As the US government built its latest stretch of border wall, the AP reports that Mexico made a statement of its own by laying remains of the Berlin Wall a few steps away. The 3-ton pockmarked, gray concrete slab sits between a bullring, a lighthouse, and the border wall, which extends into the Pacific Ocean. "May this be a lesson to build a society that knocks down walls and builds bridges," reads the inscription below the towering Cold War relic, attributed to Tijuana Mayor Montserrat Caballero and titled, "A World Without Walls." For Caballero, like many of Tijuana's 2 million residents, the US wall is personal and political, a part of the city's fabric and a fact of life. She considers herself a migrant, having moved from the southern Mexico city of Oaxaca when she was 2 with her mother, who fled "the vicious cycle of poverty, physical abuse and illiteracy."
The installation opened Aug. 13 at a ceremony with Caballero, 41, and Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico's former foreign secretary who is now a leading presidential candidate. Shards of the Berlin Wall scattered worldwide after it crumbled in 1989, with collectors putting them in hotels, schools, transit stations and parks. Marcos Cline, who makes commercials and other digital productions in Los Angeles, needed a home for his artifact and found an ally in Tijuana's mayor. "Why in Tijuana?" Caballero said. "How many families have shed blood, labor and their lives to get past the wall? The social and political conflict is different than the Berlin Wall, but it's a wall at the end of the day. And a wall is always a sphinx that divides and bloodies nations."
President Biden issued an executive order his first day in office to halt wall construction, ending a signature effort by his predecessor, former President Trump. But his administration has moved ahead with small, already-contracted projects, including replacing a two-layered wall in San Diego standing 18 feet high with one rising 30 feet and stretching 0.6 mile to the ocean. The wall slices through Friendship Park, a cross-border site inaugurated by then-US first lady Pat Nixon in 1971 to symbolize binational ties. It is a cherished, festive destination for tourists and residents in Mexico. Cline said he was turned away at the White House when he tried delivering the Berlin Wall relic to Trump and then trucked it across the country to find a suitable home. He said the piece has found "its second life" at the Tijuana park alongside the colorful paintings on the border wall.
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The Berlin Wall installation has gotten rave reviews from visitors, including Sandra Flores, 55, from the port city of Mazatlan. "It's a little less severe here than it was in Germany but it's a wall that divides nations, lives, social and economic lives and everything related to the United States," she says. Lydia Vanasse, who works in the financial sector in San Diego and lives in Tijuana, said the relic took her back to her 20s when the Soviet empire fell and Germans were suddenly allowed to move freely. "San Diego and Tijuana are sister cities," she says. "The wall separates us, but we are united in many ways. It would be better if there wasn't a wall." Any failures at the border are a collective responsibility of governing nations, Caballero says. "We are against violence, we are against family separation, we are against division, and that's what the wall represents," she says.
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