Abstract

Based on the documentary Over the Wall / Sobre el muro (El Colef, 2019), this text discusses some social effects from the transformations of the barriers and divisions that have demarcated the border of the states of California, United States and Baja California, Mexico, to the construction of fences and border walls pushed by the last four US federal administrations. Based on interviews with specialists in migration and borders, residents, and an investigation of archives and documents around the wall and its effects on the Tijuana-San Diego border, this documentary captures periods of change and border reinforcement by States. States, as well as the recent situation with the arrival of new migratory flows such as the caravans of Central American migrants to Tijuana and the challenges for this border.

Keywords: documentary film, border, migration, Wall, Tijuana

Documentary “over the Wall” / ”Sobre el muro” (El Colef, 2019): A Vision of Social Transformation at Tijuana's us-Mexico Border Wall

Based on the documentary film Over the Wall / Sobre el muro (El Colef, 2019), the present essay takes up certain social effects that stem from the transformation of barriers and divisions that establish the border between California (USA) and Baja California (Mexico ), up to the construction of border fences and walls overseen by the four most recent US federal administrations. From interviews with migration and border experts, as well as residents, alongside archival and documentary research on the wall and its effects on the Tijuana-San Diego border, the documentary portrays the challenges the border faces: changing times, US reinforcement and the recent situation with migrant flows such as Tijuana-bound Central American caravans.

Keywords: border, wall, immigration, Tijuana, documentary.

The walls in the world and the border wall between Mexico and the United States

Contrary to what was thought with the fall of the Berlin Wall in Europe, the physical divisions between people and countries have increased. Currently the construction of barriers and different types of walls between nations and territories is a multibillion dollar industry with a global presence. And although its purposes are justified as reinforcement measures to increase border control and security, its construction has also meant a political and social use that reflects conservative views of societies, in addition to encouraging expressions of discrimination, racism and xenophobia towards refugees. , migrants or any person considered foreign to the place where he or she arrives.

During the first decade of the century xxi, Alexandra Novosseloff and Frank Niesse, both collaborators of strategic projects of the United Nations Organization, walked the walls that still remained in different countries and registered nine of these divisions (Novosseloff and Niesse, 2011).1 This report was collected in a book with photographs about the characteristics of each division, as well as brief articles to contextualize their origin.

Image 1: Guard the mountain. Border guard post in Seungni. Border between North Korea and South Korea. Photo: Alexandra Novosseloff, 2005.

Image 2. The electrified border. Electrified fence on the dividing line. Border between India and Pakistan. Photo: Alexandra Novosseloff, 2007.

Image 3. The faces of the conflict. Art on the border wall of Bethlehem. Border between Israel and Palestine. Photo: Alexandra Novosseloff, 2006.

Image 4: Sand walls. Aerial view of the conflict zone between Morocco and the Saharawi Polisario Front, Sahara, West Africa. Photo: Frank Neisse, 2001.

Image 5: The wall borders the houses in the town of Benzú, in the autonomous city of Ceuta, on the border with Morocco. Photo: Alexandra Novoseloff, 2007.

The book was translated into Spanish and republished in 2011 by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Mexico and the Alma Mater Network in Colombia. A couple of years later, Dr. Novosseloff would visit the Mexican border with the United States again in Tijuana, at a time when the deportations promoted by the Barack Obama administration also accompanied reinforcement actions in the border strip, and found that the fences installed by the US government, far from representing an ineffective strategy, they were rather strengthened and sophisticated. The walls in the world were not only extended and reformed, but had multiplied and today there are more than seventy.2

It is in this context of reinforcement and the emergence of new divisions that the border between Mexico and the United States is located. This border has undergone transformations since the late 1980s, and in a singular way with the arrival in 2016 of Donald Trump to the presidency, who used the proposal of the wall with Mexico as a campaign promise and whose negative rhetoric against migrants has encouraged rejection. and violence towards Mexican and Hispanic communities, regardless of whether they have legal status or not.

