Building the City of God in Tijuana: How Migrant Shelters are Transforming Mexican Urban Landscapes
As journalists and academics document the travails of migrants and asylum seekers around the world, humanitarian aid and religious organizations in Mexico are building and managing shelters for them. Draconian U.S. policies and an increasing number of people forced to flee violence in Central America have contributed to make Mexico, once a “passthrough” country, into a destination for thousands. Shelters—most of them built without the participation of the Mexican government—are now gateways into Mexican cities. After a few days or weeks in them, it is increasingly common for their residents to settle more permanently in emergent neighborhoods nearby. They do so to remain close to migrant networks and because they often return to shelters to access services denied to them by state institutions.
Figure 1. Aerial view of Tijuana and the wall dividing the United States and Mexico in June 2020. © Francisco Álvarez.
One such shelter, Embajadores de Jesús, is located in Tijuana, a bustling city cut sharply by a wall (figure 1). North of this wall are barren lands heavily guarded by the U.S. police and Border Patrol. South of it are rolling canyons where hundreds of thousands live. A century ago, Tijuana numbered less than a thousand residents. The arrival of migrants from all over Mexico and the world throughout the twentieth century created a booming city of some one and a half million (figure 2). The city’s middle-class neighborhoods stand on higher ground, with views of “el otro lado”. Some of the canyons, with no paved streets and beyond the city’s electrical, sewage and drinking water systems, are home to the city’s poor. It is not uncommon for official maps to represent them as uninhabited swaths of land. Embajadores de Jesús is at the end of one such canyon, known as El Alacrán.
Figure 2. Aerial view of the Tijuana River in June 2020. © Francisco Álvarez.
A dirt road leads to the shelter, which is surrounded by garbage dumps and terraces with pig and goat pens shored up by walls made of abandoned car tires. In August 2019, in the service marking its anniversary, Pastor Gustavo Banda Aceves told his congregation they were called on to build “the City of God.” In El Alacrán, all nations would come together and find deliverance. Many nations were present that day. Haitian immigrants prayed from the pulpit in Creole. Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorians received diplomas attesting to their recent baptisms. A visiting pastor preached in Korean; his words were translated into Spanish by an American. At the end of the service, the congregation shared tamales, baleadas and pupusas. Participants seemed eager to heed Pastor Banda’s invitation to, as he wrote in an earlier Facebook post, break down “divisions put up by selfishness and xenophobia” and foster a different kind of world where all will be one under God, regardless of race, national origin or immigration status.
I first heard the story of Embajadores de Jesús from Pastor Zaida Guillén, Banda’s wife. In a visit with a group of students in 2017, she told us her husband had a vision in which he was instructed to build a massive temple. They built it, not knowing how it would be filled. The first Haitian migrants arrived in Tijuana in May 2015. Most came from Brazil, where they had lived since the 2010 earthquake that devastated their country. When the Brazilian economy stalled, they became migrants once again and traveled north, often by foot, facing awful dangers. They waited in Tijuana to be let into the United States, but only a few were. Haitians crowded in shelters and prompted the temporary conversion of churches and soup kitchens into dormitories. Still, there was not enough room for all. One day, while running an errand downtown, Pastor Guillén was moved to invite a group of Haitians to follow her to El Alacrán. This, she told us, is how God’s plan was revealed.
“Migrant shelters—most of them built without the participation of the Mexican government—are now gateways into Mexican cities.”
In the years since 2017, when Embajadores de Jesús became a shelter, its congregants have erected an apartment building nearby known as “Little Haiti.” When they arrived, Haitians slept on mattresses inside the temple. On Sundays, they would clear a large section for services. On weekdays, they participated in the construction of the apartment building. The land and materials were bought with money raised by the pastors locally and in California. Upon dedication of the new building, the Haitian migrants moved there, opening up space in the temple that other migrants promptly occupied. The pastors have ceased inviting new residents; they simply arrive, as do food and clothing. Activists and humanitarian organizations such as Mexico’s branch of Border’s Angels collect donations and bring them here. Among the donors are parishioners, including Mexicans affiliated with the church since before it became a shelter and those who have found refuge there in the past. Pastor Banda interprets the availability of supplies as divine intervention: Embajadores de Jesús will continue welcoming migrants as long as God’s blessings last.
When I returned to talk to Pastor Banda after the anniversary service, he showed me the site of “Little Honduras.” That morning, a bulldozer had leveled a plot across the dirt road from the shelter. He also pointed to the site where they would build a school and a playground, on land Embajadores de Jesús had recently bought with a loan from the bank. Pastor Banda had enthusiastically welcomed the input from UC San Diego architects, who proposed using local stone for construction, installing water and energy harvesting technologies, and paving the street with permeable cobbles. When completed, he told me, this would be the area with the most ecological and modern infrastructure in the city. Although there is a long way to go before this utopian vision materializes, under Banda’s leadership, a different type of city is emerging in El Alacrán.
