The San Diego-Tijuana Conurbation

Week Three of our road trip to US cities.  We’ve been to Atlanta and Denver.  This week, San Diego-Tijuana.

I got my feet wet this week on the US-Mexico border. 

Friendship Park is located above the beach along the U.S. Mexico border. (Photo by detritus / Flickr)I literally put my feet in the waves of the Pacific Ocean on a Tijuana beach and tried to look across to the US a hundred yards away.  But a giant, ridiculous border fence blocked my view.  A constructed barrier between the two nations extends in various forms from Brownsville, Texas across desert and city, town and forest, 2000 miles to San Diego-Tijuana.  Its last several hundred feet plunge from the beachhead out into the crashing surf, as if it could divide US and Mexican waves.

My hosts discouraged me from putting my feet in the water because they said it is so polluted.  But Mexican kids frolicked around me, oblivious, or maybe with no other choices of beach.  No one played on the US side, choosing instead the cleaner US beaches up the coast.

I had earlier that day just barely avoided getting my feet wet jumping across a filthy stream running through a Tijuana shanty town.  I could smell the rancid water, polluted by runoff heavy metals from the nearby Mexican “maquiladorias,” huge American owned electronics manufacturing plants.  Thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA,) these plants perch on the border, so they can say “made in the USA” while exploiting cheap Mexican labor to make most US TVs and other electronics.  The companies and the community tolerate these shanty towns so they can have easy access to workers.  Like poor exploited workers around the world who make inexpensive goods for the first world, they have no water, electricity, public safety or health care.  The factories pay workers $56 a week, but a 5 gallon can of water costs $10.  Just a few miles from prosperous San Diego, these shanty town folks try to keep their kids out of the stream.  No surprise there is a high incidence of birth defects in Tijuana.

I got my feet wet on an “immersion” trip to the border this week with the Centro Romero for Border Ministries.

I wanted to learn more about our national border with Mexico and my neighbors.  The Center states its purpose:

If participants desire to grow as individuals and as a human family, there is a theologically-based need to cross borders. At the Romero Center we accept that borders will never disappear, but we also believe that borders do not have to divide or separate. Borders can be privileged meeting places. Through our immersion opportunities, participants are invited to view or observe the border and reflect theologically considering the border communities as places of great importance and as markers that enable us to recognize and respect the differences that make us who we are as individuals and societies. 

Our nation of immigrants is trying to change our immigration policies.  The Senate this past week passed an immigration reform bill with a possible path to citizenship for the 11 million Mexicans living without documentation in the US, but only after including in the bill deep concessions to fear-fueled Republicans: the bill would require dramatically increased border security and more walls.  The House will probably reject even that compromise.  

Legislators don’t want to get their feet wet, or muddy, on immigration.  But if they don’t, or won’t, our nation as a whole may be poisoned by fear, or drown in ignorance.  And our nation’s neighbors will suffer even more. 

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On this week three of our US road trip here at the Back Road Café, we visit the San Diego-Tijuana conurbation. 

Yes, conurbation.   It’s a word new to me; a conglomeration of urban areas that have merged into a continuous developed and industrial area with a shared labor market.  It’s also called “urban agglomeration.”  Think Tri-state New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, or Greater Tokyo.  I think we’re going to be seeing more and more conurbations. 

San Diego and TijuanaSan Diego-Tijuana is the third largest conurbation in the world, over 5 million folks, across two nations.  San Diego, founded 1769 was the first and southernmost city in California, with a deep harbor, long ties with the Navy and a vibrant economy.  Across the 15 mile border it shares with Mexico is Tijuana, founded 100 years later, now Mexico’s 5^th largest and westernmost city.  Likewise vibrant and productive, Tijuana also suffers severe poverty, crime, drug trade, sex trafficking, in sharp contrast to its US sister city. 

The San Diego-Tijuana border crossing is the world’s busiest.  50 million people use it every year, largely because of that shared labor market.  Every day 50,000 cars pass through the closely guarded checkpoint, and since that can take hours, another 35,000 walk it each day.

Before 9-11 this checkpoint and the border in general were much more fluid, easy for families, workers, shoppers to travel and visit  back and forth.  Now it is increasingly militarized, fearful and punitive. 

A once “fluid” border; there’s that water word again.  The US in general feels less and less fluid these days, more and more rigid. 

And dry.

The 5000 Mexicans who die every year trying to get to the US across that dangerous border mostly die from dehydration.  They don’t attempt to storm the busy San Diego-Tijuana checkpoint.  They set out across the deserts of the Southwest and die of thirst.

I think of water as the source and symbol of life.  But for Mexicans water can mean death.   A polluted fenced ocean.  A toxic neighborhood stream.  A desperate desiccated desert journey. 

Americans, in big cities and tiny towns, depend on these poor thirsty workers.  How else would we get such cheap TVs?

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter