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 Editorials | Issues | March 2007 
US-Mexican Border is a Blurry One
 Marc Lacey - International Herald Tribune
| | In Tijuana, the metal border barrier is decorated with painted coffins, each marked with the number of migrants who died trying to cross into the U.S. in a given year. (Luis J. Jimenez/NYTimes) |
Tijuana, Mexico - The Mexican authorities complained recently that American construction workers putting up a barrier on the border between Mexico and the United States had trespassed into Mexico a full 10 meters.
Promising an investigation of the diplomatic brouhaha, the American ambassador, Antonio Garza Jr., reassured the Mexicans, who are livid that the barrier is going up in the first place, that any improper step across the line was unintentional.
"The U.S. is sensitive to Mexican concerns," Garza said.
The accusation involved an episode in February east of here, near the Mexican border city of Agua Prieta and the Arizona town of Douglas. But it drove home a point that may be more evident in Tijuana than anywhere else: The border is a blurry one, no matter what barriers may be going up to keep people from illegally crossing it.
A case in point is Kurt Honold Morales, a citizen and resident of both countries, who drives his Mercedes sports utility vehicle with California license plates around Tijuana, where he works.
Honold, a 46-year-old telecommunications executive, recently became the mayor of Tijuana, when the elected mayor resigned to run for governor and Honold, the mayor's No.2, stepped in to fill the unexpired term.
"We're connected, border or no border," Honold said, noting that his children go to San Diego schools and that his family has held season tickets for the National Football League's San Diego Chargers for more than 30 years.
On a host of issues, there is no separating San Diego, the largest U.S. city along the border, from Tijuana, the biggest municipality on the Mexican side.
They are linked economically, with Tijuana's assembly plants, or maquiladoras, helping to fuel growth on both sides of the border. High home prices in San Diego have pulled up Tijuana's real estate market as well.
When it comes to the environment, it is difficult to say where Mexico ends and the United States begins. Air pollution knows no borders, and heavy rains in Tijuana send sewage and industrial waste down the Tijuana River into the United States.
A former congressman once used a bulldozer to try to push sewage back to Mexico, but that was no permanent fix. For years, an American-financed sewage treatment plant on the Tijuana side has been considered the best solution, although now support is increasing for a plant to process waste on the U.S. side.
There are other cross-border irritants. When San Diego announced that it was replacing a leaky section of the canal that carries water into the city from the Colorado River, Mexicans complained loudly because their farmers had been irrigating their crops with the leakage for decades.
Honold, whose father was born in San Diego, is hardly the only person whose life straddles the border.
There is Elisa Peñaloza-Aguirre, also a dual citizen, who teaches in a San Diego elementary school but moved to Tijuana a year ago for the lower home prices and so her children would become fluent in Spanish as well as English.
"There are tons of people who commute back and forth," said Peñaloza- Aguirre, one of 88,252 regular crossers who have a special American pass that allows them to use a fast lane at the California-Mexico border.
There is metal border fencing running the length of Tijuana, but that does not stop people from trying to poke holes in the barriers, both literally and figuratively.
For years, the San Diego-Tijuana Border Initiative, a binational anti-drug organization, held its meetings right at the fence, with American members sitting on chairs on their side and their Mexican colleagues on the other.
"The drug problem does not stop at the border," said Veronica Baeza, the group's executive director.
But the U.S. authorities soured on the meetings after Sept. 11, 2001, Baeza said. Now the sessions are rotated between the cities, though Mexicans without visas cannot attend the ones in San Diego.
It is hard to find a Mexican who supports the barriers going up along the border. Many are offended by such an approach, even those like the Tijuana mayor, who will be able to cross back and forth no matter how high the walls are built.
On the other hand, Representative Duncan Hunter, a Republican who represents part of the San Diego area and is a candidate for his party's nomination for president, has said that building a wall between Mexico and the United States would be among his highest priorities if he won.
Luis Ituarte, a Tijuanan who lives in Tijuana half the week and in Los Angeles the other half, has a much more relaxed view of the border.
His Border Council of Arts and Culture has rented a house in Tijuana just a few steps from the border to use as a cultural center. Recently, it was the site of a cross-border poetry reading. Using bullhorns, poets from Mexico and the United States recited their work.
"Air doesn't need a passport," Ituarte said. "Light doesn't need a passport. Art should not need a passport either."
Ituarte, who is a citizen of Mexico, chose the site of the cultural center not just for its proximity to the border. The house was seized by the Mexican authorities several years ago when it was discovered that drug traffickers had dug a hole in the concrete floor and tunneled under the border to a parking lot in San Ysidro, California.
"What better place to try to connect two cultures?" he said. "We want to break this wall in a subliminal way, if we can't break it physically." |
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