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Tijuana’s Borderhack significantly sits on the clichéd site of "the border" only because the oppressive laws that make that site real are so ridiculous. Friday night at Borderhack made like a mix of activist rendezvous, media/academic conference, and Quaker meeting. Sitting at the border, giving witness to the architecture of repression. "Why did you come to Borderhack?" was a succinct question for such an open and symbolic event- a media activist from the Bay Area answered most clearly, "This border is visible, physical and real, it physically keeps people from crossing. Yet notice that the wind easily passes through. With new media, radio, and TV, we will create a cultural groundswell so that people on the powerful side will demand that the boarder be deleted."
That said, Friday night featured a pirate radio workshop, a presentation by Pea Pod of Jesse Drew's videos, and the online works of Christina Ulke's UCSD new-media class: bordercampsite.net including works by Yung Min , Jackie Buttice and Will McChesney, Vu Cao and Gerardo Gonzalez. Scheduled to perform was Adriene Jenik and Desktop Theater, though the hacked into phone line would not support their performance. Instead, they will perform Saturday.
Though Friday's turnout was small, and plagued by technical problems, the event still stands as one of the few sites of cross-border radical cultural exchange. It is also a focused, though casual environment to discuss this ever-present thing, the fence.
I chatted a resident of Tijuana's beachfront Las Playas neighborhood who told about the daily anti-leftist repression by police and Mexican Army done in the name of "the war on drugs." I talked to a San Diego activist about the
wasteful and environmentally destructive post-9/11 plan to make a new, triple fence border. And La Resistencia added their knowledge of the travails that cross-border migrants must face.
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