{"id":289,"date":"2023-09-28T14:24:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-28T14:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.ryanfatica.com\/?p=289"},"modified":"2024-07-08T14:28:02","modified_gmt":"2024-07-08T14:28:02","slug":"queer-migrants-find-shelter-and-community-in-tijuana-collective-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.ryanfatica.com\/?p=289","title":{"rendered":"Queer Migrants Find Shelter and Community in Tijuana Collective House"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>By Ryan Fatica<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tijuana, Mexico \u2014 As the Biden administration continues in Trump\u2019s footsteps \u2014 <a href=\"https:\/\/unicornriot.ninja\/2023\/tijuana-groups-protest-border-wall-construction-at-friendship-park\/\">constructing a 30-foot-tall border wall<\/a> along the Tijuana\/San Diego border and imposing new barriers to seeking asylum in the United States \u2014 many activists in Tijuana have continued the quiet, daily work of welcoming migrants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One such group is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.casadeluz.com\/\">Casa de Luz<\/a>, 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.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>\u201cCasa de Luz is a collective house built for and by the LGBT community,\u201d<\/strong> Areli Palomo, co-founder of Casa de Luz, told Unicorn Riot. <strong>\u201cWe receive here asylum seekers and migrants in transit that want to get to the US. It\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-vimeo wp-block-embed-vimeo wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Queer Migrants Find Shelter and Community in Tijuana Collective House\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/868880477?dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Casa de Luz began in 2018, as the migrant caravan traveling north from Chiapas, Mexico, landed, in part, in Tijuana. Irving Mondrag\u00f3n, one of the house\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>\u201cIt was a dark place. It was hard times,\u201d<\/strong> said Palomo. <strong>\u201cIt was very hard at the beginning.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>\u201cIt was a hard place to live in but it was somewhere that people could be in and stay.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 pi\u00f1atas made by the migrants themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/unicornriot.ninja\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/CasaDeLuz-emoji-decor-1200x675.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-90062\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/unicornriot.ninja\/2023\/queer-migrants-find-shelter-and-community-in-tijuana-collective-house\/\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Ryan Fatica Tijuana, Mexico \u2014 As the Biden administration continues in Trump\u2019s footsteps \u2014 constructing a 30-foot-tall border wall along the Tijuana\/San Diego border and imposing new barriers to seeking asylum in the United States \u2014 many activists in Tijuana have continued the quiet, daily work of welcoming migrants. One such group is Casa [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.ryanfatica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.ryanfatica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.ryanfatica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.ryanfatica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.ryanfatica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=289"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/staging.ryanfatica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":293,"href":"https:\/\/staging.ryanfatica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions\/293"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.ryanfatica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.ryanfatica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.ryanfatica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.ryanfatica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}