Friendship Park at the U.S.-Mexico border turns 50
SAN DIEGO — It has been 50 years since first lady Pat Nixon inaugurated what she envisioned would be a binational friendship park on the U.S.-Mexico border.
At that ceremony on Aug. 18, 1971, as she looked south to the barbed-wire fence dividing the two countries, she famously said, “I hope there won’t be a fence here too long.”
Half a century later, that dream has come up against another reality. That barbed wire has been replaced with two 20-foothigh fences, and contact has been limited to barely fingertips touching.
Friendship Park lies inside Border Field State Park, at the southwestern corner of the United States, between Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego County.
California voters approved money for Border Field’s acquisition as a state park in a 1964 Bond Act. In 1971, President
Richard Nixon announced that the state park would be developed for recreational use as part of his Legacy of Parks program.
On the U.S. side, Friendship Park is within the Border Patrol’s enforcement zone.
On the Mexican side you can see the historic Monument 258, which was placed as an international boundary line, after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848).
Over time and despite the tightening of security at the border, the park has established itself as a meeting place for families who have been separated by the border, even if divided by a rusty fence that prevents full contact. Some even travel from other cities or states in Mexico and the U.S. to reunite at this spot with their loved ones.
There are those who still remember times when more contact was allowed.
Christian Ramírez, a longtime human rights activist on the border, discovered the site back in the 1980s, when his grandfather would take him to see the bullfights that took place in Tijuana’s Plaza Monumental, a few steps from the park on its Mexican side.
“I remember kicking my first soccer balls in that park,” said Ramírez, 44, who now serves as the policy director of the SEIU United Service Workers union.
Ramírez grew up in Tijuana. He would later move to San Ysidro, California, where he continued to regularly visit the park, since it was next to the closest beach to his home.
But over time, security at the border increased. First, as a result of a border security strategy known as Operation Gatekeeper under the Bill Clinton administration, and later, in the post-9-11 era. That would be the end of what Ramírez calls a “time of innocence” at the park.
“I have this picture of me, in one of the posadas, getting a tamale from the Mexican side while I was in the U.S side. I also remember Border Patrol agents buying tacos and candy from Mexican street vendors through the fence.”
In the last years of the George W. Bush administration, plans began to build a second border fence to curb illegal crossings, which was thought to put the park at risk. During that time, a group of local advocates formed the Friends of Friendship Park, a grassroots coalition advocating for increased public access to the park.