July 2018
“If men appear in the road in front of us,” the cab driver said in Spanish, “we will turn around.”
I didn’t quite trust my comprehension, especially over the sound of the wind and radio, so I repeated it back to him to make sure I’d heard him right. I couldn’t help but recall the warning my partner had given before I left San Francisco that there were active drug cartels at the border. The driver confirmed that I’d heard him correctly, and I translated for my mother, father, brother and cousin. No one protested, and we kept driving. We had already made up our minds to go.
We were on a quest to view the border wall prototypes, constructed by Customs and Border Protection in response to President Trump’s January 2017 executive order. By now most Americans have probably forgotten about this giant political football, but we paid for it. In March 2017, the agency issued two requests for proposals.
By October of that year, the prototypes were up. Though they stand on the American side of the border, they’re only visible from the Mexican side. U.S. citizens are not allowed onto the land where they stand without special security clearance.
So, we came to Tijuana to see them for ourselves. To make them real. To bring ourselves to the problem. To complicate a life where we could pretend construction wasn’t happening. To find the prototypes, I’d brought directions I’d copied by hand from the web site of a right-wing group that wants to make them a national monument.
Finding a cab to take us there had been easy – the first and only cabbie waiting at the taxi stand outside the pedestrian bridge at the Otay Mesa crossing near San Diego had been willing. We negotiated a price and were on our way, making clear in our norteño accents that we did not like Trump or his prototypes.
The driver had slowed down as we turned off the pavement onto a rough dirt road on the northern edge of Tijuana. Dust rose around us as we rolled past empty warehouses, shacks, and lots full of abandoned big rigs. There was trash piled on the shoulder twice the height of the car. Yards away on the American side, we could see the prototypes looming. There are eight of them. Each rises about 30 feet from the ground, and has a barrier about six feet under. Each casts a shadow that is at least 500 miles long. I know because that’s about how far it is from San Francisco to San Diego, and that’s how far their shadows need to stretch for me to feel them creeping over me.
“If the police come,” the driver told me before we got out of the car, “tell them you are seeing many things in Tijuana. You’re not just here to see the prototypes. You are going to other places with many drivers. If they think you’re just here to see this, they’ll ask you for money.” Again, I repeated it back in Spanish to make sure I’d understood, and then told my family. We got out of the cab. We felt the full heat of the day, and the dust in our throats.
I was surprised to see that people live right there at the border wall. You could throw a stone from one of the houses and hit the existing Mexican wall, which has been painted with murals that criticize Trump and call for peace. One shows a long table with a line drawn down the middle, people seated on the US side and on the Mexican side, eating together.
The prototypes are walls surrounded by walls – details and access secured behind missing information, passive voice, and heavy security. Funding was diverted to cover the cost of each prototype, but where from? I could not find that fact. I do know each prototype cost roughly between $350,000 and $450,000, that the total cost for construction for all the prototypes was around 3 million dollars, and that San Diego taxpayers have paid millions to cover the cost of security and fencing around the prototypes, none of which will be reimbursed.
While we were trying to get a photo of the prototypes in the distance, some of us standing on piles of trash to get a better angle, a man and woman came out of their house and got into their car, waving at us as they drove away. Under a high-voltage electrical transformer, someone had hung swings where children could play.
And then, through the dust and heat we saw him: A man in the road.
He was pushing an ice cream cart and coming right for us. The bell on his cart tinkled cheerfully.
My dad treated us all, including the driver, to popsicles.
I got the tamarind.
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References
- http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-border-wall-protection-20180203-story.html#
- https://www.borderwallprototypes.org/visit/
- https://www.newsweek.com/trumps-border-wall-has-been-financial-drain-san-diego-785862
- https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-mexico-fence-spending-bill_us_5ab40810e4b0decad0481089
- https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1397/build-wall-and-make-mexico-pay-it/
- https://www.texastribune.org/2018/03/23/donald-trump-border-wall-16-million-funding-restrictions-attached
- https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-awards-contracts-border-wall-prototypes
- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/us/mexico-wall-prototypes-trump.html
- https://www.ocregister.com/2018/03/12/heres-a-look-at-8-mexican-border-wall-prototypes/
- https://www.denverpost.com/2018/01/19/mexico-border-wall-prototype-testing/
