ACROSS THE LINES - Archive (2006-2020)

Yesterday some twenty people shared a single celebration of communion in two nations  - seven of us in the United States and the rest in Mexico.  The setting was Friendship Park , the bi-national park at the western-most edge of the US-Mexico border, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  We are calling our gathering "El Faro: The Border Church / La Iglesia Fronteriza"  because "Faro" is a Spanish word meaning "lighthouse" and Friendship Park sits in the shadow of the famous lighthouse in Playas de Tijuana. ( "Like" EL FARO  / FACEBOOK / "Join" EL FARO ) For six months in 2008 and 2009 I served communion at Friendship Park - in part to protest the construction of a new, secondary border wall that promised to eliminate public access to this historic meeting place.  During that time I was able to offer the communion elements to people on both sides of the border fence.   In February 2009 San Diego Border Patrol Agents fo...

Imagine the First Lady of the United States punching a hole in the fence on the U.S.-Mexico border.   Imagine her publicly lamenting that there was a border fence at all. In fact this scenario doesn’t need to be imagined … because it happened forty years ago right here in San Diego County.   The date was August 18, 1971 and the location was “Friendship Park,” the small cement plaza on the U.S.-Mexico border, at the southwest-most corner of the continental United States. The First Lady was Pat Nixon, who had been a prominent champion of our state’s public parks when her husband Richard Nixon was Governor of California, before being elected President of the United States.    She came to Friendship Park to inaugurate the surrounding area as California’s Border Field State Park.    After planting a tree as part of the inauguration ceremony, Mrs. Nixon approached the large stone monument which sits at the heart of Friendship Park.   The monument commemo...

A newly-released video of immigrant rights activists Daniel Alfaro and Angel Navarrete contesting the legitimacy of DUI checkpoints in Escondido should serve as a caution to us all. When Mr. Navarrete is stopped by Escondido Police, he demonstrates that he is sober, clearly meeting the purported "test." But when police ask him to produce a drivers license, he refuses to do so, asking instead a series of quintessentially American questions: "On what grounds are you asking me to produce identification?" "Am I being detained?" "Am I free to go?" Police officers persist in asking for his license, and when he refuses, they break his car window and drag him from the car. These checkpoints are just one of the reasons Escondido has earned the reputation as a hotbed of local anti-immigration sentiment and enforcement. Local police erect random and mandatory stops for all vehicles, obstensibly to check sobriety, but along the way identif...

Here are just a few nuggets from a recent National Journal Article on Latino Gains in California: Three in five Californians are now ethnic minorities. Latinos now make up 38 percent of the state, which nearly surpasses non-Hispanic whites (40 percent). 51 percent of Californians younger than 18 are Latino. In the introduction to his 2005 book, North to Aztlan: A History of Mexican Americans in the United States , Richard Griswold del Castillo wrote, “Since 1848 the Mexican people have been engaged in the slow-going process of repossessing the lands that they lost to the United States as a result of war.” "Reposession" may be too strong a word - Mexicans moving to the Uniteds States are not doing so as a part of some imgagined "reconquest," but rather as an expression of quintessentially American aspiration.  Still, the newly released results of the 2010 Census display that the pace of this demographic transformation is picking up. What does the Foundatio...

Published in the San Diego Union-Tribune on Friday, January 28, 2011 At the dawn of a new decade, California is about to launch an unprecedented experiment. In the coming year, a commission of citizens – not the Legislature – will redraw the state’s political map. There is a great deal at stake in San Diego. California’s new Citizens Redistricting Commission will redraw the boundaries of the five congressional seats, four state Senate seats and eight Assembly seats representing residents of San Diego County. Independently, a commission of San Diego city residents will create new City Council districts and for the first time apportion the city’s population across not eight districts, but nine. And the five members of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors ... well, they still draw their own districts, a textbook case in the power of incumbency. Aggregate population numbers from the 2010 Census, recently published by the U.S. Census Bureau, will provide the basis for redistr...