THE PEOPLE IN THE TENTS SAY YES
Photos and Text by David Bacon
Dollars and Sense - September/October 2015
Fernando Méndez has been a leader of the encampment from
the beginning.
When Ruben Beas says he's been living in a tent in a
public park for five years, anyone might wonder why, especially since he says
he's not homeless, but staying there as a matter of principle. "I will not
leave," he declares. "This park belongs to the people of Tijuana. We
will defend it."
He's not the only one. Half a dozen others live there
too. A few more, like Fernando Méndez, come to cook meals for the occupiers,
and then go home elsewhere to sleep. Beyond them stretches a wider network of
activists who show up when they hear the police might be coming to run the protesters
off again.
Why are people in Tijuana so angry that they've organized
one of the longest and most determined occupations of public space in either
Mexico or the United States?
Rubén Beas in the tent where he sleeps.
By comparison, Occupy Tijuana (in the city's Zona Rio
business district) lasted a day before the cops arrived, arresting everyone in
sight on the street median where activists had set up tents. Even Occupy Wall
Street and other U.S. occupations were much shorter.
It's not that the police haven't tried to evict people
from Benito Juárez Park. They have. But, each time, the occupiers and their
supporters return.
The first tents went up in 2010. Soon, sky-blue and
pastel-green nylon tarps stretched over a network of ropes, festooned with
hand-lettered signs and banners. The largest declares the community's name to
passersby, in white letters on a black field: "Defensores del Parque
Benito Juárez"-"Defenders of Benito Juárez Park."
Daniel Taramayateca is a poet living in the encampment.
Behind him is a banner saying "Solidarity with San Quintín" which
supports farm workers who were on strike this spring.
In the early morning janitors and office workers troop in
to their jobs in the two large buildings that frame the open space. One is the
ayunta- miento-Tijuana's city hall. The other houses offices of the state
government for Baja California Norte. As the day wears on, people arrive
seeking permits, or trying to satisfy one or another of the many bureaucratic
requirements Tijuana and Baja California make of their citizens.
Tijuana's cathedral sits across a shady street. On the
fourth side, the steady whine of tires and boom of truck exhaust never
stops-the incessant traffic on the main artery leading to the San Ysidro bor-
der crossing. Across three lanes of cars rises the concrete embankment of the
Tijuana River chan- nel. Except during flash floods, the river is never more a
thin stream of water between cement walls painted with portraits of Mexican
revolutionaries.
Emiliano Zapata and José María Morelos, and even one of
Luis Donaldo Colosio, the supposed reformer of the old ruling party, the PRI,
assassi- nated in Tijuana during his presidential campaign in 1994, at the
start of the NAFTA era.
Daniel Taramayateca stands near the memorial the camp
residents have made to honor the 43 students kidnapped and possibly murdered at
the Ayotzinapa teachers' training school in Guerrero.
In other words, Parque Benito Juárez is an urban park. It
gives Tijuanenses a respite from city stress. The United Nations has a
recommendation for open parks in urban areas-eight square meters of green space
per inhabitant. Tijuana, according to architecture critic Rene Peralta, has one
square meter per person. Given the city's demographics, it's very much a
working-class park and a political space. That's why it's being defended so
ferociously. City activists have set up a memorial to the 43 students kidnapped
and disap- peared last fall from the Ayotzinapa teachers' college in Guerrero.
This spring, striking farm workers from the San Quintín Valley assembled under
the park's trees, after caravanning to Tijuana to demonstrate.
The lack of green space is a product of the same headlong
rush to build factories that also forgot to plan housing for the workers
arriving in the city. In the 1960 census, before Mexico instituted the Border
Industrialization Program (BIP) in 1964, Tijuana's population was around
166,000. The BIP promoted construction of the first maquilado- ras on the
U.S.-Mexico frontier. Three decades of factory building followed, much of the
production moving from the United States.
