The Coyote's Bicycle by Kimball Taylor Page A

between the United States and Mexico with fascination, the heart surgeon’s wife found an unlikely calling in documenting life along the gritty frontier through photographs. The terrain of her milieu included the mountainous Otay section, the dense urban center at San Ysidro, and finally the coastal bluffs, and the beach. There was a lot of driving, walking, and hiking involved. Just to get to the border-adjacent state park she visited every weekend required a mile-and-a-half trek through scrub and sand. When the Department of Homeland Security began construction of the new sea fence extending into the Pacific, access to the public Americanbeach was closed. So every day Fernandez drove into Tijuana, and through town to Playas de Tijuana, where she could walk up and lay a hand on the very same construction.
    By the time I met Fernandez, she’d been photographing various aspects of the boundary for a dozen years. She said, “Anything that touches the wall, I want to document.” There was everyday graffiti as well as professional artwork: sculptures made of coffins and white crosses representing the numbers of fallen migrants. The Playas portion was a favored canvas. One artist had simply painted the metal pylons of the fence the same blue as the San Diego sky. Viewed at a distance from the Mexican side, there appeared to be no fence at all.
    For the purposes of Fernandez’s work, however, the detritus of the clandestine traffic—and the increasing fortifications to prevent it—were even more potent symbols.
    â€œI’ve been able to see a lot of things, watching this living, growing entity. And I have this need to keep in touch with [the wall] all of the time,” Fernandez explained. “It’s as with any relationship—there is a certain point when you think you understand all there is to know about that person. But that point is just the beginning. The relationship continues. And that’s how it is with me and the wall, because the wall just grows and grows.”
    Certainly, it was true that Fernandez caught the border complex at what she called “a special moment.” In her career, the steel and concrete that constituted the fortifications changed textures and sometimes crumbled. There were barnacles and mussels attached to it at the ocean. She’d found a hole in a thin and rusting steel section and pulled crumbling pieces away so she could stick her camera through and make a photo. But mostly, through the efforts of government contractors with their heavy equipment, the wall only became taller and wider and thicker.
    Recently, she’d passed through two checkpoints to get to the formerly open area at Friendship Park, dedicated by Pat Nixon in 1971in a gesture of national kinship. The park is centered around the border monument set in place in 1851. This area was where Fernandez had made some of her most successful images—including photos of Mexican Americans picnicking at the beach fence with their Mexican relatives, or lovers, sitting on the other side. One of them depicts a man seated under a colored umbrella laughing so hard he’s brought his hands to his ears to stop the words he’s hearing. On the opposite side of the steel pylons, a woman’s head is upraised and howling too. Whatever was said struck the family as so hilarious, the pylons of the wall virtually disappeared. Yet in 2012, as Fernandez was ushered through a new eighteen-foot-tall steel gate that had been erected around Pat Nixon’s park, a Mexican looking through the fence said to her, “Hey, who do you think is more free? You in America, or me over here? You are being guarded by men with guns. I just walked over from the taco cart.”
    As a kind of resident artist of the boundary, Fernandez has hosted a number of delegations from other parts of the United States and abroad. A group of German filmmakers came to document the border wall, and Fernandez offered them a