In Tijuana, a street studio attracts migrants and locals
Migrants on the caravan, commuters, and visitors form a backdrop to the world’s busiest land border crossing.
Every day nearly 100,000 people—commuters, students, visitors—legally cross from Tijuana to San Diego, California, at the San Ysidro border. Webster built her first studio in Tijuana near a café where new arrivals often stop for legal advice and a free lunch. She set up a half dozen more in the city: at a migrant shelter, on the beach where the border fence ends, in the Undocumented Café near the binational Friendship Park.
Passersby who asked what she was doing often sat for a portrait. Lourdes Santiago González posed with her daughter, Brenda. She’d arrived decades earlier with her family to cross the border but after multiple failed attempts had stayed in Tijuana. At each set, lines of people waited: a former
