Prologue
The international border between the US and Mexico at the San
Ysidro (San Diego)/Tijuana checkpoint is the most trafficked in the
world. Approximately sixty million people cross annually, moving
untold amounts of goods and services back and forth. This contested
zone is the site of massive contradiction, defined and re-defined
every day by the unstable balance of two powerful forces. On one
hand are the 'legal' actions and 'official' urban policy prompting
the federal government to rethink surveillance infrastructure,
while on the other hand, insurgent and 'illegal' actions
proliferate in both Tijuana and San Ysidro, in smaller-scale,
spontaneous, and tenuous - but nonetheless determined - occupations
and appropriations that seek to blur and transgress the formidable
barrier that would preclude them.
It is clear that the events of 9/11/01 permanently altered the
US government's position on its international borders, but
immigration issues were suddenly thrown into high relief in January
2004, when George W. Bush announced his new policy. The president
proposed to issue temporary work visas that would allow immigrants
to work legally in the US for a period of three years, with a
renewable second, three-year term, after which workers would have
to return to their home country. Bush's 'open-door' policy
professes to 'legalize' the status of hard-working people who
currently fill a seemingly insatiable demand for cheap labor in
this country (in California alone, if every nanny, construction and
agricultural worker, bus boy, waiter, cook, gardener, and janitor
stopped working for twenty-four hours, the whole state would come
to a standstill). However, labor organizers contend that in denying
the possibility of citizenship, the proposed policy will end up
producing nothing short of a labor underclass. Is this a re-run of
the Bracero program that invited over 12,000 documented Mexican
workers into the country in 1942? While it is true that in little
more than two decades, these workers transformed the growing fields
of America into the most productive in the world, one shouldn't
forget that the Bracero program was abolished in 1964, when then US
Department of Labor officer Lee G. Williams indicted it as a system
of "legalized slavery."
If history doesn't tell us enough, the logic of Bush's apparent
pro-immigration stance is contradicted by the fact the federal
government is quietly planning to close the gaps and fortify or
'harden' the San Diego/Tijuana border checkpoint. Funded by
billions of federal tax dollars that are pouring into San Ysidro
through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the federal
government has embarked on the construction of a larger, more
militarized, and more technologically sophisticated checkpoint than
we have seen anywhere. The new project is managed by the Design
Program of the General Services Administration (GSA), and seven
corporate architecture firms from across the US have been
short-listed for the commission. It consists of a complete redesign
and large-scale transformation of the existing security
infrastructure at the border, one that radically redefines its
nature and intent as well as its outward appearance.
Needless to say, the impact of this hardening of the border zone
falls first and foremost on the adjacent communities of San Ysidro
and Tijuana, not to mention the natural ecology and landscape of
their shared territory. At the very moment when architects and
planners have allowed themselves once again to be seduced by the
possibility of reinventing the city on a model that is more
inclusive and heterogenous, protectionists strategies fueled by
paranoia and greed are defining a radically conservative social
agenda that threatens to have impact on urban planning policy and
legislation - which already tend to reinforce a rigid grid of
containment instead of a fluid bed of opportunity. And thus it
seems important to zoom in on the paradox inherent in the border
zone, where conditions of difference and sameness collide and
overlap. For despite the apocalyptic implications of a more
fortified border with intensified surveillance infrastructure, the
growing tension between the various communities of San Diego and
those of Tijuana have elicited a multitude of creative responses -
new opportunities for sharing resources and infrastructure, for
recyling at the most outlandish levels, and for normalizing local -
not just international - relations between the cities of Tijuana
and San Diego.
Bordered and Borderless Worlds
Borders, limits and boundaries pervade our lives, everyday
experiences, imaginations, and especially our built domain. They
divide as much as they unite us, they demarcate the relationships
and conditions from which our social and political practices grow
within and across the territories, nations, cities, and spaces we
create, construct, and inhabit. Border conditions exist at all
scales, from the individual to the collective, and are composed of
everything from emotional and psychological to physical and virtual
matter. They generate the devices through which we continually
redefine our identities, histories, narratives, from the fixed
particularities of place to mutating global landscapes, netscapes,
and even driving us to fantasize about extra-terrestrialscapes.
Rarely do we find two such radically different cultures and
economies juxtaposed so intensely as San Diego and Tijuana. They
are intimately connected, but at the same time sharply divided by a
ten-foot steel wall that ruptures the continuity of the shared
landscape. The wall itself was built by the US government, six
inches into its own territory, using recycled steel landing mats
left over from former George Bush, Senior's Desert Storm war in
Iraq. The message is strong: Stop! Go back! We control access, and
only insofar as it benefits the US. In reality, the wall is an
anachronism; it is virtually powerless against the international
connections and interests of a world emancipated by flows of
information, technology, and hybrid identities belonging to a
global community sans frontiers. This is the paradox of a
world defined by geographies of contradiction, a world that wants
to be simultaneously bordered and borderless.