In the 1990 census, before NAFTA went into effect,
Tijuana had already mushroomed to nearly 750,000 residents, as people arrived
from all over Mexico looking for jobs. The last census, in 2010, put the city's
population at close to 1.5 million- about the same size as the city of San
Diego, just 30 miles north.
Cimatl Óscar Rodríguez gives a lesson in Aztec dance and
drumming to children and adults in the Benito Juárez Park.
San Diego has a 2.8% growth rate. Tijuana grows at 4.9%
per year. Its urban density of over 1,100 people per square kilometer is more
than four times as great. Hundreds of thousands of fam- ilies have settled in
informal communities without basic services, on dirt streets that turn to mud
when it rains. The few parks are an afterthought, if they're planned at all.
Meanwhile, the industrial areas get pavement,
electricity, water, and sewers. And of course, they get workers. At the heart
of Tijuana's growing populace are the women who pass through the doors of the
city factories every shift change. About 155,000 people work in 589
maquiladoras. The biggest is Foxconn, with 4500 workers making televisions and
monitors. This plant belongs to the same Taiwanese corporation that owns a huge
factory in China, which became notorious for such harsh conditions that several
workers committed suicide. Each of the next five largest factories has over
3,000 employees, assembling TVs or medical equipment. Almost half the
maquiladora workforce labors in these two industries. More than half work for
U.S. corpora- tions, and another quarter for Asian companies.
So a public park, even if it's downtown, away from the
neighborhoods, is important. It's a sym- bol that the private sector doesn't
just get every- thing it wants. That was the spark that lit the occu- pation's
fire-a proposal to build a huge complex of stores, galleries, a theater, and a
plaza, all on top of a 2000-space parking garage. In the process of building
it, a private developer would cut down over a thousand trees and Parque Benito
Juárez would disappear.
Felipe Gómez, a former baker, has been a leader of the
encampment from the beginning. His horse says, "Finally [Mexican
President] Peña Nieto Came Out of the Closet!"-an allusion to rumors that
Peña Nieto had an affair with a man, and (with the bottle in the horse's mouth)
to rumors that he has a drinking problem.
Developers called it Zócalo 11 de Julio-the date chosen
in honor of the founding of Tijuana in 1889. It was originally set to cost 900
million pesos (around $55.4 million), but the price tag soon bal- looned to 1.2
billion ($74 million)-a quarter of the city's annual budget. The project's
board presi- dent, Carolina Aubanel, is the ex-wife of the former mayor, Carlos
Bustamante. A rude cartoon of her decorates a wall of Felipe Gómez' tent.
To stop the destruction of the park, the occupiers have
demanded an inventory of the plant life and an assessment of potential
environmental destruction. A federal decree from 1975 says the Tijuana and Baja
California governments can't change the park's land use. This spring the
defenders succeeded in getting yet one more in a series of injunctions blocking
con- struction. Their lawyer, José Peñaflor Barron, said the court acted
"because the construction endangers the environment, and the existence of
the park itself."
But the law isn't everything, especially in Tijuana,
where developers and industrialists are politically powerful. Laws guaranteeing
the freedom to organize in factories are unenforced, while police help owners
break strikes. In the park, the occupiers have faced arrest and expulsion,
despite court orders protecting their right to public space.
Fernando Méndez and two other park inhabitants look at
the trees they're growing in a an effort to make up for those already cut down
by developers who want to get rid of the park.
The latest raid came on March 18, when state police drove
the occupiers out of areas near the stalled construction. Protest leader Sabino
Arellano Soriano said he had to flee to avoid arrest. "The police were
asking for me, where I was, what clothes I was wearing," he charges.
"City workers warned us before police arrived, in solidarity with us."
By the end of the decade, Tijuana's population will reach
two million. The city will continue to grow as an industrial powerhouse. But
will its workers, its artists, and its political activists still have these
benches to sit on, under trees almost as old as the city itself? Will Cimatl
Óscar Rodríguez still have a space to rehearse his budding Aztec dancers in the
soft evening after work?
The people in the tents say yes.
The Tijuana River runs down a concrete channel, with the
Benito Juárez Park on the right.
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