‘We Treat San Diego as the Innkeeper’

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.

It begins with a mile walk along the beach, [where] you begin to embody what it’s like to walk those lands as someone who is not from there and yet feels a belonging there. You can see the two border walls. On the U.S. side is a tower that has a camera on it, and if you look to your right, you will see a lighthouse on the Tijuana side. All of this happens at the shores of the ocean, whose waves have no limits to their crossing. Birds fly over and above. Aquatic animals move back and forth. And if you look really close to the border wall, you can see how the moisture of the waves and the graininess of the sand slowly but surely erode the steel structure that is trying to divide creation.

It’s hard to see to the other side of the wall. Once, I locked eyes with another woman who looked about my age and height. Fragments of our fingers met while we sang “Silent Night”—me in English and her in Spanish. But in the past five years, it’s gotten more difficult to gather. Last year we weren’t allowed to actually come to the wall. So, I am unsure what this year will look like. What I know is that evil is predictable, but love is always innovative.”