COLUMN: Call It The River Trump

The Endangered, Border-Crossing Tijuana River Needs Transnational Attention. A New Name Would Help.

This column is co-published with Zócalo Public Square. Photo credit: View from north side of the mouth of the Tijuana River at the Pacific. Via Flickr by Rickbramhall CC BY-SA 4.0

“It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.” — Machiavelli

The Tijuana River stinks. So, what could be more fitting than renaming it in honor of Donald Trump?

Turning the sewage-filled Tijuana into the River Trump would be far more than commentary on a corrupt and lawless American dictator. It would be the best way for California and Mexico to win necessary attention for a critically endangered waterway.

It also would swipe a page from the playbook of Trump, who loves renaming things. He’s declared the Gulf of Mexico to be the Gulf of America (sparking anger and litigation from our southern neighbors). He is about to turn the Persian Gulf into the Arabian Gulf (who cares if doing so might increase the risk of war with Iran?). And since Trump doesn’t ask permission before renaming, California and Mexico would be justified in giving the Tijuana a new moniker without U.S. government sign-off.

Of course, the Tijuana needs much more than a name. The river flows for 120 miles— through Baja California, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border into San Diego County, and running through Southern California’s largest natural coastland wetland (and one of its last salt marshes) before ending in the Pacific Ocean, near a famous surf break called “the Sloughs.”

The Tijuana and its estuary should be a natural treasure, but the river is so polluted that the beaches and waters near its mouth are currently closed, to protect people and other species from contact with the water. For more than 100 years, trash, toxic materials, and sewage from communities and their failing treatment plants on both sides of the border have fouled the river.

Neither the U.S. nor Mexico has built or maintained treatment facilities with the capacity to clean the Tijuana’s water, especially when it rains. Tens of thousands of people have been sickened by the pollution, which also sullies the air when the water aerosolizes as sea spray.

The pollution exceeds legal standards in the U.S., Mexico, and California—but the violations haven’t yet inspired a comprehensive cleanup. Community groups have devised solutions, but have struggled to find funding. Indeed, a big reason why the Tijuana remains dirty is that it crosses too many jurisdictions—nations, states, localities, and the Kumeyaay Nation—which means no single government is responsible for it.

The Biden and Newsom administrations took modest steps and added funding to encourage a clean-up. In recent weeks, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin visited the river and promised to tackle the project, too. But there is little reason to believe this promise is made in good faith. The EPA has reduced its staff and authority so aggressively that it’s likely the agency no longer has the capacity to help clean up the river.

What the EPA pledge does present is an opening to rename the river, draw attention to it, and make Trump responsible for its condition.

Maybe the occupier of the White House will take the bait. Trump can’t resist talking about the border, and this is a cross-border river. He loves to blast away at America’s very nice neighbors, and addressing the Tijuana is an opportunity to take shots at Mexico. Trump loves to declare emergencies—and a border emergency here would be an actual crisis, unlike his bogus imaginings of non-existent immigrant “invaders” crossing into the U.S.

There are risks to drawing Trump into the Tijuana’s problems. When he has taken previous interest in California waterways, he’s done dangerous and irresponsible things, like emptying water out of a dam at a speed that threatened lives. It’s not hard to imagine Trump ordering a pointless dam to block the Tijuana River at the border, too.

Also, naming anything in California or Mexico for Trump, no matter how pointed the intended insult, could trigger a backlash from Trump critics and others on the left. Something like that happened in 2008 after San Francisco activists proposed a ballot measure to rename a city sewage treatment plant after George W. Bush. The stunt was meant to embarass Bush, but San Francisco’s progressive electorate rejected the idea overwhelmingly. Even lending Bush’s name to a building full of crap was too high an honor for that president, apparently.

Ultimately, the real-world risks posed by the polluted river are far greater than the downsides of any resulting political drama. “An entire generation of children is growing up in South San Diego County having only experienced polluted beaches,” Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre wrote Biden last year.

That missive didn’t produce much action. And Mexico’s previous president (Andrés Manuel López Obrador) and current president (Claudia Sheinbaum) haven’t done nearly enough either. One could argue for adding their names to the rechristened river as well.

If the Tijuana is ever going to get the urgent clean-up it needs, the best bet, right now, is to make the river Trump’s namesake, and thus his problem.

Photo credit; via Wikimedia Commons, CC 3.0