The crisis unfolding on the US-Mexico border is not new.  It is the result of a decades-long neglect of an oppressed and impoverished community. This community is composed of “migrants,” whose circumstances have caused them to migrate north from southern Mexico and Central America, and of “deportees,” who have been returned south by deportation from the United States.  Millions of people fit one or the other of these profiles, and thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, fit both. The community of migrants and deportees is bound together not by common location, but rather by common experience (forced migration), by the interlocking relationships of millions of extended family trees, and by modern communications technologies like Facebook Messenger, Twitter and WhatsApp.

Migrants from the south today are commonly fleeing criminal violence, political corruption and persecution, unproductive fields due to climate change, and severely limited opportunities for advancement via work or education. At present there are over 10,000 migrants on the list maintained by Mexican authorities, waiting in Tijuana for an initial asylum hearing with US officials. These people – many entire families, many single women with children and many unaccompanied minor children – do not immediately have access to traditional work opportunities in Mexico.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of deportees from the United States have arrived in Tijuana, many having never before set foot in the city.  Many have chosen to remain so that they would be within driving distance of their families in the southwest United States. This population includes many single men, but also single women, and women with children, almost all members of “mixed-status” and “binational” extended families. 

There is opportunity in Tijuana.  The city is known for full employment, with job offerings abundant.  As these new arrivals join the peripheral neighborhoods of the city, they need a pathway to become participants in establishing community – safe places where they can work and their children can go to school and/or be connected to their families living on the US side.  They need support services to deal with the trauma they have experienced as well as case management to secure the paperwork that is needed to establish permanent residence and work eligibility in Mexico.  They need support to secure a livelihood and way forward. Via has worked in Baja California communities for over 40 years, developing with the residents a model of community development that supports people to be their own best resource, engaged with others to make a good life.

In 2020 Via International launched an initiative to engage with the Tijuana-based expression of this large, transnational community.  We called this initiative VIA MIGRANTE.  Our goal is to take the lessons learned from our decades of experience in sustainable community development, and transport the lessons learned into the context of this new population.  We knew this community was different from those we had served before, because it was a floating, often unstable, population that could not be organized in any single colonia or barrio.  Even still, we knew that the proven principles of sustainable community development could be of service to this unique population.