It is also in this context that the initiative of El Colef arises in 2018 to make a documentary on the transformations of the border wall between Mexico and the United States, taking the case of Tijuana to account for the changes as a result of the barriers that have existed from the nineties to the present, making use of the documentary format in search of reaching a wider audience from audiovisual content.

This text seeks to contextualize the transformations in Tijuana in relation to the construction of the wall. At first, some of the premises in the script of the documentary are raised, among them the processes of change in the border as a result of the construction of these divisions, as well as events and social effects due to the reinforcement of the border, migration and the new forms of mobility, such as migrant caravans. To conclude, some of the reflections in the
documentary, as well as the challenges for border cities like Tijuana in this scenario.

Over the Wall / On the wall and the changes in the border region since the last four federal administrations in the United States

Over the Wall / Sobre el muro is a 28-minute documentary produced by El Colef and released in early 2019. The original idea and executive production were in charge of Alberto Hernández, president of El Colef. The realization and production were carried out by Luis Mercado and Marina Viruete, audiovisual creators, who also collaborated in the writing of the script together with Jhonnatan Curiel from El Colef.

The work is built from interviews with historians, sociologists, specialists in migration and borders, residents of this border, and a work of investigation of archives, documents and audiovisual material around the changes of the wall and its effects in the Tijuana region -San Diego, among them the recent conjunctures with the caravans of Central American migrants. The documentary integrates the voices of specialists such as Paul Ganster from San Diego State University, Érika Pani from El Colegio de México, David Piñera from the Institute of Historical Research of the Autonomous University of Baja California, Alberto Hernández, Rodolfo Cruz, Rafael Alarcón and Olivia Ruiz from El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, as well as José Luis Pérez Canchola, who served as director of Human Rights in Tijuana and has worked on migration issues in the state of Baja California since 1970.

The objective of the script was to capture the changes from the tightening of border security by the United States in the late eighties, and how these actions had effects on daily life in Tijuana.

Prior to this, the historical conditions that turned this town into a border limit as a result of the war of US intervention in Mexico (1846-1848) and the signing of the Guadalupe-Hidalgo Treaties, where Mexico yielded 50 percent, are contextualized. of its territory. The Tijuana ranch would be on the border of that demarcation and gave rise to that town (Piñera, 1985).

One of the events that contributed to the growth of this border was tourism from the southern United States, which found in Tijuana a site to avoid the prohibitionist period in California during the first decades of the century. xx. Starting in the 1940s, World War II and the implementation of the Bracero program would bring important changes for Tijuana in population and urban terms. Decades later, the launch of the National Border Program (pronaf) in 1961 and the Border Industrialization Program (pif) in 1972, it had a positive impact on the economic integration of Mexico in global markets, although it also encouraged an unprecedented arrival of people from other Mexican states in search of employment or with the purpose of crossing into the United States. The following decades would end up turning Tijuana into one of the five most important cities in the country, both due to its rapid demographic growth and the economic benefits provided by its border status, for example with the maquiladora industry, and also by emerging as one of the busiest and most dynamic borders in the world. Facts that for the Mexican State were conditions of opportunity, but that for the United States government were challenges in terms of the undocumented migration of Mexicans to their territory and the need to implement more regulations and infrastructure for security on its border with Mexico.

Although the attention of the US administrations to its southern border has been a priority issue in the relationship with its Mexican counterpart, the eighties constitute a watershed in border surveillance and reinforcement actions, as well as the beginning of a stage in which that border will be closing.

The beginnings of El Colef as an academic institution in northern Mexico will account for this process with the Cañón Zapata project (El Colef, 2019a), which developed a methodology for measuring undocumented migratory flows in an area of Tijuana where there was every day. The Cañón Zapata project found that these flows were due to periods of demand for labor power by the United States and also to the laxity of border controls until then (Bustamante, 2012).

