Citizen

Cross-Border Citizens

Our descent from the global border to the border neighborhoods, across planetary, continental, regional and local scales, culminates in the communities themselves that are divided by the border wall. To visualize this cross-border conflict and raise awareness about the need for a binational approach to conservation and investment to protect bioregional assets in Los Laureles Canyon, in 2011 we curated the Border-Drain Performance, an unprecedented cross-border public action, in collaboration with grassroots organizations that flank the border wall, at the intersection of the informal settlement in Tijuana and the estuary in San Diego. This public action consisted of two acts: a Forum and a Border Crossing.

We pitched a tent-forum in the middle of a surveillance corridor on the US side, a few meters from a newly built segment of the border wall. We summoned diverse local and global actors from civil society, academia, government, arts and culture to discuss the impacts of wall building on local communities and the entire bioregion. After the forum, we moved toward the wall to collectively witness the conditions we had debated, exposing conditions that remain invisible, too often unaccounted for in public narratives about the border wall. We then led a caravan across the border, traveling southbound through a sewage drain underneath a new section of the border wall located at the precise juncture where the informal settlement of Los Laureles in Tijuana collides with the estuary on the US side. With our community partners, we negotiated a special permit with US Homeland Security to transform the drain into an official port of entry for twenty-four hours.

The strange juxtaposition of pollution traveling northward and the passage from pristine estuary to informal settlement under a militarized culvert amplified the region’s most profound contradictions and interdependencies. Can border regions be the laboratories for reimagining citizenship beyond the nation-state? Can citizenship be organized around shared interests in communities divided by a wall?