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-foot-high 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.
Dan Watman, 50, a coalition member, first encountered the park in 2000 when he was exploring San Diego, fresh from Modesto, in Central California.
As a Spanish teacher, he used to take his students to Tijuana to practice the language, but when he was unable to do so anymore, he opted to take them to the beach next to the park so they could interact with people from across the fence.
“People could talk and shake hands, and there were no problems,” he said. “As things got more and more militarized, that became less and less possible.”
In 2004 he created the Border Encuentro group, under which he organized different binational events at the park, such as poetry readings, salsa and yoga classes.
In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security closed Friendship Park to continue the construction of the second border fence and replace the existing one.
Finally, in 2012 after pressure from local groups and community members, the park reopened to the public after three years of restricted access, albeit with some changes and under certain hours during the weekends.
Thick steel mesh replaced the former fence. It makes it difficult to see through and limits contact to fingertips only.
In 2013, the park witnessed a historic moment.
During a Día del Niño, or Children’s Day, celebration, organized by the Border Angels organization, the U.S. Border Patrol agreed to open for the first time a rusty maintenance gate at the fence, to allow a father to hug for the first time and only for two minutes, his 5-year-old daughter who was standing in Tijuana.
From there, the so-called “Puerta de la Esperanza” (Door of Hope), opened six times for events like that. That came ended abruptly in 2017, after a cross-border wedding was held during one of those events. It was later discovered that the groom, who was on the U.S. side, was awaiting sentencing on smuggling charges.
In 2020, under the Donald Trump administration, there were plans to replace the border fence again in the Friendship Park area. Those plans were canceled a year later under the Joe Biden administration.
Border Field State Park closed in spring 2020 due to the pandemic and with it, access to Friendship Park. Although the state park reopened in May, Friendship Park did not. The U.S. Border Patrol said that because of the influx of migrants on the southern border, they could not properly staff the park.
On the Mexican side, things are much different. The park is open 24/7, and several artists have painted colorful murals at the border fence that stretches to the Pacific Ocean.
Friendship Park brings bittersweet emotions: the hope of reuniting but the pain of division.
Emma Sánchez, 46, lived 12 years in Tijuana after being deported from the United States. In December 2018, after an arduous legal fight that included a 10-year ban from the country, she was able to return to San Diego with her family.
During the time she was waiting in Mexico, she used to go to the park to meet some of her family members, who could not cross the border.
“It’s encouraging to be able to see your family members through the wall,” said Sánchez, who now lives in Vista, California, with her husband and three sons. “To be able to hear their voices not through the phone, and to see them, not through a screen, but to know they are right there.”
In 2015, she and her husband, Michael Paulsen, a U.S. Marine veteran, held a wedding ceremony at the Mexican side of the park.
“It was something symbolic. I wanted to show that love has no borders,” said Sánchez, who at the time was part of Dreamer’s Moms group, formed by deported mothers.
On that occasion, her mother, who witnessed the ceremony from the other side of the fence, gave her blessing through the wall. That day, Sánchez met for the first time one of her aunts and a niece who were also at the U.S. side.
“For me, it is very important that this place remains open, and that we maintain what first lady Pat Nixon initially wanted.”
María Teresa Fernández, 68, a photographer and Friends of Friendship Park Coalition member, has photographed the park since she discovered it more than 20 years ago.
Her camera lens has captured the park’s transformation through the years, and in her memory, she carries the stories of perhaps hundreds of families she has met there.
As she showed the photographs that make up her personal archive, she recalled names and details of the moments she has captured. “There’s no day that I come out of this place without a ‘nudo en la garganta’ (lump in my throat).”
One anecdote she remembers fondly was more than a decade ago when she met Julian, a small boy whose mother took him every two weeks to the park to see his father who was in Mexico.
“At the end of that visit, the father called me, and he told me he was jealous of me,” she remembered. “When I asked him why, he said, ‘Because you can hug my boy, and I can’t,’” said Fernández, who added that those experiences make her appreciate her time with her loved ones even more.
Fernández, a Mexican immigrant, compares the border wall to a living object. One that keeps getting longer and longer, taller and taller, constantly transforming and reproducing itself, she said. “I only wish to be here and document the day the wall dies.”
Families will have to wait even longer to meet again at the U.S. side of Friendship Park. Some of them expected the site would be open by now.
On July 24, Doris Cifuentes went to the Mexican side of the park with her four children in hopes of reuniting with her husband, who was waiting for them on the U.S. side after making the trip from Oakland, California.
Upon arrival, both found out that access was still denied, so they had to settle for talking on the phone and seeing each other from about 90 feet away. They first tried down at the beach, but phone service was poor, so they returned up the hill and talked from near the binational garden.
“This is the only place where we can at least see him,” lamented Cifuentes, who has been unable to hug her husband in four years.
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A spokesman with the U.S. Border Patrol, which grants access to Friendship Park, confirmed Friday that the park will remain closed until further notice since the agency doesn’t have enough agents available to staff it.
“Our border security operations are at a critical state. San Diego continues to experience increases in mass migration of people attempting to enter the U.S. illegally by land and sea. Narcotics seizures are also on the rise,” a Border Patrol spokesman said in a statement.
“Adding to the complexity of our border security operations, we are still mitigating the spread of COVID and its variants. At this time, there are no plans to reopen Friendship Circle until it is operationally feasible, and we can do it safely and securely.”
It has been the community’s advocacy that has kept the park alive, said Ramírez, the former leader of the Southern Border Coalition. “It’s not just the activists. There have been yoga instructors, environmentalists, theater groups, sports figures, musicians. Every sector of society that is connected to the San Diego-Tijuana border region is captivated by this part of the region, which I think has become iconic.”
On the Mexican side, the border fence surrounding the park has become a canvas from which artists from different countries have expressed messages of hope and solidarity.
There have also been concerts, religious ceremonies, Christmas posadas, and even a human cannonball who catapulted himself into the U.S. from Tijuana in 2005.
As long as these activities and expressions continue, so does the original vision of the park, local advocates agreed.
“I’m certain that the day will come when there are no more walls between these two neighboring countries. And the day that happens, it’s probably going to be here at Friendship Park”, Ramírez said.
Ramírez went back 50 years, to that binational celebration with mariachis and surfers, and remembered when the first lady ordered to cut a stretch of the barbed wire fence so she could cross into Mexico to greet the crowd.
“The park has become a place of hope, unification, and a celebration of our binational identity and I believe that Pat Nixon’s dream has not died, it is still there.”