After this project and at the beginning of the nineties, changes will begin to be implemented along the border, through a reinforcement of its security and the introduction of more restrictive actions in migration matters. The last four federal administrations in the United States headed by Bill Clinton (1993-2001), George W. Bush (2001-2009), Barack Obama (2009-2017) and Donald Trump (2017 to the present) have transformed the dynamics and processes on the shared border with Mexico.

Bill Clinton implemented the operative Gatekeeper (Guardián operation) in October 1994. In the case of the Tijuana-San Diego border, this consisted of a tightening of security in its international ports, the installation of metal fences to separate the territory, a wall with steel bars that jumped into the Pacific Ocean, as well as the surge in Border Patrol personnel.

In turn, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Law, enacted in 1996, was another of the actions that authorized the strengthening of this barrier with Mexico.

These actions and their effects transformed the daily life of the border crossing in Tijuana, which for decades had remained flexible or less restrictive for people and vehicles. The famous anecdote of people crossing the border simply by saying "US Citizen" to the immigration agent or using apocryphal documentation, for some, was a reality until the mid-1990s, when that changed.

Another of the events that transformed the border were the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. From these events, a new dependency would emerge in the government of George W. Bush, who in November 2002 promoted the creation of the United States Department of Homeland Security (Department of Homeland Security, dhs) dedicated to protecting the United States from threats to its national security.

Just under a year later, in March 2003, the United States Customs and Border Protection Office (US Custom and Border Protection, cbp) attached to the Department of National Security, to carry out protective actions against drug trafficking, terrorism, as well as illegal trafficking of people and goods. As he dhs dome the cbp, in conjunction with the Border patrolThey were agencies that were in charge of the control of the southern border, as well as the supervision and surveillance that a new, more ambitious and elaborated division project in infrastructure and technology implied, the construction of a new border wall.3

The arrival of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States led to favorable expectations in his relationship with Mexico. During his two administrations, this president maintained a skeptical public discourse regarding the effectiveness of continuing the construction of a wall with Mexico, however, in practice he strengthened the security of the border fence by providing it with financial resources, as well as personnel and surveillance infrastructure.

In August 2010, Obama allocated 600 million dollars to increase border security with Mexico (pbs, 2010). Also, although the extension of the physical border barrier did not continue, it did invested in the security of the natural border crossing by establishing at least twelve naval bases in rivers that divide the two countries (Arias, 2016).

Although President Obama did not distinguish himself by continuing to build more divisions, he has been the president who made the most deportations to Mexico in recent decades. In the period from 2009 to 2016, more than 2.5 million return shares were registered, and at the end of his administration in 2017 the figure reached almost three million (emif North, 2016). Therefore, although Obama did not increase the extension of the wall, he did establish barriers and obstacles of another type for the migrant and Latino population in the American Union, in addition to influencing the population change of border towns in northern Mexico, such as it was for the city of Tijuana, due to the hundreds of thousands of people who returned to Mexico4 during his administration.

However, the rise of Trump to the presidency of the United States with an electoral campaign marked by threats to build a "Great Wall" with Mexico was favored by previous projects of division. When he assumed the presidency of the United States, the border wall with Mexico already had more than 1,000 kilometers of construction with different types of fences and walls in the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. This extension is equivalent to one third of the total border with Mexico, which is 3,141 km long.

At the beginning of 2018 it was reported that the The Great Wall of Trump would mean 1,400 new km of wall (bbc News Mundo, 2019), however this has been questioned due to mountainous areas or territories inaccessible for construction machinery, especially in the northeast region, which, in addition to the budgetary implications, would impact ecosystems and cause severe environmental damage (Córdova and De la Parra, 2012).

The political use of the border wall has brought Trump more backing from his supporters. In March 2018, he visited South San Diego, California to supervise the eight wall prototypes erected to assess which of them was the best option to build on the border with Mexico. They are images that can be recovered in this documentary.

