reality of people on the ground.

Such issues have been central to ETC's collaboration with Casa Familiar. Teddy has also been working with the organisation since 2001 and the results are two highly innovative projects currently in the pipeline: Living Rooms at the Border and Abuelitos (Senior Gardens) these projects will be the subject of the next post.

This church, built in 1927 was bought by Casa Familiar in order to preserve an important piece of local heritage. It is the site for their collaboration with Estudio Teddy Cruz; Living Rooms at the Border.

Estudio Teddy Cruz: Manufactured Sites

While the border condition of San Diego/Tijuana is central to all of ETC's projects, the majority have been focused on gleaning from the informal settlements tactics of invasion and organisational strategies by which catalytic projects can be inserted into San Diego's suburban homogeneity, variously challenging notions of public space (InfoSite 05) and pairing with grassroots organisations to 'contaminate the planning code' (Houses on the Border, Senior Gardens, Hudson 2+4).

Manufactured Sites is ETC's first major proposal for intervening in Tijuana's informal settlements. Cruz describes the proposal as follows:

MANUFACTURED SITES:

The most trafficked border in the world is mainly characterized by a series of illegal 'off the radar' two-way border crossings.  While 'human-flow' mobilizes Northbound in search of dollars, 'infrastructural waste' moves in the opposite direction to construct an insurgent, cross-border urbanism of emergency. 





















Taking advantage of NAFTA generated free economic zones, large maquiladora (assembly) factories position themselves in close proximity with the emerging slums in Tijuana in order to easily extract cheap labor from these informal settlements.  Can the maquiladora industry contribute with its own logics and processes of prefabrication to produce surplus, micro-infrastructural support systems that can reinforce the transitional, informal housing environments that dot the periphery of Tijuana?




a maquiladora produced frame : micro-infrastructure for housing in the informal urbanism of tijuana

How Mecalux can use their exisitng processes to produce a 'surplus piece'

The Manufactured Sites proposal consists of a maquiladora produced prefabricated frame that acts as a hinge mechanism to mediate across the multiplicity of recycled materials and systems brought from San Diego and re-assembled in Tijuana.  By giving primacy to the layered complexities of these informal sites over the singularity of the object, this small piece is also the first step in the construction of a larger, interwoven and open-ended scaffold that helps strengthen an otherwise precarious terrain, without compromising the temporal dynamics of these self-made environments.  By bridging between the planned and the unplanned, the legal and the illegal, the object and the ground, as well as man-made and factory processes of construction, this frame questions the meaning of manufacturing and of housing in the context of the building community.

Materials can be delivered to the site

The frames can be set up by community members themselves

And added to, using commonly available material and typical building processes

The design is a scaffold system comprised of metal frames manufactured by Mecalux, a maquiladora of heavy-duty industrial pallets.  The components are produced by lightly altering existing factory methods and systems of production in order to create, in a sense, a ‘surplus piece’ that is given to the informal communities that are the industries’ surrounding support infrastructure.  The scaffold is built, in turn, on top of an artificial pad bulwarked by recycled rubber tires that are interwoven to create a highly functional retaining system.  Overall, Manufactured Sites is a transitional architectural system made of PARTS – not an architectural object – that can support and better the unavoidable recycling and improvisational realities of low-income environments.  The notion of prefabrication here depends on a triangulation of human and material resources, agencies and institutions.  The relationship produced by community based activists in charge of distributing the frame, the community’s participation in building their own housing stock, the architect’s collaboration in designing and facilitating the process, the municipality’s efforts in mediating between the maquiladora industry and the informal sector, and the factory’s support in providing the infrastructure, all suggest an expanding concept of mass-production methodologies.

A vision of how the 'surplus piece' could become a stabilised site for further development by the community

The proposal has been in circulation for some time now, being exhibited from Istanbul to New York. ETC now sees its task as making it work on the ground. An upcoming exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art is an opportunity to build a firm coalition: community, NGO, maquiladora, municipal government, media, art agencies and philanthropic foundations needed to take the project from the Utopian to the Real.

This project represents a 'perfect' example of how, with only minimal effort, a maquiladora can positively contribute to the communities on which it depends. How can this story create a momentum, encouraging other maquiladoras to sponsor micro-infrastructure projects for their own workers? What part can the municipality play to encourage this 'scaling up'? To what extent can the media be used to offer positive PR incentives to those maquiladoras who participate?

The strength of ETC's approach is its grounding in the real situation, based in a thorough understanding of the economic forces at play (from those encouraging factories to set up in Tijuana to those encouraging small enterprises to import used materials from San Diego). It is an example of 'urban acupuncture', seeking maximum effect from minimal change. It is a nimble and light form of activism: engaging with the maquiladoras rather than opposing their presence, reimagining their exploitative relationship with their workers from the inside out.

Borderlands: Tijuana

I went with Cesar Favela from Estudio Teddy Cruz (ETC) down to the San Diego neighbourhood of San Ysidro to cross the border into Tijuana.

