Margarita Diaz has been fighting Tijuana’s sewage problem for 30 years in her home country, but the battle extends all the way to Coronado.
Diaz since 2007 has been the general director of Proyecto Fronterizo de Educación Ambiental (PFEA) ,an organization that raises awareness over Tijuana River contamination and infrastructure issues.
The organization works to motivate Tijuana residents to volunteer at beach cleanups, and it teaches them about composting.
Three key programs
Founded in 1991, PFEA currently oversees three projects in Tijuana.
One includes converting a garbage dump, which resulted from a landslide, into a community park and Colonia Anexa Miramar community members learn the process of composting.
The second is Tijuana Waterkeeper whose water quality analysis lab has monitored the coastal environmental health of Baja California since 2015. The water quality results are published on theswimguide.org.
The third is Restaurante Amigo del Mar, specifically created for restaurants to participate and learn to reduce or eliminate the use of single-use plastics.
Diaz also is a representative of Civil Society in the Tijuana Clean Beaches Committee, coordinator of the management program of the Tijuana Clean Beaches Committee, and member of the Plastic Pollution Coalition. Apart from these roles, she’s the mother of two young adults.
Binational problem
In late January, Diaz hosted members of Coronado News staff for a tour in Tijuana and showed how sewage that spills into the Tijuana River is a binational problem.
Standing in front of the 24-hour Easy Park Lot near the San Ysidro-Mexico border entrance into Tijuana, Diaz stands at about 5-foot-2 with a full smile.
Curly, short hair falls slightly above the left side of her forehead, where black and white strands meet the rims of small eyeglasses that sit on her nose. She is excited to share that she stood on these same streets in the beginning of her career.
Diaz remembers the uncertainty, as a recent college graduate, of standing on the opposite side of the roundabout in the middle of where Avenida de la Amistad and Avenida Frontera intersect.
She had decided to move from Mexico City to San Diego after completing her studies with a senior thesis, the first project in Universidad La Salle México, about green architecture in 1991.
Looking across the street at the hovering building where she waited before crossing to the United States, she said that her time in the states was short-lived, as she eventually moved to Tijuana after two years living in Chula Vista.
Early years in Acapulco
In Tijuana, Diaz settled next door to the founder of Proyecto Fronterizo de Educación Ambiental, the NGO she has been at since joining in 1993.
Growing up at the beaches and fishing in Acapulco, Margarita said she learned the importance of water and nature.
She completed her high school and architecture degree studies in Mexico City, where she was born.
Life in Acapulco contrasted the strikingly tightness of the city she experienced.
“When I moved back to Mexico, I hated it,” said Diaz, who said she always knew she would return to the coast.
“I remember going to my balcony and seeing buildings and seeing the sun going down in between the buildings, and I was like oh my God, I don’t want to be here,” she said.
“I promised myself when I graduate, I am going to the beach, what beach I don’t know, but I’m leaving…I don’t like the city.”
