The Museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Border Wall Preservation Project
Stories & Realities of the U.S.-Mexico Border
Friendship Park/El Parque de la Amistad is a binational park located along the United States-México border in the trinational region of San Diego, Tijuana, and the Kumeyaay Nation.
Following the federal government’s decision to replace the existing border wall at Friendship Park, the Museum collaborated with the nonprofit organization, Friends of Friendship Park, to preserve 21 sections of the former border wall as items of great cultural, historic, and artistic significance to our trinational region.
The Museum is currently holding these sections of the border wall that once stood at Friendship Park–each of which is 18 feet high, 8 feet wide, and weighs approximately 4,300 pounds. Murals, messages, and meaningful moments of human connection are forever captured on these sections of the border wall, which also divides Kumeyaay communities who have lived in this region for millennia.
During the spring of 2024, the project entered a year-long community engagement phase. This process is driven by a Community Advisory Council, which includes community members, activists, and artists from both sides of the border. The council will make several key decisions about the redistribution of these cultural resources back into our larger region.
More information about the Border Wall Preservation Project will be announced as decisions are made by the Community Advisory Council.
To stay up to date on this project, sign up for the Museum’s newsletter and follow Us on social media.
Friends of Friendship Park
Friendship Park / El Parque de la Amistad is a public park and cross-border meeting place at the western end of the U.S.-México border, on Kumeyaay/Kumiai land. At Friendship Park, people from both sides of the border have come together to nurture the land, visit with friends and family separated by deportation, and celebrate the culture and heritage of la frontera.
The Friends of Friendship Park are the custodians of this space, champions of its enduring message of “amistad across borders,” and advocates for its future as International Friendship Park, modeled after the many such parks on the U.S.-Canada border.
Currently, Friendship Park on the U.S. side of the border is closed to the public. Customs & Border Patrol agents manage public access to the U.S. side of Friendship Park and Border Field State Park.
Learn more about Friendship Park, and follow Friends of Friendship Park on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
Friendship Park is a contested place, where competing narratives are played out continually on the ground. The U.S. federal government has asserted the ideologies of colonialism and conquest on the border, inscribing this narrative on the landscape in the form of monuments, fences, and walls.
However, peoples of the U.S.-México border region have claimed Friendship Park as a site of peaceful, fruitful, cross-cultural encounter — a place of connection and community.
In 2006, the U.S. federal government took land by eminent domain from the State of California, and, after waiving dozens of laws intended to protect public spaces like this one, constructed an elaborate system of walls across the face of Friendship Park.
While Friendship Park remains fully open, accessible, and joyously well-utilized in México, Border Patrol officials have progressively restricted public access to the U.S. side of Friendship Park in recent years. In February 2020, they closed the Park and have made no commitment to its reopening.
Rooted in lived experience, the Friends of Friendship Park promote and facilitate the use of Friendship Park by people on both sides of the border.
Learn More
Activists and Museum of Us come together to save historic border wall murals
March 21, 2024 | KPBS
“They don’t belong to us, they belong to the community."
– Dr. Micah Parzen
Chief Executive Officer
Major project support is provided by the Prebys Foundation.
The Museum of Us recognizes that it sits on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Kumeyaay Nation. The Museum extends its respect and gratitude to the Kumeyaay peoples who have lived here for millennia.
The Museum is open daily, Monday through Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
1350 El Prado, San Diego, CA 92101