By February 2019, these prototypes would be demolished by the US government itself, when a new model of wall was chosen. During February and June of that same year, from his Twitter account, Trump will share videos with progress of the construction of the wall in New Mexico, Texas and California, accompanied by the legend “I changed the design, it is stronger, bigger, better and cheaper, much cheaper ”(Hernández J., 2019).

Today, in Tijuana, on the site where the foil fence originally installed during the Clinton presidency from 1994, stands the new Trump wall, a thirty-foot-high wall built with steel bars anchored in concrete. In addition to this barrier, just 10 meters from it, in the United States, a second 10-meter high wall has currently been erected, so that in areas such as Tijuana beaches, the road to Playas and the international avenue, These two new walls are already visible, structures that have transformed the landscape along the 41 kilometers of shared border between Tijuana and San Diego.

Migration and new mobilities on the United States-Mexico border: the case of Tijuana

Along with the transformations derived from the different border division and reinforcement projects, the Mexico-United States border has also witnessed substantive changes in migration matters and new international mobilities whose transit through Mexico, and in some cases their stay in the country, are related to requests for asylum or their recognition as refugees.

In summary, four facts could be identified that allow us to account for these transformations: a) The emigration of Mexicans to the United States decreased considerably in the last 20 years;5 b) The return of Mexicans from abroad increased along with that of persons deported or returned from the United States; c) The population (especially Central American) of migrants in transit through Mexican territory has increased, and d) The number of applications for asylum, refuge and other forms of international protection has increased (Hernández, A., 2019).

In relation to the last two points, from 2013 to 2016 there was a contrast in the trend of the volume of irregular Mexican and Central American migrants who try to enter the eu. Something that was reflected in the detention of more Central Americans than Mexicans on the southern US border.

In these years, the number of returns of Central Americans by US authorities was more than 360,000. During the same period, the Mexican government registered more than 400,000 returns of Central Americans (emif, 2016). At the same time, from the end of 2016 to the second semester of 2019, the applications for recognition as refugees of people from the northern triangle of Central America, Haiti, and to a lesser extent, migrants from Caribbean, Latin American and African countries increased. With which Mexico, as well as being a transit country, has also become a destination country (Hernández A. 2019).

Added to these changes are the caravans of Central American migrants during 2018, especially of Hondurans seeking to reach the United States. These are events that implied serious challenges for Mexican border cities, whose service capacity was exceeded and required work between local, state and federal government agencies in Mexico, as well as the support of civil society organizations, which joined the provide attention to this situation.

However, the volume of people who arrived with the caravans was growing. More than 7,000 migrants of Central American origin arrived in Tijuana alone (El Colef, 2019b), who were located in the Benito Juárez Sports Unit in the north, a makeshift shelter a few meters from the border fence.

A short time later, thousands would be transferred to El Barretal, another improvised space as a shelter in the eastern part of the city. The arrival of Central Americans to this border was also marked by attitudes of rejection and xenophobic and discriminatory attacks on the part of a sector of the Tijuana population in disagreement with their presence in the city.

The purpose of reaching the United States led a large number of Central American migrants to attempt a massive crossing in December 2018 in the area known as El Bordo de Tijuana, a channel in the federal zone that divides Mexico from the United States. They also attempted to forcibly cross the international gatehouses of San Ysidro and Otay, as well as areas surrounding the border fence, which caused the temporary closure of international ports and led to the deployment of the US Army and the National Guard, who Next to the Border patrol and staff of the cbp they dedicated themselves to containing and capturing those who attempted to cross these sites.

The Tijuana-San Diego border and the documentary as a socio-anthropological tool for its study

The use of the documentary as a tool to account for a social phenomenon is a resource that acquires relevance at a time when contemporary discursive regimes are linked to audiovisual productions. For this reason it is not by chance that sometimes for certain audiences, for example young people, the visual has a greater weight than the written, in that through the audiovisual, people are represented from their body, face and subjectivity, something that sometimes it fades away in the exposition and written argument (Trujillo, 2013).

Hence also the relevance of continuing to explore the relationship between the documentary genre, anthropology and social studies in search of representing contexts or capturing the world as close to its reality, something that the documentary Over the Wall / Sobre el muro has sought.