Such contradictory conditions invite us to reflect on the
relevance of contemporary debates in art and architecture: form
versus function, style versus performance, aesthetic appeal versus
socio-political import. What comes to mind are certain anticipatory
actions - scenes from a world to come that have already been staged
in the urban context of Tijuana, definitive moments out of which
new histories and practices will unfold over time. Ironically, as
the following 'scenarios' settle into the collective imagination
and are interpreted by popular culture and academia, they are
revealed to be as local as they are global, and thus fugitive in
time and space.
Scenario 1
Horse and Doll
On the 26th of September 1997, as part of a bi-national art
project called InSite, Marcos Ramírez Erre, one of the most
far-sighted artists to emerge in Tijuana, rolled an enormous
Janus-headed Trojan Horse into the midst of traffic waiting to
cross the border on both sides. The horse appeared out of nowhere,
and in the same way, it vanished. It was positioned to straddle the
border, with two legs resting on the US side, one head looking
north, while the other legs remained rooted in México, one
head gazing southward. Erre inserted his horse into the
de-centered, de-territorialized, and multi-directional flows that
constitute the border, where it dwelled for a brief moment,
(impossibly) occupying both sides at once in defiance of the
dialectic forces that govern the space. Representing both arrival
and departure, stasis as well as movement at a crossroads, the
Trojan Horse was
the fragile 'anti-monument', ephemeral and translucent because
in our time there is nothing to hide, we already know all their
intentions towards us, and they know our intentions towards them.
It is a universal symbol, which was modified to indicate the
uncertainty of a time in which the only way to conceal the truth is
to overwhelm us with information. When there are no more sufficient
caretakers of censorship to control the avalanche of doubts, and
when one does not know anymore where the truth has been buried,
everyone a version of it, and that is where creativity begins. This
should be the best response for those who still believe that it is
possible to establish rigid custom houses, and protect cities and
their images with judicial decrees. (citation to follow from
Teddy)
In 1989, Armando Muñoz, a Tijuana citizen Michel De
Certeau would have called 'a common hero', paid homage to the
hundredth anniversary of his city by erecting a home-made 'statue
of liberty'. La Mona (the Doll) appeared from one day to the next
from within Colonia Libertad, one of Tijuana's oldest informal,
favela-like communities. Her arms reaching for the sky, La Mona
invokes the irony of 'liberty' in this context, but she also stands
for the political role of women in the city. La Mona was not only a
monument to Armando Muñoz's city - it is also a permanent
addition to his own house. As the Situationists imagined it, the
ultimate avant-garde action occurs the moment that an average
citizen is able to appropriate the spaces and the materials of the
city.
Both Muñoz's 'monument' and Erre's 'anti-monument', the
Trojan Horse, remind us that the contemporary city is still able to
elude the absolute ordering devices that attempt to render it
homogeneous and one-dimensional. Spontaneous gestures such as the
Horse and the Doll allow us to glimpse the subjective and
collective struggles of a community locked into conflicts that are
being played out in the border zone: the most derelict and
unexpected places have the potential to become sites for light
occupations that challenge the massive colonization of traditional
urbanism. For San Diego as well as Tijuana, the Horse and the Doll
have ironically become political symbols that remind us of the
opportunities opened up by an insurgent, flexible urbanism that
insinuates itself into the most rigid contexts using simple
strategies of transgression and appropriation. How to appropriate
the empty spaces of the city - defunct infrastructure, abandoned
industrial buildings, and brown fields - and how to activate the
potential of the void are still, as Ignasi de Sola Morales noted,
the crucial questions for contemporary artists - and also for
architects and urban planners.
Scenario 2
Two Urbanisms
Two completely different urbanisms expressing two different
attitudes toward the city have grown up in reaction to the
phenomenon of the border. If San Diego is emblematic of the
segregation and control epitomized by the master-planned
communities that define its sprawl, Tijuana's urbanism evolved as a
collection of informal, nomadic settlements or barrios that
encroach on San Diego's periphery. This comparison is not
reductive, if one considers that the steel border wall itself
transforms San Diego into the world's largest gated community. The
complex relationship between San Diego and has engendered multiple
histories, narratives and identities. Their centers, for example,
which are only twenty minutes apart, represent entirely different
socio-economic and political universes. While San Diego calls
itself "America's Finest City," Tijuana is viewed in México
as a decadent hybrid and transient world unto itself, distinct from
(and somehow inferior to) the rest of the country. While San Diego
is perceived as a picturesque resort town, a point of arrival for
migrating populations looking for a nice cul-de-sac in which
to retire, Tijuana has traditionally been perceived in
México as a threshold leading to the 'other side', a
contemporary Sodom and Gomorrah. The differences dwindle as San
Diego's signature mini-malls spring up on Tijuana's street corners
and gated residential communities fill in the city's periphery,
while Tijuana's dense and chaotic patterns of mixed-use and
informal type of public markets begin to appear in neighborhoods of
San Diego. Unavoidably, both cities seem to contain something of
one another other: In every 'first world' city, a 'third world'
exists, and every third world city replicates the first.
