Tijuana Shantytown Demonstates Serious Mexico-US Migration Problem Jorge A. Bustamonte - Reforma
go to original March 28, 2014

Deportee Purgatory: Tijuana's 'El Bordo' Is Home to Thousands of Mexican Deportees (vice)

I cross the Tijuana-San Diego border more than twice daily. The majority of the time I sleep in the southern part of San Diego, and my office is at the Northern Border College (COLEF) in Tijuana where I work most of the year. This is why every day I get to see the spectacle of misery that shows, on average, close to one thousand people who live sheltered in small dwellings colloquially called ñongos [good-for-nothing's].

These dwellings are built from the waste of metal sheets, cardboard, pieces of fabric, newspapers and bits of trash. The shantytown, a few meters from the boundary line, is called “the border.” The ñongos are generally dwellings so precarious that they can be destroyed and built from one day to another. Two or three people usually live there.

According to data from a study by Dr. Laura Velasco (COLEF in Tijuana), the majority of people who spend the night in “the border” are people living in conditions of extreme poverty. The majority are men, and three-quarters of the people lack identification documents. What you see with the naked eye is a conglomerate of people who live in the ñongos wearing scraps of clothing. They are dirty and disheveled, some are semi-naked. Among them are people who were expelled from the United States a few hours before or the night before. Among them are delinquents, drug addicts and lunatics, as well as undocumented migrants without any other history than the bad misfortune of having been arrested and expelled from the United States.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

Translated by Janine Rhyans

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!