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.