On a cool and sunny morning in late March, two dozen people of good will gathered for a 5-mile Bike Ride/Native Plant Event at the southwestern corner of the United States/northwestern corner of Mexico. Homemade signs called upon the U.S. Border Patrol to re-open Friendship Park, a bi-national plaza and gathering space where people on both sides of the frontier have been gathering for many years. The U.S. Border Patrol Agency completely closed the door to Friendship Park at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it refuses to re-open this sacred space where grandparents can see their grandbabies for the first time, where children on one side of the border can visit with their parents on the other side, and where people of faith gather weekly at the wall to break bread and worship together.
Dan Watman, one of the Borderlands Coordinators with VIA International (the parent organization of the “Friends of Friendship Park”), brought two native plant specimens to talk about – a Bladderpod (Peritoma arborea) and a White Sage (Salvia apiana). Dan and a team of dedicated volunteers created and nurtured the Bi-national Garden, a native plant garden that transects and transcends the border at Friendship Park approximately 15 years ago. In a shocking and disgraceful act intended to demoralize the bi-national community, a San Diego Border Patrol agent bulldozed and destroyed the plants, signs, paths and benches of the garden on the U.S. side in 2020. VIA International continues to seek recompense for these actions from the federal government.
One of several symbolic elements of the garden design was the White Sage River, an installation of white sage plants winding back and forth across the border to echo the Tijuana River. White sage is one of the many plants in the garden that are native to both southern California and Baja California. It remains an important plant to the Kumeyay people, who have lived and continue to live in what are now borderlands for 600 generations (12,000 years). In the wild, white sage can often grow to heights of six feet tall, supported by a drought-adapted deep root structure allows the plant to become dormant each year after the growing season, and sprout anew each spring. It echoes the resiliency of the fronterizos who are committed to the struggle to re-open the doors of friendship at Friendship Park and Bi-national Garden.
(for more information, visit Friends of Friendship Park)
