Friendship Across Fences: Communion and Civil Disobedience on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Friendship Across Fences: Communion and Civil Disobedience on the U.S.-Mexico Border
by John Fanestil 02-11-2009
Photos by Karl W. HoffmanEach Sunday afternoon, people from San Diego and Tijuana gather to celebrate communion at a seaside plaza on the U.S.-Mexico border, where families and friends have been meeting for generations to visit through the border fence. The spot – known to locals as “Friendship Park” – sits atop Monument Mesa, so called because it features a monument marking the initial boundary point established in 1849 by the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission after the end of the U.S.-Mexico War.

At a meeting on January 6, 2009, Customs and Border Patrol officials announced that they had finalized plans to wall off Friendship Park. By the time they are done, there will be a second wall at a distance of about 120 feet north of the border fence, with a high speed patrol road running in between. There will be a gate in this second wall, but it will be used for maintenance access only. These final plans will allow for no public access at any time, for any reason – neither to the historic marker on top of Monument Mesa, nor to the border fence on the beach below. They announced that the site would now be considered a construction zone and was closed to the public, effective immediately.

The act of celebrating communion with people on both sides of the border at Friendship Park is now an act of civil disobedience.

So it came to pass that this past Sunday (January 25) we celebrated the sacrament of communion by passing the bread and cup across TWO different fences. As always, there were people on the Mexican side of the border fence. But this week, some of us chose to climb around the mesh fence that now marks off the construction zone at Friendship Park. This left some of our friends, who had not come prepared to engage in civil disobedience, standing behind the mesh fence.

I decided to place the communion elements precisely at the intersection of the two fences – one fence made of steel, running east to west, marking an international boundary; the other fence made of mesh, running south to north, marking off a new patch of U.S. soil that has just been declared by the U.S. government off limits to U.S. citizens.

I began: “On the night in which Jesus gave himself up for us, he took bread … En la noche en que se entregó por nosotros, Jesús tomó el pan …”

Rev. John Fanestil is an ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church and Executive Director of the Foundation for Change. You can join Friends of Friendship Park on Facebook.

Karl W. Hoffman has done extensive documentary photojournalism on the U.S.-Mexico border. See more of his photos at: www.livingontheborder.com