tijuana
Photo by Nancy Wiechec
Jennifer Guerra Aldana helps organize the annual Posada Sin Fronteras in San Diego/ Tijuana. She spoke with Sojourners’ Jenna Barnett about the tradition, which reenacts Mary and Joseph’s travels as described in Luke’s gospel.
“Las Posadas is a Catholic tradition in which community members set up a pilgrimage. People go door to door singing songs, wanting to be let in. And at every door, the innkeeper does not let them in. At the last home, the people do get let in, and there’s a party with tamales and candy. Posada Sin Fronteras [The Inn Without Borders] takes place at the San Diego-Tijuana border. We treat San Diego as the innkeeper and Tijuana as the one who is asking to be let in.
Asylum seeker Maria Meza sits with her daughters in her tent in a temporary shelter in Tijuana. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
"The first thing I did was grab my children," said Meza. A photo of her clutching the hands of twin 5-year-old daughters Saira and Cheili, as her 13-year-old daughter Jamie runs alongside, has gone viral and sparked angry reactions from some lawmakers and charities.
Asylum seekers traveling from Central America en route to the United States cross the Tijuana river to reach the border fence between Mexico and the United States in Tijuana, Mexico, Nov. 25, 2018. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
When children scream from tear gas where they’ve been told to wait,
when signs tell families, “Don’t pass!” outside our nation’s gate—
O Lord who welcomed children and loves each little one,
we cry, “Where is compassion?” We pray, “What have we done?”
People hold signs during a protest while standing in front of the current border fence and near the prototypes of U.S. President Donald Trump's border wall, in Tijuana, Mexico March 13, 2018. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido
President Trump, I personally invite you to also come down to the borderlands with me in Tijuana and San Diego and meet the people directly impacted by the stroke of your pen. I am a co-founding director of Global Immersion, and one of our primary organizational initiatives involves having cross-sector leaders from around the country come to the border to see the human face of immigration and build a set of tools for how to better care of the “stranger among us,” as my sacred text (the Bible) mandates.
Case del Migrante. Image courtesy Alexandra Travnik.
While the transition from paternalistic “helping” models to more mutual partnership models is in many ways a helpful and important move for the modern church, it is also misguided, theologically shaky, and ultimately incomplete. The church, especially amidst a religious and political climate that spews venomous rhetoric about “the other,” must offer a thoughtful and radical counter-narrative of what it means to live with and for one another.
And partnership simply does not go far enough.
My friend Dan and I walked along Avenida Internacional, the four-lane highway that runs along the border between Tijuana and San Diego, on our way to get a view of the DHS border fence construction from the Tijuana side.
I was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and grew up in San Diego, California, only a few hundred yards from the actual borderline. As a kid, there were always border patrols around but I never felt like my birthplace offered any threat. A few years ago, though, I noticed a massive escalation of security infrastructure along the U.S.-Mexico border. I couldn't figure out what had changed.
Each Sunday afternoon, people from San Diego and Tijuana gather to celebrate communion at a seaside plaza on the U.S.-Mexico border, where families and friends have been meeting for generations to visit through the border fence.