This summer, I met a 17-year-old boy named Jay at a DIF shelter in Tijuana. He had spent 15 of his 17 years in the U.S., brought from Mexico at age 2. Working alongside KPBS reporter Amy Isackson, we recorded his story and photographed him (all except his face because the shelter administrators wouldn’t allow it).
View photos from the Tijuana youth shelter on Flickr »
I’ve been working from about 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. the last few nights to keep KPBS.org updated. Our web team, along with the news staff and other volunteers, are taking turns to keep everything up and running 24/7. As I was finishing up early this morning, Doug Myrland (KPBS general manager who was working overnight on-air), asked me a few questions about the Google map to give people a sense of how we’re doing it.
Here’s the conversation:
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(It’s not exactly an award-winning performance by yours truly, but I thought it was worth a posting for posterity’s sake.)
Much has progressed since this recording. Google has joined the effort to streamline updates, and those who have been updating the county maps will now be contributing directly to our Google map. In addition, a site from Governor Schwarzenegger, calfires.com, has embedded the map directly. Local CBS is linking to the map. Wired bloggers Michael Calore and Kevin Poulsen reported on KPBS’ use of Twitter and Google maps.
(Special props to Joe Spurr for pushing the use of Twitter and Google maps.)
During 2004/2005, I spent my mornings waiting in line at the border. The commute from Tijuana to San Diego gave me plenty of time to watch, listen and think. For several weeks, I watched a group of men working behind a shroud of old vinyl banners and recycled plastic sheets. I couldn’t see what it was, but they were building something. Every day, I’d catch a glimpse of color or a peculiar shape. On days when traffic moved quickly, I felt a little disappointed that I hadn’t been able to see more. Day by day, the anticipation grew.
Finally, it was revealed.
The structure stands around 40-feet-tall. The base holds an imprisoned hand; the top, a tile mosaic cityscape with two spires reaching upward. Four engraved Mayan hoops face north, south, east and west. A south-facing plaque reads:
Sculpture “Between a Window and a Door” By Visual Artist Oscar Ortega
At the time, I was the technical director for KPBS Radio’s The Lounge, a daily talk show covering the arts in San Diego. The show’s producer, Angela Carone, and host, Dirk Sutro, were interested in Tijuana artists as well, so I made contact with Oscar Ortega. We started an email conversation, but unfortunately, there was turnover at work and I was reassigned to a different program. After not receiving Oscar’s reply to a set of questions — and with the changes at work — the story faded into that quiet place where memories go to gather dust.
Oscar Ortega has several public pieces in Tijuana, including a mural just a short distance from the sculpture. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have an online portfolio that I can find. Searching “entre ventana y puerta” returns an image of mine on Flickr as the top result (I’m curious if this blog post will take it’s spot after it gets crawled). So after two years waiting to read someone else’s review of the piece, I figure it’s about time to share my own.
He explained the title as a description of Tijuana’s physical (and perhaps psychological) situation. It’s an incredibly transited city, but has no seaport, making its coastline only a “window.” The “door” refers to the U.S. border — a door locked for many. The piece, like the city, is rich with layered symbols: the hand of Mexican labor, cars circle the base endlessly, the round indigenous blocks carved with the men’s bathroom figure, the jumbled mosaic like the residential architecture covering Tijuana’s hillsides.
Certain patterns line up at particular angles, allowing you to discover each scene as you move around it. For me, Ortega’s sculpture stands as a monument to the culture of Tijuana: a mix of indigenous and modern symbols, a city of travelers, glimpses of family struggle, international labor and commerce, and all of it trapped in a corner at the edge of the world. And I’m curious if the people who pass “between a window and a door” daily manage to see themselves in it.
May 1st is a holiday in Mexico, and on any holiday you can expect the lines to cross into the U.S. to be substantially longer than normal. But today is a different day. Less than 1 percent of the normal traffic crossed the border from Mexico into the U.S.
At Balboa Park in San Diego, tens of thousands gathered to remember those who have died crossing the border and celebrate their unity. At the corner of Juniper and Sixth, a small group of people waving flags started calling others to march. People started to follow, and the police quickly stepped in to try and stop the crowd. The group chanted “Si se puede” and walked past the police and began to march through the city. The police worked quickly to clear a path, blocking streets as if it were a planned parade. Organizers of the rally ran to the front of the line, but were unsuccessful in dissuading the crowd’s action.
The organizers and police decided to guide the crowd to City Hall. The group ignored several blockades and twisted their own path through the city. At the entrances to the highways, police were standing with bags of riot cuffs at the ready. Once the crowd reached the closed and vacant City Hall, they turned through the Horton Plaza entrance and looped back to rejoin the tail of the crowd, heading back to Balboa Park.
Throughout the impromptu march, the participants remained calm and peaceful. In the end, the same officer who pleaded with one of the leaders to turn around shook hands and thanked him for managing to lead them back around safely and peacefully. Those at the front of the march were young and passionate. While the group was unorganized, they worked together and followed each other’s lead. There were no egos or celebrities leading the group. It was clear that a newfound confidence, strength and power emerged tonight.
I produced a segment today for KPBS Radio’s talk show These Days. I brought on Sal Castro, a key figure who led student walkouts in the 1960s, and two UCSD professors to talk about Chicano history and identity.
Student Walkouts Hark Back to the Chicano Movement
Sal Castro, youth motivator and volunteer teacher. He mentored the students who staged walkouts in 1968. He joins us from his home in Los Angeles. Sal Castro will be at UCSD to lead a discussion following a public screening of the HBO film Walkout on Wednesday May 10 at 7 p.m. Walkout is directed by Edward James Olmos and is based on the true story of the 1968 walkouts.
Jorge Mariscal, director of the Chicano Studies Program at UC San Diego. His latest book is Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the Chicano Movement.
Tomás Jiménez, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCSD. His research focuses on immigration, race, ethnicity, inequality, assimilation, and the Mexican-origin population in the U.S.
By now, everyone knows that Japan won the first ever World Baseball Classic. What no one knows, is that the music that graced San Diego’s Petco Park sound system as the players entered the field was being played from a CD; the San Diego Symphony Orchestra was on the field performing, but the amplified audio was pre-recorded (and edited by yours truly).
The day before the final game, the orchestra was recording the national anthems for Cuba and Japan (not knowing who would win), the host country (USA) as well as the entrance music for the parade of flags. After recording several takes of each theme, classical music guru Doug Dillon brought the recordings to me and we started editing at about 9pm Sunday night. He layed out the music scores and worked off his notes from the recording session. Taking a few bars from one take, a section from another, we weaved together the best pieces to create the final versions. We finished six hours later, at 3am Monday morning. Only a few hours after that, the sold-out stadium was listening to the CD I burned that morning.
You can hear the Parade of Flags theme in this video montage from the World Baseball Classic website. I’ve worked on a lot of freelance projects in recent years, but this one had by far the widest circulation yet.