Border Poetry: La Mona and the Writing on the Wall

La Mona (the Doll), or Tijuana III Millenium, a 17 metre high sculpture built by
Armando Muñoz Garcia in his backyard in Colonia Aeropuerto as a tribute to his city
on the occasion of Tijuana's first centenary in 1989,and a tribute to the strength and beauty
of Tijuana's women.

The following are 3 excerts from texts found pinned and written on the walls of Estudio Teddy Cruz:

Refugees inhabit a divided world, between a country in which they cannot live and a country which they cannot enter.

- Eyal Weissman.

- Ann Micheals, 1958.




Pobre mexico, tan lejos de dios
y tan cerca de los estados unidos

- Porfrio Diaz

translation:
Poor mexico, too far from God
and too close to the united states.

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.