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The Park of Tears
In a patch of land between San Diego and Tijuana, loved ones reunite across a mesh fence, poking pinkies through the holes to touch
For years, if you didn’t have papers or lacked the authorization to leave the United States without the right to come back, the only place along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border where you could meet your family face-to-face was at the end of the line: a small patch of land adjoining the Pacific Ocean between San Diego and Tijuana. It was inaugurated by First Lady Pat Nixon in 1971 as a “friendship park” between the two nations and originally did not have a fence. Families on both sides could meet and have picnics together without hindrance. “May there never be a wall between these two great nations,” Nixon said. “Only friendship.”
In 1994, as part of Operation Gatekeeper, the Clinton administration decided that “only friendship” was no longer the case; it would erect a barrier — a fence — between these two great nations. Families could meet across the barrier of 12-foot-high steel bollards and pass food back and forth. In 2009, the Obama administration shut down the American side of Friendship Park and put up a second fence behind the first one. After protests, Friendship Park reopened in 2012, but with a thick double mesh; if a child wanted to touch her mother, for instance, she could stick her pinkie inside the fence, and her mother could do the same on the opposite side, and the tips of their pinkies could touch: the dance of the fingers, the “pinkie kiss.” “Amargo y dulce” is how the migrants describe the experience. Bittersweet.
Every once in a while, in its magnanimity, the government opened a door adjoining Friendship Park, and people could actually hug their family members — for no more than three minutes. This wasn’t done often; the door was opened only six times after 2013. On one of those occasions, in November 2017, a couple showed up on opposite sides of the border wearing wedding clothes, got married under the watchful eye of the Border Patrol, and then went back, separated again. The groom on the American side, as the newspapers later found…
