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.
