Border abolition, Against All Odds

A line for the Comedor Comunitario in 2020, just before the pandemic. Photo © Contra Viento y Marea.

Interview • Brian Whitener • August 29, 2024 • Leer en castellano

Contra Viento y Marea is a community kitchen in the Zona Norte of Tijuana that serves over 1,000 hot meals every week. The group was founded six years ago, and is made up of Central American migrant and refugee youth who arrived in the November 2018 migrant caravan and anarchist organizers from Mexico, the US, and beyond. 

But Contra Viento y Marea, which translates to Against All Odds, does a lot more than cooking and handing out prepared meals. Collective members run a donation center and built themselves a kitchen to store goods that are distributed to people in the community. It also collects and distributes clothing, shoes, personal care items, diapers, sleeping bags, toys, and basic medicines; and runs a small garden on the rooftop. 

The collective hosts a variety of community events, including a monthly acupuncture clinic. It recently held a free school to provide “Free Education for Liberation” to young adults and adults. The remarkable work of Contra Viento y Marea on the Mexico-US border flies in the face of traditional, charity focussed humanitarian efforts and has border abolition at its core.

In an interview published in the new book Border Abolition Now, writer and scholar Brian Whitener interviewed two members of the Contra Viento y Marea collective. This week, we’re sharing an edited excerpt from that interview.

Brian Whitener: Tell me about how Contra Viento y Marea works and where you’re located.

Devi Machete: Everyone who puts in time and labor gets to participate in the decisions. The people we serve, who live in our community, mostly originate from various parts of Mexico, Central America , South America (Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador), and the Caribbean, but also those who come from other far away countries like Cameroon, Ukraine, and Russia. 

We are located 15 minutes from the international port of entry El Chaparral, and a few blocks from the border wall in an area that is heavily militarized and overpoliced. We have the National Guard (Guardia Nacional), the Municipal Police (Policia Municipal de Tijuana), the Mexican Army (Ejército Mexicano) the Attorney General’s Office (Ministerio Público), and all kinds of other federal, state, and local agencies patrol our neighborhood armed to the teeth. 

Tijuana has a skyrocketing homicide rate, heinous femicides targeting young women in particular, mass graves, black sites, and deeply entrenched sex, drugs, and arms trafficking rings. Brutal cases of mutilation, torture, and forced disappearances are commonplace. 

It’s under these circumstances that we have managed to carve out a space for folks to feel safe, welcomed, and in community. 

Andrea M: Right now we serve a lot of people who have been deported from the United States. Those people are the most vulnerable because they’re maybe Mexicans who lived a long time in the United States and they don’t speak Spanish. But if you add all those who are deported from the US to the already complex situation we have in Tijuana – involving people arriving from every part of Latin America – we see all kinds of vulnerability. 

BW: Could you all say a little bit about how you think of abolition, within the context of the project or how an idea of abolition informs the project and talk about what border abolition looks like from where you all are? 

DM: Border abolition for us means a framework we use to organize ourselves internally, but also for how we want to see society organized. We believe in abolition because it provides us with a framework from which to understand the context of violence we are seeing play out in real time. It also helps us come toward a new vision of what we want to see happen in our society, economic changes, political changes, social changes – abolition ties those together in a way that allows us to move forward thinking about the greater picture of what we need to do to reshape society. 

Get rid of the borders, border patrol, the walls, the National Guard, Mexico’s immigration enforcement arm, the Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM), then invest in free education for life: free public housing that is adequate, that is affordable in the sense that people have free access not just discounted access; free healthy food; free healthcare that is high quality given at the point of necessity; and services for folks that need preventive care such as free maternity and child care. 

All of these things come together in a vision of abolition because the money that’s going to fund all the free programs and all the free projects that we need comes from stripping funds away from the police, away from militarization; away from the state. 

A volunteer with a tattoo that reads "Contra Viento y Marea." Photo © Contra Viento y Marea.

BW: Border abolitionist organizing is different from a lot of the other kinds of organizing that people do at the US–Mexico border. Could you talk about some of the difficulties or complications in sustaining an abolitionist project in that context? 

AM: For many organizations, migration is a business. If you don’t pay attention, people just become numbers, and reports are filled out with those numbers and the biggest worries are about how much funding I can get from such a large number of people, instead of prioritizing their dignity. 

DM: The comedor is very different from nonprofits or large NGOs. We are organized through solidarity and mutual aid, meaning everyone who comes participates as a volunteer and does so because they want to, not because they’re coerced. We measure our success by the quality of our relationships and we organize on the basis of friendship. There’s no distinction between those that are doing the organizing and those that are receiving the services. They’re the same community, the same group of friends, the same circle of volunteers. 

Of course, there are distinctions in terms of economic privilege between some of us that have more economic stability and so we offer economic stipends to those who need them, mainly our migrant volunteers. We give them money for transportation and food. Not just the food we cook for meals, but staple food boxes with rice and stuff from the kitchen, like those we give out to people in the neighborhood with stoves. We also give them clothes that come in as donations. 

They have access to all the donations that come in actually. We don’t say, “Oh you can only have like three things” or how a shelter would say, “Only pick a few things and that’s it,” they have access to whatever it is that comes in. There’s a sense that we’re not here to restrict the resources but to ensure that they get out to everyone who needs them. We have a horizontal internal organizing structure. That’s one difference. 

Another difference is that we rely on small donations, and the solidarity of the hundreds of accomplices, allies, and partners on both sides of the border, to run all our projects. We don’t have large grant donors, meaning we don’t allow donors of a foundation or nonprofit to decide how we do things. 

Our objective is to build up the community, not earn grants for the sake of promoting ourselves and boosting our own incomes.

BW: It sounds like to me one of the things you’re saying is that border abolition would be the abolition of the business of the border. 

DM: Border abolition is an umbrella term that covers a lot of different aspects of work that people are doing through mutual aid projects. For example, in the landscape of border abolition, there’s several areas. 

Those that are focused on using the hammer to chip away or to smash down the state institutions that are physically extracting people from their countries via deportations, to incarcerate them in jails, prisons and detention centers (which are also jails and prisons by another name), to exploit them. There are organizations, groups, and collectives devoted specifically to using a diversity of tactics to attack those institutions to bring them down. So that’s one area of the abolition landscape. 

Then there’s those groups working with people who are caught inside the belly of the beast, supporting prisoners trapped within carceral and punitive systems. That’s also another piece of the landscape, organizations doing detention support, sending commissaries, writing letters, noise demos, and overall doing tons of work in that area. 

Then there are organizations or groups or collectives like us that are  modeling in real life what it would be like to have a world where there’s free food, free care, and free resources for all. Our project is about implementing what we imagine it would be like to not have the state, but doing it now, not waiting for the state to collapse or be abolished. We are starting to build that beautiful world where we would all be supported, cared for and loved. 

I think that’s the difference between the way we do this project and the way nonprofits do humanitarian aid. They don’t want to challenge or abolish the state, they want to work with the state as partners. They don’t want to completely stop the forced migration flows because they’re making money off of every migrant/refugee that comes through, so they don’t necessarily want to end the whole business of the border, they just want to play their role in it. We’re about destroying the entire apparatus, the entire border business model.

This interview is an excerpt from: Border Abolition Now, edited by Sara Riva, Simon Campbell, Brian Whitener and Kathryn Medien and published by Pluto Press.