As said at the beginning, based on the content exposed in this audiovisual piece, this text had the purpose of contextualizing the set of social transformations that the reinforcement of the border wall between Mexico and the United States has brought with it, taking the case of Tijuana to exemplify these changes.

As the documentary shows, the transformation of the urban landscape in the border strip from the early 1990s to the present day has been linked to division projects promoted and strengthened by the last four US federal administrations.

But also during the same period, this border has evolved in terms of its components and migratory flows, both due to the return of Mexicans to the country and due to the flow of international migrants, particularly Central Americans, who have opened a new paradigm of the mobility that transits through Mexico using caravans as a visibility and protection strategy. Its purpose of seeking asylum or refuge, both in Mexico and in the United States, is a component that stands out in these new forms of mobility, as it breaks with the patterns of the migratory phenomenon in the history of Tijuana.

On the other hand, the administration of President Trump has placed numerous obstacles for these populations in mobility contexts to achieve their purpose. Both his speech and his actions against migrants have led to a greater tightening of border controls, raids, deportations and the establishment of detention centers for men, women, children and even babies, all with the purpose of discouraging their aspiration to arrive. to American soil. These events have undoubtedly empowered supremacists and anti-immigrant groups, in addition to securing the support of their political sympathizers with their sights set on the 2020 federal elections.

The current border strip between the United States and Mexico consists of a common territory that has historically been permeable in different ways and at different times, in addition to serving as a filtration and control mechanism between two separate lifestyles, not only economically but also economically. also for the historical and the religious.

Millions of people living along this strip of land see the wall as an element of unnecessary tension in the course of their lives. People, despite their pragmatic tendency to build barriers, borders and boundaries, also question its existence as they observe the impact that discrimination can cause between one side and the other. The disparity that can be observed between San Diego and Tijuana and the contrasts between opportunity and lack further reinforce the imposing nature of this barrier. Filters and control express two axes of life on the U.S.-Mexico border.6

The question of otherness is one of the nodal points of anthropological thought and in general of social studies: the border wall, in addition to delimiting the border between two countries, functions as a point of reference from which various identities and otherness are generated.

The wall not only determines who can walk through it and who cannot; The wall, in addition to shaping daily life marked by access to privileges and also by the lack of opportunities, also functions as a symbolic reference to differentiate the global north and south, at least in the American continent.

The wall, which has gradually become more and more impermeable, has come to represent mixed feelings: for the most conservative, it is a guarantee that things will remain as they are and as they have been; for the more liberal, an assault on the human dignity of those who seek new opportunities. More walls are being built in the world, but that of Mexico and the United States, as this documentary portrays, is a clear expression of the asymmetries and differences in the social and cultural aspects of two countries.

In a common territory of 41 kilometers of extension between Tijuana and San Diego, both cities possess the most dynamic border in the world, there are displaced two to three metal and concrete walls between 6 and 10 meters high, equipped with advanced control and surveillance systems. The old residents of both cities remember the days when there was only a metal cable and obelisks that marked the limit of a barely perceptible border. Today, when this space threatens to become impenetrable, at least from Trump's perspective, we must remember that the role of anthropology, social studies and the use of tools such as documentaries can be alternatives to make the world a safe place, dignified and fairer despite the differences.

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Data sheet

Qualification: Over the Wall / On the Wall (El Colef, 2019)

Genre: Documentary

Duration: 28 minutes

Director: Luis Mercado

Executive producer and original idea: Alberto Hernández

Production: Marina Viruete

Screenplay: Jhonnatan Curiel, Marina Viruete and Luis Mercado

Synopsis: This documentary shows the transformations in the border between Mexico and the United States over five decades. From the city of Tijuana and through interviews with residents and specialists, as well as historical and documentary material, the relations and tensions that this city has experienced due to its border status are captured, especially since the arrival to the presidency of the States. United of Donald Trump.