From the ramp leading over the border wall we could see the now closed Tijuana hostel where people would stay while waiting to use the tunnel which used to go from the house accross the road through a concealed hole in the fireplace through a tiny tunnel under the border wall to a stormwater grate in the San Diego parking lot over which an open bottom van would park to collect the new immigrants and take them deeper into the US.



We pass over the cars streaming freely into Mexico and waiting bumper-to-bumper into the USA. There is are no passport checks or metal detectors entering Mexico. Just a metal turnstile which lets people in but not out. Passing back over requires passports, visas, security checks and waiting in line for typically 2-3 hours.

into Tijuana / into San Diego

Turnstile into Mexico

We walk to Tonya and Fernando’s house (Tonya also works at ETC). Fernando grew up in San Diego, he and his parents crossed over illegally when he was five years old. Two years ago, during his 3rd year of Architecture at Woodbury College, Fernando and his class went on a field trip to Rome. Fernando bought a ticket from Guadalajara via Chicago, during the Chicago stopover Fernando was pulled aside, questioned and officially deported. He is now living in Tijuana, working odd jobs and trying to get back to his family and finish his degree.

Tonya, Fernando, Janet and César

We drive past the dense, lively neighbourhoods, the big freeways, the mega stores and maquiladoras, the squatted settlements climbing up the dusty hillsides, smoke billows from a tree on fire by the road in a dense neighbourhood, we turn off the highway and drive up the mountain to look more closely at the way people are building in the informal settlements.





Retaining walls of old tires filled with dirt, timber garage doors used as walls, reinforcing cages reaching out of concrete frames, ready to extend (the same strategy that is so common in the Philippines and Thailand, is it a globalised idea or a case of convergent evolution?). ETC has studied the processes invading, settling and acquiring land and has investigated the ways in which used materials (ranging from tires, pallets and garage doors to entire houses) are trucked from the US to Mexico for reuse.

Used tires from the US are a common material for retaining walls on the steep hillsides

The road is falling apart from erosion, we stop at the fringes of the settlements and walk: small gardens between parked cars, a dirt football field with chairs for posts and a carpet for the goalkeeper, sofas under the shade of eucalypt trees. Electricity lines are added to, bendy pvc shoots out from pumped header tanks. Rainwater tanks are also common, but unconnected: not much rain either.

Small garden in public space

Football field

We chat to a lady who owns a small store: not much buisiness up there at the top of the hill. She tells us that most people in the area work for the maquiladoras, the international factories who have moved across the border to take advantage of the low wages and lax labor laws in Mexico. The relationship between the maquiladoras and the communities who work for them is the grounds for ETC's project 'Manufactured Sites' which will be discussed in further posts.

A maquiladora, in distance, and the informal housing of those who work there.

I am surprised by signs advertising plots of land for sale. There is a law in Mexico that if land is unused, anyone who makes use of it can own it after continuous settlement for 5 years.

Sign advertising two plots of land for sale

After a good lunch of baja california fish tacos we cruise down Avenida De La Revolucion, the major tourist strip dotted with bars, discount pharmacies, donkeys painted as zebras to pose with etc. Around the corner we enter Tijuana’s red light district: girls young and old stand out the front of short-stay hotels in miniskirts and stilettos, pig-tails, plaid skirts and white socks were particularly common. They work from the hotels and are protected by pimps or ‘owned’ by the police. It is not hard to see why many mexicans are not proud of Tijuana. Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal summed up this attitude by describing the city as 'the armpit of Mexico'.



We then go to meet Giacomo (http://www.archivobc.org/?secc=2&a=104&letra=C) a peruvian architect/artist who came up to San Diego to work with Teddy but settled in Tijuana, and his partner Lucia who works for the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego.

After returning from America, Giacomo explored the informal in his native city of Lima, photographing and cataloguing the street vendors, transport networks and informal housing... what emerged was an understanding of how these informal processes develop and grow, incrementally. For example: tracing how an attendant (only a person) can become a vendor (person carrying goods) can become a cart (person with vehicle) can become a stall (person inside vehicle) can become a small store (vehicle becomes immobile) and so on, there is a development in scale but also a formation of a networks of peers and relationships between scales.

This led to an interest in DNA, geological processes, the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari and the internet as models of self organising systems, ones in which the part is never separate from the whole and where heirarchic control structures and pre planning is impossible.

This in turn led to the development of his own design studio GERMEN (germ in spanish) and his practice of micro-urbanism in Tijuana such as the portable bench for those waiting for family on the mexican side of the border.

GERMEN's border waiting chair (micro-urbanism)...

...and those who wait.

The micro-park is another example. Originating in a convergence of lack of public space, lack of green space and abundant waste: a tree, planted in a recycled tractor tire, becomes a unit to be arranged and painted through a process community involvement. The process included handing out flyers to communities and enrollment forms for those who want to get involved. He tells of how the dream hit political reality as one community wanted a massive project of soccer fields and water infrastructure and another wanted their political party to be credited for the project while excluding access to a rival section of the community.