By Barbara Zaragoza
The South Bay celebrates Women’s History Month with two outstanding exhibits:
San Ysidro’s The Front celebrated their 10th annual Dia de la Mujer. On Thursday, March 9th the art gallery opened Back to Basics featuring 21 female artists from both sides of the border presenting their photography, sculpture, paintings and digital art.
“Back to Basics suggests that the way out of many of our problems is to return to the origins, to the most basic forms of community interaction, to respect for nature and all living beings, to teamwork, to respect differences, to search for happiness and love in the simplest things, to the inner and deep look of our existence,” said Norma Iglesias Prieto, curator of the exhibit and Professor of the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at SDSU.
The exhibit runs through April 15, 2017. The artists included Ilse Almazan, Norma Campos-Pica, Rebecca M. Goldschmidt, Melissa Castañeda, Elaine Martinez, Miriam Garcia Aguirre, D. Emily Hicks, Erika Murriett, Karina Velasco, Lynn Susholtz, Ericka Barboza, Araceli Proulx-Sollano, Cayce Wheelock, Cynthia Angulo, Laura Hurtado, and Monica Martin.
I was at the opening yesterday evening and here’s some of the visual delights:
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Irma Poeter -
Irma Poeter -
Karina Velasco -
Laura Hurtado -
Cayce Wheelock -
Ilse Almazan
In addition, an exhibit at Southwest College Art Gallery opened on March 7th with 11 artists exploring their Chicana identity. I visited this gallery yesterday morning and received a profound visual delight:
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Ni Solo Mujeres -
Rotmi Enciso -
Carolyn Castano -
Panca -
Berenice Badillo -
Berenice Badillo -
Shizu Saldamando -
Patricia Aguayo -
Melanie Cervantes
More South Bay News
Chula Vista
- Chula Vista City Councilmember Steve Padilla openly criticized Otay Water District board member Hector Gastelum for his recent anti-Muslim and racist tweets. Padilla called the comments “abhorrent and reprehensible”. In 2005 a group of bigots came to Chula Vista’s city council meeting to denounce Padilla for being gay. He was mayor at the time. (San Diego Union Tribune)
- A Citizen’s Oversight Committee was created to make sure funds are spent appropriately from Proposition P (the half-cent sales tax increase approved by voters in November). (San Diego Union Tribune)
- Chula Vista has a creative baker at Daniela’s Kitchen. Last year, Daniela partnered with Border X Brewing to pair cupcakes and beer. In addition, on March 12th at 9pm she’ll be one of the contestants of the “Spring Baking Championship” on the Food Network. (San Diego Union Tribune)
- Linda Heath at Dig Imperial Beach has a history of the South Bay Salt Works. It’s the second oldest industry in San Diego and also where the Kumeyaay once extracted salt to trade with other tribes.
National City
- After two contentious City Council meetings in National City where the Mayor refused to commit to being a Welcoming City because of ‘an outside group pushing for groups to become a welcoming city’, on February 25th Border Patrol agents conducted an immigration checkpoint on the busy intersection of 30th Street and Highland Avenue. Nevertheless, the Chula Vista Star News reported, the President and CEO of the Hospital Association of San Diego and Imperial Counties, Dimities Alexiou, assured that undocumented immigrants and refugees would still receive medical care at any local hospital. (Chula Vista Star News)
- National City is cracking down on massage parlors that are actually fronts for prostitution and sex trafficking. (NBC 7 News)
- Remember Tom Waits? He’s from the South Bay and the New York Times Style Magazine included him in a feature with musicians Beck and Kendrick Lamar.
Imperial Beach
- Coronado Brewing Company plans to build a ten-barrel rewet in Imperial Beach. (San Diego Reader)
- Drone video shows that the massive raw sewage spill from Mexico continued after February 23rd. The Union Tribune has video and more on resident and lawmakers call for the federal government to investigate.
The Border
- U.S. Customers and Border Protection reported on Wednesday that illegal border crossing data through the month of February showed an unprecedented 40% drop. (CBP)
- However, a news report also found that 91.2% of the 739,168 U.S. Citizens who live in Mexico are living there illegally. (Latino Rebels)
The director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney declined to say how much Trump’s border wall could cost. He also said:
“It just depends on the kind of wall that you want to build, and I don’t think we’ve settled, yet, on the actual construction,” Mulvaney said. “You can do steel, you could do concrete, you can do a combination of concrete and steel. You can supplement it with different types of technologies and so forth.”
And noting that “when you’re talking about a wall that’s, you know, several thousand miles long, there’s going to be certain places where a certain type of wall are more appropriate than others,” Mulvaney suggested that parts could be “see-through.”
“Some places, a solid concrete barrier might be desired,” Mulvaney said. “In other places, the border folks are actually telling us, border control’s actually telling us that they like the one you can see through, because it reduces the number of violent attacks on our folks. So it’s a complicated program.”
I personally maintain that President Trump would like to take credit for the walls that already exist, courtesy of the Clinton Administration in 1994 and the Bush Administration in 2008. So, once again, here are pictures from my personal photo collection of the wall between San Diego & Tijuana.
(Note that Border Patrol told me on one occasion that border walls don’t stop people from jumping over into the United States. They only slow people down so that Border Patrol can catch them. In certain areas where the terrain is harsh, Border Patrol SUV’s and surveillance seem to be sufficient.)
See through like this one at Friendship Park by the Pacific Ocean? (Photo by Barbara Zaragoza)
Or See Through like this one at Border Field State Park by the Pacific Ocean? (Photo by Barbara Zaragoza)
Or perhaps two walls, one made of military landing mat and the other of concrete with concertina barbed wire at the top of the second? (Photo by Barbara Zaragoza)
Here’s the secondary wall along the Tijuana-San Diego border. What’s that? You want a closer look? (Photo by Barbara Zaragoza)
Here’s a closer look at George W. Bush’s secondary wall along the Tijuana-San Diego border. Yep, you guessed it. Those are holes in the wall that Border Patrol had to patch up. (Photo by Barbara Zaragoza)
And finally — Don’t forget to enjoy the National City Mariachi Festival at Pepper Park on March 12th from 11am-7pm. It’s the largest of its kind anywhere.