“Pastor Zaida Guillén told us her husband had a vision in which he was instructed to build a massive temple.”
As I followed the pastor in a tour of the canyon, we were joined by Darwin, who had arrived from Honduras a few months earlier as part of a migrant caravan. He was eager to offer his conversion testimony: in Tijuana, he and his wife had been saved and both had started excelling at their job in an upholstery shop. They lived in a small house next to the temple and were on their way to a life of prosperity. He figured that arriving there, finding their place on earth, was part of God’s plan. Embajadores de Jesús has offered both earthly and spiritual salvation to Darwin and hundreds of others. In the urban margins of Tijuana, some finally feel at a safe distance from the violence razing their native countries. Although Mexican cities, especially those along the border, are far from safe, with countless daily cases of extortion, kidnapping and human trafficking, sometimes they offer seekers a moment of respite.
Embajadores de Jesús is an eloquent example of an urban transformation seen, on different scales, all over Mexico. In Monterrey, a city two hundred kilometers from the Texan border, a large shelter known as Casa INDI has had similar effects on its surroundings. This shelter is also led by a charismatic leader, father Felipe de Jesús Sánchez, who has overseen the growth of an old soup kitchen for the homeless abutting a Catholic church into a shelter that can house up to one hundred migrants and includes a health clinic.
Similarly, El Refugio, in Guadalajara, a city in western Mexico along the route to Arizona and California, has started building apartment blocks close to its main building for refugees who, after some time in the city, seek more independence. El Refugio is built around a church and is led by a cleric, father Alberto Ruiz Pérez. In these and other cases, shelters are leading the way in the emergence of new forms of communal living and new urban patterns in Mexican cities.
The case of Tijuana’s Embajadores de Jesús is especially interesting because it narrates urban transformation as a God-mandated plan. Those who embrace this plan look earnestly towards the future. Under the guidance of evangelical pastors, many have cut off ties with Catholic or Voodoo practices, some of which are embedded in their life histories, relations and bodily practices. Joining Embajadores de Jesús might involve abruptly silencing the past. This can be a welcome option for those fleeing violence and severe economic hardships. Traveling back can be very risky, and Pastor Banda insists that people don’t give up after having come such a long way. And while shedding past selves might be painful, it can also be reassuring to settle in a place that so openly invites reinvention.
“The open hostility of government officials toward migrants and their characterization as a labor force by the maquiladora industry are reminders that shelters are working on their own in addressing migration with compassion and imagination.”
Other actors who work with migrants in Mexico are much less imaginative. Rather than seeing those who have left everything behind as agents capable of refashioning an unequal and unjust world, they see them as a threat that has to be contained. Fulfilling a promise made to the U.S. government, Mexican officials have deployed thousands of members of the National Guard to block and detain migrants. In one incident, on August 14, 2019, the Guard detained eighteen migrants, mostly minors, in a field trip organized by Embajadores de Jesús to the Tijuana beach. The armed officials argued that the migrant children and adolescents in bathing suits were not carrying proper identification, although they are not required to do so by law. Pastor Banda and representatives from Border’s Angels staged a press conference and sued the government, eventually securing the release of the detainees.
Others welcome migrants as subjects who will help reinforce the status quo. In a visit to Ciudad Juárez in 2019, I attended a workshop organized by the maquiladora industry to discuss how they might recruit them as workers. This new wave of migrants could be a boon for the local economy. For them, Cubans, Hondurans, Venezuelans and central Mexicans in the city were not people with histories and dreams of their own, but an indistinguishable mass. Now and ever, sequestering populations within a territory is conducive to their exploitation. In this case, both Mexican and U.S. companies stand to benefit. For their part, migrants in Ciudad Juárez told me they often abandon their jobs in maquiladoras because of low wages, long hours doing repetitive tasks and harassment from superiors. They also complained of the absence of public transportation and of the hostility of the city’s public spaces, where violence is all too common. In the workshop with maquiladora owners and managers, participants did not discuss how these complaints might be addressed. They sought to absorb migrants into their businesses expediently, as they have done for decades.
The open hostility of government officials toward migrants and their characterization as a labor force by the maquiladora industry are reminders that shelters are working on their own in addressing migration with compassion and imagination. Without official support or the backing of major economic agents, shelters are vulnerable; funding might run out, organized crime might target them or governments might decide to interfere more directly with their work. For these reasons, it is yet to be seen if transformations centered on shelters will consolidate, multiply or eventually recede into the background of larger urban and social processes. For now, they remain the source of some of the most consequential challenges to dominant forms of urban development and the practice of citizenship in Mexico. If shelters manage to build a new type of city through solidarity and collaborative work, the destination of migrants fleeing failed economic and social systems might in fact be a different world.
