We are witnessing an audacious resurgence of dehumanizing tropes across the world that portray migrant populations as less-than-human. A nativist mentality that once characterized the political fringe has gone mainstream, legitimizing an open racism and intensifying hostility toward migrants that evokes histories of radical collective violence against minority groups – where Jews become “parasites”, Tutsis “cockroaches”, Mexicans “criminals”, and so on. Our world is veering dangerously away from the norms of basic human respect and dignity enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Too many countries are closing their doors to our planet’s most vulnerable people, building walls and surveillance technologies capable of repelling “infestation” and protecting national resources from an endless flow of “vermin” who compromise the purity of “national blood.”[2]
I live and work at the international border between San Diego, California and Tijuana, B.C., Mexico, a key destination for Central American, Haitian and other migrant groups seeking protection from poverty, violence, and the accelerating impacts of climate change in their home countries. National borders in migration zones across the world typically aim to regulate the movement of people across them, and ours is exemplary in this sense. The continental border between the United States and Mexico manifests a long history of annexation and partition, grounded in nineteenth-century legacies of colonialism, dehumanization, violence, and the destruction of natural systems. But even thickly militarized borders like ours are ultimately porous things. Borders cannot contain many flows – air, water, waste, health, and the rich social, commercial and cultural exchanges and circulations that define everyday life in places like this.
In the Center on Global Justice at the University of California, San Diego, we investigate the ecosocial dynamics that define this border region, and shape the transgressive, hybrid identities of people who inhabit it. Our work reimagines the border zone as a tissue of social and spatial ecologies that provide an alternative vantage on how national identity and “citizenship” actually perform in this region. We see the border as a mesh of flows, exchanges and interdependencies, not merely an artificial jurisdictional line that divides two cities, two states, and two countries.
Our work at the San Diego-Tijuana border is local, but we see this region as a microcosm of all the injustices and indignities faced by vulnerable people across the world: political violence, climate disruption, accelerating migration, deepening inequality, escalating nationalism and border-building everywhere. Our campus sits just a few miles away from the child detention centers that will forever stain this period of American history. San Diego-Tijuana is a lightning rod for American nativism. In recent years, tens of thousands of Mexican, Central American and Haitian migrants waited at the wall for asylum that never came, too often reviled by publics on both sides of the wall. Many sat in US detention centers as tools of deterrence, exposed to a global pandemic and separated forcibly from their children. It has been devastating in recent years to witness the emotional impact on children, their fear and the inevitable psychic internalization of being socially and morally marginalized.
Ambiguous US asylum policy, and rumors of increased border porosity, typically draw people north. For the moment migration numbers are down, a response to policy changes on both sides of the border;[3] but climate change will inevitably accelerate these flows in the years to come. Northward migration in this part of the world is typically understood as a function of violence and poverty, and of course this is true. But climate change is a “threat multiplier.” It makes poverty and food insecurity worse, aggravates violence, and ultimately compounds the reasons why people take the risk, leave their homes and walk north.[4]
Geopolitical preliminaries
Three geopolitical remarks before introducing our work:
First, international agencies do not see climate migrants as refugees. They are defined as economic migrants who are drawn toward a better life. What this means is that they are not entitled to asylum or international refugee protection under the Geneva convention. By mid-century, climate change is projected to displace millions, as many as one billion people.[5] Our commitment to planetary climate resilience must include serious and central attention to seismic demographic shifts already taking place across our planet. We need to rethink the category of “refugee,” as well as retool and reaffirm our commitments to interstate cooperation around asylum protection for those forced to migrate within and across national boundaries.
Second, we need to rethink our language. Well-intentioned people often refer to waves of northward migration as “caravans” or “convoys” where the human struggle is grasped in its magnitude from above. When depicted aerially within a mass of others, the migrant loses her own story. Her reasons become invisible; her rights become easier to violate, easier to homogenize and distort into ugly political tropes about “infestation.” We need to rethink our language.
