Ever since he ran for office, Donald Trump has been boasting that he would build a wall between Mexico and the United States strong enough to keep immigrants away. According to Trump, those who are coming over the border are guilty of either crime or sloth, and they shouldn’t be here.
Millions of people on both sides of the border disagree. And in that spirit Mexican-born, American-raised artist Enrique Chiu is leading a project to turn a mile-long section of a previously existing wall at Tijuana into a work of art. More than 2,600 volunteers have been working to create the Mural of Brotherhood. They’re painting cartoon figures, butterflies, flowers, prayers and messages of hope and, in the process demonstrating the kind of friendship, creativity, and collaboration that belies all the rhetoric.
Chiu has said that he dedicates this project “to all those people who are looking for a better life. Who take enormous risks. Or those have been deported and are separated from their families.”
Trebbe is the author of The World Is a Waiting Lover and 101 Ways to Make Guerrilla Beauty. Her new book, Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty, will be published in Fall 2018 by North Atlantic Books. Her articles about people’s emotional and spiritual relationship with nature have appeared in Orion, Sierra, Ecopsychology, The Ecologist, The Nation, Harper’s and other magazines. She lives with her husband, Andrew Gardner, in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, a region currently under exploitation by natural gas companies.
Image Credit:
- Mural 4: Enrique Chiu
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