A Q&A with Historian Marco Antonio Samaniego on the New Tijuana River Agreement
“If the U.S. and Mexico are going to agree on one thing, it’s water.”
On July 24, the U.S. and Mexican governments signed a memorandum of understanding regarding the Tijuana River. The river flows 120 miles from Baja California’s Sierra de Juárez to its estuary south of Imperial Beach, California, in San Diego County. For decades, untreated wastewater—including trash and sewage—has flowed from Tijuana into the estuary, provoking complaints and health concerns among Imperial Beach residents.
In the agreement, Mexico commits to providing $93 million for infrastructure projects called for in 2022’s agreement known as Minute 328, along with several additional projects. The two governments have committed to an accelerated timeline for the projects, which are now proposed to be completed by December 2027. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin called it a “permanent, 100 percent solution.”
Historian Marco Antonio Samaniego of the Autonomous University of Baja California has followed the management of the Tijuana River for decades: he was raised in a neighborhood overlooking the river and now lives in one that was developed alongside its channelization. He has published several articles about the history of the U.S.-Mexico border and served on an advisory committee for the International Boundary and Water Commission. Samaniego spoke with the Border Chronicle about the July agreement and its place in the long, binational history of the river.
What is your opinion of the newly announced agreement?
I think it’s a good thing that they’ve signed another agreement. What they are proposing in engineering terms is significant. So I see it positively, and I hope they manage to complete it within the short timeline they have committed to. By 2028 would be excellent. I have my doubts, because public works projects always take longer than planned. But if the U.S. and Mexico are going to agree on one thing, it’s water.
Is it a “permanent, 100 percent” solution, as they say?
Politicians always claim that their agreements will resolve everything. I’ve heard that about the Tijuana River for decades. They have always made important steps, but never sufficient ones. Urban problems are much more accelerated than the speed of diplomacy. It’s one step among many.
Why does so much trash and sewage end up in Imperial Beach?
A river is much more than just water—it’s energy that attracts, pulls in, and transports everything around it. It’s the product of the areas through which it passes. A river picks up everything people throw into it or leave nearby. In this case, all the material it drags with it ends up in the Tijuana River estuary, which is a very important habitat.
The agreement requires more commitment from Mexico than from the United States. Why is that?
The reason it depends more on Mexico is simple: the Tijuana River flows more on the Mexico side, but it discharges on the U.S. side. For that reason, everything that happens in Tijuana—and, worse, what doesn’t happen in the city, like trash collection, careful handling of toxic waste, and maintenance of the canal—has repercussions in Imperial Beach and the Tijuana River estuary.
At the same time, the United States is implicated.
Yes. There’s a permissiveness on the part of the Mexican authorities that allows the maquiladoras to use the river as a place to send their waste.
Then there’s migration. For 40 years, people who have been deported from the United States have lived along the canal. When I was young and they were building the canal, I would go for runs along it. There were people living in the sewer drains, exposed to all kinds of chemicals, infections, and pollution. Forty years have passed, and it’s still the same.
So when people from the U.S. complain, I say yes, trash is accumulating, but it’s because people are living there, because they don’t have any other way to live, because they were just thrown out of the country, and because the countries haven’t come to an agreement about migration as they should. Instead, there are all kinds of contradictory politics that leave these human beings stuck in the middle, living in overcrowded and inhumane conditions.
When did this issue become a binational conflict?
The first documents I have found with complaints from people in Imperial Beach about trash are from the 1930s. The reason it began is that during the 20th century, the Tijuana riverbed became a residential area. Where there shouldn’t have been houses, they built hundreds, even thousands, and it became a social, political, and even religious problem—and it created a lot of pollution. All the material arriving in Imperial Beach was coming from the homes of very poor people.
What measures did the governments end up taking? What community movements were involved?
In 1965, there was a binational act signed to channelize the river. They started removing people from the area with bulldozers. But what really removed them were the floods of 1978 and 1980, which pushed out more than 50,000 people. We still don’t know how many people died in those days, but it was more than 100.
Many groups opposed the removals, including the [conservative] National Action Party and the Mexican Communist Party. But the people were in danger, as the floods later showed. So after the floods, the movements shifted to ensuring that there was housing where people could move. By then, it was the maquiladora boom. The government sent people to live in the industrial zones, so close to the factories that they didn’t even have to catch a bus to work.
The channelization permitted the urbanization of much of Tijuana, including the area where I am literally sitting right now. They built the Tijuana Cultural Center, rebuilt parks, and constructed the medical towers that are big business right now, increasing the value of many areas and causing gentrification. That’s why I always say that the river gives the city its shape.
Meanwhile, on the U.S. side, there was opposition to the channelization for the damage it would do to the Tijuana River estuary. Their activism led to the estuary receiving state and federal protection. It’s important to note that this activism also critiques California—the activists pointed out the importance of conserving the last remaining estuary in the state.
In the 1980s, the topic arose again, because there’s a proposal to build a third port of entry at Playas de Tijuana, which the people of Imperial Beach opposed. In the 1990s, the topic exploded. Many binational groups took up activism, and the PITAR plant [Planta Internacional de Aguas Residuales Tijuana, known as South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant in English] was built. The wastewater from Tijuana goes there, it’s cleaned, and it’s returned to Tijuana. We pay the U.S.—when I pay my water bill in Tijuana, I’m also paying for that process. The idea is that the treated water should be used for parks and gardens, but there aren’t actually enough parks and gardens, so for 30 years we’ve sent it back into the sea. In the new agreement, they say they are going to double the plant’s capacity. That plan is 15 years old. It’s nothing new.
What measures are still necessary?
I’ve used an ugly phrase to describe the city where I was born and where I live—Hay una Tijuana hedionda [There’s a Tijuana that stinks]. There’s a Tijuana that was built quickly, and because of that rapid growth, has low-quality piping, and those pipes are causing huge problems. You can’t see it from above, so no one knows what’s going on. But below cities, there’s an explanation for everything you see above. So the city needs to be renovated from below. They are doing that. It’s not new, but it takes years and is expensive.
Another issue is trash collection. There are low-income neighborhoods without trash collection. That means you’re leaving mounds of trash everywhere, and sooner or later that trash is going to end up in the canal.
Finally, I’ve never seen a real campaign in Mexico to help people understand the importance of the Tijuana River estuary. As long as there isn’t awareness among our authorities and among tijuanenses about the significance of the river and its estuary in environmental terms, and the importance of the flora and fauna, people won’t understand that they shouldn’t throw trash into the canal.
Sometimes people want to say, “Pinches gringos! Throw all the trash at them! Viva México!” But that doesn’t solve anything. The estuary is part of us, since everything nonhuman is part of us. The fact that there are animals in the estuary on the U.S. side is good for the Mexican side. The problem isn’t Trump. It isn’t any Mexican president. The problem is trash, the problem is taking care of the natural world, and it’s about creating the conditions for a rich flora and fauna that make us love the natural world.
This interview has been translated and edited for length and clarity.
Great interview with Marco Samaniego! I could not agree more with his analysis. The only thing I would add is to note the sleight of hand at EPA which first held back Border Water Infrastructure funds and then with the new agreement released them. Typical Trump—create the problem, then offer a solution. That is only a slight exaggeration. Lee Zeldin and his crew are busily gutting the La Paz Agreement and the Good Neighbor Board which doesn’t bode well for future cooperation on binational sanitation issues. For what it is worth, Steve Mumme