At the US-Mexico border wall with the Friends of International Friendship Park
I drove to Border Field State Park (aka Friendship Park) on August 16, the day that it was reopened to car traffic after a two-year closure due to construction of the US-Mexico border wall. The reopening was supposed to mark the 54th anniversary of the park which was inaugurated on August 8, 1971 by First Lady Pat Nixon. When I walked up to the beach near the border fence, I saw a group of people associated with the Friends of International Friendship Park standing in a circle on the sand, many of them holding large painted cardboard props in the form of butterflies. Another prop held in the air was in the form of another migratory species, a 10-ft long eagle.
A young woman in a kaffiyah and sunglasses, Natalia Ventura, was speaking into a microphone as the volunteers coordinated their movements with their counterparts across the border, in Mexico, who could be seen marching around with their props, through the bollard fencing.
“We are friends, we are families, we are neighbors, we are not enemies,” she said. “We reject disinformation, coercion.”
She also led chants. “From Palestine to Mexico, these walls have got to go,” she said.
Panoramic images taken of the Friends of International Friendship Park
I’ve been on the other side of the fence, on the Playas de Tijuana side, many times. On that side, artists are allowed to use the bollard fencing as their canvas. Having been going across the border occasionally for the past decade, save for a two-year hiatus during COVID, I’ve seen successive waves of murals painted on the bollards, by artists using the border wall as their canvas. This past year, the primary fence near the beach was replaced by higher fencing,now 30 feet high. In the San Diego sector, there are two parallel sections of this fencing stretching 14 or more miles inland, and in the middle is a sort of no-man’s land that has been heavily militarized. But when First Lady Pat Nixon inaugurated the park on August 8, 1971, the fence was a mere 4-ft high border fence that you could reach across and shake hands with someone in Mexico. The restrictions on cross-border contact, however, kept growing and growing to the point now where the name “Friendship Park” really is something of a misnomer. While it is physically possible to approach the primary fence, because the secondary fencing ends approximately 100 feet from the shore, there are at any given time three or four border patrol officers on the beach with their vehicles who would prevent that from happening. But the fact that the area nearest the fence is pretty much a closed military zone isn’t much of a deterrent for artists who are again painting murals on the new border fencing, after the old fencing has been taken down, or are marching around on the sand with butterflies and eagles demonstrating for a reopened Friendship park and a reopened border.
I asked Nanzi Muro, who is, like Natalia Ventura, a multimedia artist and activist (or artivist) what the Friends of International Friendship Park were doing.
“Fifty four years of legacy, friendship, community, beauty, building, resistance, history,” she said. “So we're here to celebrate. But the most important thing is that Tijuana, Mexico gives us the example of how a park should be and how communities should come together to heal, because we're just one planet, one land, one sky, one ocean.”
Muro was referring to the Friends; activities on the Mexican side of the border fence, which includes gardens of native plants, and many organized activities including poetry readings and festivals. One of the people instrumental in this activity was Daniel Watman, who I had met many times, the founder and Coordinator of the Borderless Friendship Garden of Native Plants inside friendship park. Unfortunately for Dan and everyone involved with Friends of Friendship Park, the garden on the U.S. side had been plowed over in the name of border security.
After the formal celebration was over the volunteers and community members walked or drove up to the picnic area, where the Friends of Friendship Park were providing food and beverages. I hitched a ride up with Muro, who wasn’t the only activist present. Also there was Maria Teresa Fernandez, a photographer who has spent the last 25 years documenting the border, and has had her work exhibited in multiple exhibitions. (Her daughter Ana Teresa Fernandez painted the first large scale mural at the border wall at the beach, titled Borrando La Frontera in 2011, where she painted the fence sky-blue so it looks like you could walk through it.) I also greeted Robert Vivar, who had his hands in many cross-border activities. He is co-director, Unified U.S. Deported Veterans Resource Center, Tijuana (assisting deported veterans with aid, healthcare, and border reunification), host of Via Café at Via International, (a community space in Tijuana promoting solidarity and outreach (a community space in Tijuana promoting solidarity and outreach), vice president, Veterans for Peace in Baja California, and member of the Friends of Friendship Park core leadership team. But this partial listing really doesn’t really begin to round out his biography or define his importance to the cross-border community.
I met for the first time a retired furniture-owner turned photographer named Bob Davis. As I munched on a vegetarian sandwich provided by the Friends of Friendship Park, we talked about his photography and our shared disdain of Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel after he revealed to me that he is Jewish. I’m also a member of the tribe, as some of us sometimes call ourselves, but let’s just say I’ve found myself walking into one too many Reform congregations where the rabbi has invited his congregants to say a prayer for the Israeli Defense Forces after it was clear they were involved in conducting a genocide.
Davis told me of the activities his wife is involved in, her current one, AntoniasArt.com <> and our other group that is not currently active but interesting to look over nonetheless, PuppetInsurgency.org. He also let me know of the album of photos from the exhibit that Natalia Ventura, he and his wife Antonia had at the Chicano Park Museum called, "Their Walls, Our Canvas” as well as an album of photos that he’s taken “over the years.”
Before I left, and I had to go sooner than I wanted to, I walked back down to the beach, past the sign warning people not to enter the contaminated water, and walked up as far south as I could towards the border fence. I didn’t really have in mind antagonizing the Border Patrol — there were four vehicles present in the vicinity — I just wanted to take some more photos. But a Border Patrol officer, who apparently didn’t like what I was doing — even if I hadn’t yet entered federal property— and drove his 4x4 down to the beach specifically to wave me off.
