By Ryan Fatica
Tijuana, Mexico — As the Biden administration continues in Trump’s footsteps — constructing a 30-foot-tall border wall along the Tijuana/San Diego border and imposing new barriers to seeking asylum in the United States — many activists in Tijuana have continued the quiet, daily work of welcoming migrants.
One such group is Casa de Luz, which runs a collective house located just a few hundred meters from the Pacific Ocean. Casa de Luz houses migrants and asylum seekers who are LGBTQIA+ or part of other marginalized communities.
“Casa de Luz is a collective house built for and by the LGBT community,” Areli Palomo, co-founder of Casa de Luz, told Unicorn Riot. “We receive here asylum seekers and migrants in transit that want to get to the US. It’s mostly for LGBT community but we do accept women with children, or men with special cases that we consider and then we just let them in.”
As of June 2023, there were 67 people living at Casa de Luz, including children. Many of the migrants come from Central America as well as Chechnya, Columbia, Russia and Haiti. In addition to individual migrants, the house also welcomes diverse families.
The house provides residents with food and clothing and other necessities as well workshops on navigating the U.S. asylum process. The house also offers meditation workshops once a week.
Casa de Luz began in 2018, as the migrant caravan traveling north from Chiapas, Mexico, landed, in part, in Tijuana. Irving Mondragón, one of the house’s founders, moved to Tijuana to support the caravan and squatted an abandoned building in Playas de Tijuana, where the western tip of the city meets the Pacific.
“It was a dark place. It was hard times,” said Palomo. “It was very hard at the beginning.”
After that, the house rented an abandoned gym and then an abandoned discotheque. Palomo said migrants just pitched tents inside the large, open space, using tents as bedrooms.
“It was a hard place to live in but it was somewhere that people could be in and stay.”
Eventually, Casa de Luz San Diego, a sister organization that raises money in the United States, gave the group a beautiful, multi-story house to use as its base of operations. The house is still in Playas de Tijuana, and the group has transformed the building with colorful decorations, murals and piñatas made by the migrants themselves.
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