Frontera Revisada: Placing the Us-mexico Border
Open Access
- Author:
- Meier, Lily Rae
- Area of Honors:
- Architecture
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Architecture
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Darla V Lindberg, Thesis Supervisor
Scott W Wing, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- border
us-mexico
immigration
mexico
tijuana
architecture
garden - Abstract:
- For centuries, the beach between San Diego and Tijuana at the end of the US-Mexico borderwall has been a place where families and friends who could not cross the border could visit with each other. The binational beach was officially dubbed ‘Friendship Park’ by first lady Pat Nixon in 1971, and even after the first major borderwall construction in 1994 by the US government, the beach remained a peaceful place for families split by the line to come together. In 2009, the US Department of Homeland Security built an additional fence which included a 100 foot strip of ‘no mans land’ that severed Friendship Park and restricted communication through the wall. There is no buffer zone at the border. No liminal, shared space between the two nations exists. ‘No man’s land’ is actually owned and controlled by the US, and the construction of the borderwall has brutally divided transnational communities and families. Once a peaceful place of opportunity and hope, Friendship Park is now brutally divided beach with harsh surveillance and limited visiting hours. The US-Mexico border is handled from a very ‘zoomed out’, political perspective that often overlooks the environmental, communal, and humanitarian impacts of the border. Buried below layers of controversial politics and patrol, the border shifts from a political edge to a critical boundary between city and nature. On the US side of the fence is the Tijuana estuary which is constantly threatened by the pollution and runoff of the sprawling Tijuana city. By occupying the void between the wall and providing an active buffer space, the context of the wall and the borderzone changes from one of harsh division to one of environmental and negotiation. The border is an environment of opportunity that simultaneously attracts and repels. The project proposes a positive transformation of the role of the border zone for the people who call either side of the boundary their home through a redefinition of the threshold space between the US and Mexico. By redesigning the nature of the space between, the context of the US-Mexico Border will transform from a contested, political zone of separation and inequality to a space that enables cross-cultural neutrality and environmental negotiation. Ultimately, the architecture establishes a binational zone wherein political complications are removed and Friendship Park can be restored to a place of human compassion, community, and reunion.