North to South: Disposable Housing
A Tijuana speculator travels to San Diego to buy up little
bungalows that have been slated for demolition to make space for
new condominium projects. The little houses are loaded onto
trailers and prepared to travel to Tijuana, where they will have to
clear customs before making their journey south. For days, one can
see houses, just like cars and pedestrians, waiting in line to
cross the border. Finally the houses enter into Tijuana and are
mounted on one-story metal frames that leave an empty space at the
street level to accommodate future uses. One city profits from the
material that the other one wastes. Tijuana recycles the leftover
buildings of San Diego, recombining them in fresh scenarios,
creating countless new opportunities.
South to North: Illegal Zoning
Increasing waves of immigrants from Latin America have had an
major impact on the urbanism of American cities. Already, Los
Angeles, for example, is home to the second largest concentration
of Latin Americans outside the capitals of Mexico, Guatemala, El
Salvador, and other countries. Current demographic studies have
predicted that Latin Americans will comprise the majority of
California's population in the next decade. As populations travel
north in search for new opportunities, they inevitably alter and
transform the fabric of certain neighborhoods in cities like Los
Angeles and San Diego. The immigrants bring with them their
socio-cultural attitudes and sensibilities regarding the use of
domestic and public space as well as the natural landscape. In
these neighborhoods, multi-generational households of extended
families shape their own programs of use, taking charge of their
own mini-economies in order to maintain a standard for the
household. These generate illegal, non-conforming uses and
high densities that reshape the fabric of the residential
neighborhoods where they settle. Alleys, setbacks, driveways, and
other 'wasted' infrastructures and leftover spaces are appropriated
and utilized as the community sees fit.
South = North?
As Tijuana grows eastward and is seduced by the style and
glamour of the master-planned, gated communities of the US, Tijuana
is building its own version - miniaturized replicas typical
suburban Southern California tract homes, paradoxically imported
into Tijuana to provide "social housing." Thousands of tiny tract
homes are now scattered around the periphery of Tijuana, creating a
vast landscape of homogeneity and division that is at odds with the
prevailing heterogeneous and organic metropolitan condition. These
diminutive dwellings come equipped with all the clichés and
conventions: manicured landscaping, gate houses, model units,
banners and flags, mini-set backs, front and back yards.
This is the new social housing of the Mexican federal
government, courtesy of private developers and speculators. Whereas
the gated communities of San Diego remain closed systems due to
stringent zoning that prohibits any kind of formal alteration or
programmatic juxtaposition, housing tracts in Tijuana quickly
submit to transformation by occupants who are little hindered by
comparatively permissive zoning regulations. The ways in which
occupants customize their tract houses - filling in setbacks,
occupying front and back yards as well as garages with more
construction and overlapping programs - mirror strategies common to
older informal communities of the city rather than the idealized
suburban dream house. These tracts are perceived as open systems,
their inherent uniformity giving way to occupants' collective
desire for functionality and flexibility, for the freedom to
activate improvisational, higher-density, and mixed uses - the very
DNA of urbanism itself.
The transgressive approach Tijuana residents have taken may
prefigure the fate of urban revitalization schemes in many cities
around the world, where redevelopment has been driven by
privatization, homogenization, and style. Whereas gated residential
communities on both sides of the San Diego/Tijuana border derive
from a common recipe, one insists on foreclosing the possibility of
change over time, while the other remains open to unpredictable
futures. The gated communities of San Diego, which will soon stand
in the pale shadow of the newly-designed border checkpoint,
exemplify the dominant paradigm for a post-9/11 fortified city
where public life, public space, and public institutions and
transportation hubs are increasingly barricaded against complexity
and contradiction. The imitation tract housing developments in
Tijuana, on the other hand, are inspiring and liberating in their
search for strategies of improvisation, layering, juxtaposition,
and negotiation of a territory conceived as an operative and
flexible horizon.
But it is questionable whether or not these ideals can be
achieved under the conditions that prevail at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, as discriminatory social policies regarding
the use of public space collide with intensified layers of
'security' against invisible threats. In this sense, we are
reminded that the policies being rolled out by the Department of
Homeland Security might, like the Trojan Horse, may not be as
benign as they seem. For in their blind desire to reinforce
barriers, to lock out what is different and unpredictable, they of
course run the risk of locking the door on the wrong side.
