By Linda Christensen

"The border" is not simply a wall, nor just a site for foreign investment. It's where people live. In "Reading Chilpancingo," English teacher Linda Christensen describes a visit to the Chilpancingo colonia in Tijuana and how she uses this experience to craft critical reading activities for her students. — the editors

When I met Lourdes Lujan and saw her contaminated river, I knew I had to teach about Chilpancingo, a Tijuana neighborhood where corporations' toxic presence and women's organizing against the monster in their backyards make for David and Goliath teaching lessons.

When our Rethinking Schools-Global Exchange tour first entered Colonia Chilpancingo and descended downhill to where the waste from hilltop factories bubbled into Río Alamar, the stench of burning rubber and untreated garbage filled the air. Lourdes Lujan, local activist, walked down from her home perched above the river. "When I was growing up, I played and fished in this river," she said. "My family had picnics at that park." She pointed to a sandy, trash-filled triangle at the edge of the river filled with discarded tires, pop cans, plastic bottles, baby diapers, and a lone picnic table. Her arms are pocked with rashes.

"Now, when the stream starts to flow, and it isn't even the rainy season, the kids play in the puddles. You know how kids are. They play in the water, and get blisters all over their feet."

Lourdes Lujan is part of a collective that works with women in their local communities and across the U.S. border to battle the giant corporations and their governments that have made her home a nightmare. But the horror story unleashed by Metales y Derivados, a U.S.-owned battery recycling company whose owner abandoned thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals that contaminated Colonia Chilpancingo, didn't stop with rashes and blisters. Lourdes described children born without brainstems, children whose parents slept with them at night, fearful they would drown in their own blood from spontaneous nose bleeds, maquila workers who suffered miscarriages and had babies with birth defects, and neighbors with abnormally high rates of cancer. She pointed to the buildings on the ridge above Chilpancingo and explained how Santa Ana winds blow contaminated waste down into her village, how the rains sluice down the side of the mesa and pool in the grade school at the bottom of the hill.