IMAGE 1: Planet on the Move, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, 2021. An infographic developed for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to illustrate global hot zones where climate change is intensifying the clash between migration and ecosystem protection. The need for cooperative planning is urgent.[6]
Third, as climate-forced migration accelerates, there is deepening contention between the migration rights community and the conservation community – between those who advocate for migrants’ rights to movement and safe resettlement, and those who prioritize protection of ecosystems, wildlife habitats and biodiversity. This clash often manifests profoundly. Our border region at San Diego-Tijuana is one of these places – an epicenter of both accelerating climate-forced migration and a hotspot for dramatic biodiversity loss.
Spaces of dignity and sanctuary at the US-Mexico border
Finding common ground – very literally, common ground – for nature and people, is our priority in the UCSD Center on Global Justice. We are a team of social scientists, urban designers, architects and engineers, environmental and public health researchers and artists, based at the University of California, San Diego. To carry out our work, we’ve developed a network of sanctuary spaces on both sides of the border called the UCSD Community Stations where we partner with border communities to build spaces of dignity and sanctuary for nature and people at the periphery of our cities, including the largest migrant sanctuary in the US-Mexico border region, which I will share in this paper.[7]
Inspired by the famous Library Parks project of Medellín, Colombia in the early 2000s, which we’ve studied and written much about,[8] we work closely with community partners to transform urban remainders into social housing and civic spaces that are richly programmed for dialogue, collaborative research, urban pedagogy, participatory design and cultural production.
IMAGE 2: UCSD Community Stations, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, 2017. A network of field stations on both sides of the San Diego-Tijuana border where UC San Diego researchers partner with community-based agencies to build resilience in communities at the frontlines of climate disruption, including social housing, public space and green infrastructure.
We have four stations, two on each side of the wall. Each is designed, funded, built and programmed collaboratively between our campus and a grassroots non-profit agency, and is focused on unique community-defined ecosocial priorities. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, by the Parc Foundation and David Deutsch, and by Robert Rubin and Stéphane Samuel, among others, the UCSD Community Stations are committed to a model of partnership and horizontal “co-development” and “co-production.” We are keenly attuned to power dynamics when universities arrive in communities, and are critical of both extractive research methods and humanitarian problem-solving missions. Academic culture is filled with vertical assumptions that we know more, that we are trained to solve the world’s problems (if only they would listen to us). We are committed to horizontal practices of mutual learning and co-production, engaging communities as partners with knowledges and agency. Everyone contributes, everyone learns, and we do things together in the border region, that no one could possibly do alone.
Here I will briefly share one of our four stations, the UCSD-Alacrán Community Station, located at the edges of Tijuana, B.C., Mexico.
Visualize the scene: When migrants arrive in Tijuana many land in in the informal canyon settlements at the western periphery of the city. We work in the Los Laureles Canyon, immediately adjacent to the border wall and home now to 100,000 people. Sitting just 30 minutes from our San Diego campus, Laureles demonstrates the dramatic proximity of wealth and extreme poverty in this border region. Laureles is impacted by drastic erosion, flooding and landslides exacerbated by the dramatic precipitation fluctuations of climate change, and the informal building practices of arriving migrants. Laureles, sitting at a higher elevation than the US, is encrusted with open dumpsites and lacks water and waste management, so much of the trash, and tons of sediment, is siphoned northward through sewage drains carved into the borderwall by US Homeland Security. It all ends up on the US side in a precious and protected federal estuary, the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve. It is a hot mess, and illustrates profound conflicts between political and ecological systems, and a stunning lack of collaboration between the United States and Mexico to tackle share challenges.
Enter the University of California, San Diego. We have assembled a binational coalition of nonprofits and universities, state and municipal agencies, to identify and protect unsquatted parcels in the settlement with nature-based green infrastructure. The Cross-Border Commons, as we call it, is a binational conservancy that links the informal settlement in Mexico with the US Estuary, forming a continuous ecosocial envelope, a “sponge,”[9] that transgresses the wall and protects the environmental systems shared by both sides.