While working in a Wildcoast event in 2009, Steve Wright was dismayed by the thousands of automobile tires he found cluttering the otherwise protected wetlands in the southwestern corner of San Diego County. He traced the tires back to their source and discovered that they were coming out of the barrancas of Tijuana, where maquiladora workers lead a marginalized existence. The tires are trash that never made it to the municipal landfill, it turned out, simply because the city’s trash trucks can’t negotiate the barrancas’ precarious dirt roads.
The barranca, a common geological feature of the Baja California peninsula, is an especially steep sort of canyon carved out by an arroyo. (Arroyos, in turn, are seasonal streams, dry in the summer and effusive in the winter, which is why their barrancas are so precipitous.) How some of the poorest people from the most rural parts of Mexico came to be living in these barrancas is still an politically charged question … locally the inhabitants are called paracaidistas (parachutists) because they seem to have dropped from the sky … their critics north of the border refer to them as squatters because they’re living on unsaleable land that they didn’t pay for … and somehow or another they began to populate the barrancas when the maquiladora industry boomed during the 1980s.
In the beginning, no one took much notice of the people in the barrancas, at least not at any official level. They were quite literally off the map. No roads, no schools, no electricity, no sewage system. Just a bit of rural Mexico lost in the folds of a growing metropolis. Over time, these informal settlements have acquired a few schools and some electrification, but their rapid growth and the harsh terrain have prevented them from developing modern urban infrastructure.
When Wright traced his tires back to their source, he found himself in the barranca known as Cañón Los Laureles, one of the original maquiladora settlements. He also found that not all of the tires in Tijuana cross the border to clutter up the estuary – some of them stay in the barrancas as homemade retaining walls. And that gave him an idea. If some discarded tires were being used architecturally, why not use all of them that way?
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