Border wall in backyard
the spot where the last houses seem to scatter into the scrub land.
There, the border wall stops short, like a book snapped shut, as the dividing line begins to rise into rugged mountains.
Of all the houses along the border, the cement house where Arias, 52, raised five children may be pressed up closest of all to the barricade that now defines the border. The U.S. fence does double-duty as her patio fence.
But the divide wasn’t always so stark.
For a long time, the barrier was more of an afterthought, at its most formidable points just some barbed-wire strung between posts. Then in the early 1990s, the United States used Vietnam War-era steel helicopter landing mats to build a wall.
Over the years, that first wall, now splashed with murals, has metastasized.
A second fence stretches behind most of it, and between the two lies a no man’s land of cameras, sensors and floodlights.
This year the border agency began to replace the old metal wall. The new sections, between 18 and 30 feet high, are built of closely spaced steel posts topped with a steel plate designed to deter climbers.
Despite these changes, ask almost anyone in Tijuana about the wall, or la linea, and you are likely to be met with a shrug: The wall is always present, but not a preoccupation.
“We live very comfortably here,” said Elizabeth Quintana, 73, who runs a small restaurant from her house on a dead-end street that runs into the wall.
Daily life in Tijuana is defined less by the wall as an impenetrable obstacle than by the ebb and flow of movement across it — or, for many, the distant hope for such a journey.
As many as 150,000 people travel north toward San Diego on foot or in cars every day through two border crossings. Thousands of trailers roll through a separate crossing, carrying Mexican-made goods on their way to American stores and factories.
This passage is a daily ritual for many who are U.S. citizens, or Mexican citizens with green cards or visas that allow them to move freely.
The first commuters arrive hours before dawn, their cars rolling forward along two dozen parallel lanes at the San Ysidro crossing as drivers check email, apply makeup, knit or extend a hand to caress a child snoozing under blankets, bound for school in the United States.
“How do I feel?” said Asheila Ramírez, 40, who shuttles several times a week between her aunt’s house in Chula Vista, Calif., where she works cleaning houses and driving for Uber, and her mother’s house in Tijuana.
“It’s normal for me,” she said. “Really, I’m used to it.”
On their way, these commuters pass vendors selling fruit drinks, churros and burritos, amputee beggars on crutches and merchants hawking religious trinkets.
“I live here,” said José Felix, 49, who drives a cab in California. “I pay my taxes over there.”
The dream of finding a way into the United States to escape poverty, violence and persecution has for decades drawn people to Tijuana from all over Mexico and Central America, and as far away as West Africa.
Some hope to be granted asylum or to enter through a different legal route; a good many will pay smugglers to take them across.
While these migrants are always a presence in the city, every so often, they burst into public attention, as they have in past weeks with the arrival of more than 6,000 Central Americans traveling in a caravan from Honduras.
Their long journey was halted by the wall, and their increasingly desperate situation underscored just how jarring the disconnect is between those who can cross and those who are blocked.