By Donald H. Harrison
IMPERIAL BEACH, California – Serge Dedina is a 6’4 surfer, a PhD in geography, a descendant on his Jewish father’s side of Holocaust survivors, a renowned coastal conservationist, and, since December 2014, mayor of the small city of Imperial Beach.
There were so many facets of his life to talk about that an interview lasting nearly an hour and a half was unable to cover all of it. At the Seacoast Avenue offices of Wildcoast, the ocean ecology conservation group which he heads, Dedina related such diverse topics as his grandmother’s courage in saving her Jewish family from the Nazis; his own efforts to protect coastal environments; his successful campaign to become Imperial Beach’s mayor; and some of his priorities now that he is in office.
His grandmother Lotti had lived through pogroms in Eastern Europe and moved her family to France in 1933. But as Hitler gained and then consolidated his power next door in Germany, she recognized the coming danger. Dressed as a man, she swooped into Austria after the Anschluss and rescued her nephew, the future writer and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall, and his parents Leo and Anna, bringing them with her to France. A year later, she traveled on a tourist visa with her own sons, Michel and Roland, to the United States, who all overstayed their visas. Eventually, they had to leave the country for a stay in Canada before they were accepted back in the United States, according to Dedina.
“My mom [Jacqueline Alexandria Fournier Dedina] wasn’t Jewish, but she was in the blitz in London, where they met,” Dedina told me. “Those histories of my parents played an important part in my life, never forgetting, always being cognizant of the fact that you have to be very aware that there really are people who are committed to not liking diversity, and folks who are really anti-Semitic. This is something I always will be cognizant of.”
Although he is not Jewish by halacha, the agnostic Dedina and his wife Emily Young raised their sons, Israel and Daniel, as secular Jews. One son already has traveled to Israel on the Birthright program; the other is scheduled to do so soon. Tikkun Olam, although not identified as such, was a major theme in the family household: “We don’t know how to make money in our family; it is just our commitment to social service and justice that is really important,” he said. “Giving back and understanding that we have a larger role is really important.” Dedina’s father had authored two novels and taught documentary film making at San Diego State University; his mother, was an attorney and public defender.
Born in Los Angeles in 1964, Dedina moved with parents and younger brother Nick to Imperial Beach in 1971. On their very first day in the coastal city, they found themselves exploring the Tijuana Estuary on the U.S.-Mexico border. “We fell in love with it,” Years later, when Mayor Brian Bilbray [who later was elected as a Republican to Congress] proposed building a yacht marina at the Tijuana Estuary, Dedina got his first taste of city politics, working with his parents to successfully oppose the idea.
As a child, Dedina traveled with his family in a van through Mexico and Central America. “It was a transformative experience being in these little villages in Guatemala and Mexico with my little brother Nicky. We were a shaggy, Bohemian family,” recalled Dedina. As a result of that trip and others to follow, Dedina learned to speak Spanish, an asset in Imperial Beach where approximately half of the 28,000 residents are Hispanic.
Participating as a youth in a grassroots campaign to preserve the estuary for animal and plant life, rather than for a proposed marina for yachts, set the course of Dedina’s career. He went to UC San Diego for his bachelor’s degree in political science; the University of Wisconsin at Madison for a master’s in geography, and the University of Texas at Austin for his doctorate.
While studying for his doctorate, Dedina worked for the U.S.-based Nature Conservancy in its Baja California-Gulf of California division. Living on the Baja Peninsula, he worked in programs helping to protect such sanctuaries as Loreto Bay National Park, Isla Espiritu Santo wildlife refuge, and Cabo Pulma Marine Preserve, “which is now considered a national model for marine conservation.”
The Cabo Pulma project “involved building the capacity of non-profit groups and getting support for park rangers, getting trucks and boats, and doing all the things that you need to do to help the functioning of national parks in a developing country,” Dedina said.
“I was lucky enough to work in some of the most beautiful places on the planet with really charismatic, amazing people… who have very little and will do anything to improve their communities and, in this case, the environment.”
After his tour in Baja was completed, the Dedinas moved briefly to Tucson where he taught at the University of Arizona and worked in local conservancy programs. But he missed the beaches on which he had surfed since he was a pre-teen, and decided “it was probably better to do ocean conservation from the beach rather than from Arizona.”
Not only nostalgia for the ocean drew him back to Imperial Beach in 2000. “It still was the most affordable place on the coast,” he said. He purchased a home near the beach for $220,000, “which back then was still considered an awful lot of money.”
He and Wallace J. Nichols, who was a sea turtle biologist, co-founded Wildcoast with the goal “to save marine life and their eco-systems.” At first, they concentrated on Baja California, where both had extensive experience. “Our first big work was stopping the slaughter of sea turtles,” he said. Nichols had been working along the Gulf of California, while Dedina had been focusing on the gray whales that migrate from Alaska to the lagoons of the Baja Peninsula.
“Both of us at the same time were discovering this illegal trade in sea turtles that was peninsula wide and even crossing the border,” Dedina recounted. People hunted the docile creatures for their meat, “resulting in the near extinction of the turtles.” There was prestige to serving turtle meat to visiting guests in Mexico; it was considered a very healthy food, yet “it turns out it is very high in cholesterol.” The prestige of the dish had an impact on the sea turtle population. “We estimate 10,000 were being eaten each year. So, we had a major campaign and Fay Crevoshay (a bilingual member of the San Diego Jewish community who serves as Wildcoast’s Communications and Policy Director) had a large part in it.”
Some Catholics who would give up eating meat during Lent were eating turtles under the mistaken impression that they were fish, not meat. “We did a whole campaign around the Pope, and priests, etcetera, saying that that it was ‘not kosher’ to eat sea turtles for religious reasons. We had rock stars, soccer stars, and all kinds of things to get people off eating turtles, and we turned people’s love for eating sea turtles into love for saving them.” Today, the sea turtle population has recovered. “I was on a beach one morning where 10,000 turtles were laying eggs, so that was a really great testament to the work we did.”
However, people still were eating the eggs of sea turtles because they were believed to increase potency in male humans. “We did a whole campaign around sex and sea turtles, and that was a fun campaign. We used humor and celebrity. We got beautiful women to model in a campaign in which they said, “my man doesn’t need to eat sea turtles” and the campaign went viral in Mexico. Although some feminist groups complained that the advertising was demeaning to women, the appeal to Mexican men’s macho did the trick. Now the turtles and their eggs are much safer.
Although that was perhaps the most widely publicized campaign, Wildcoast’s real work “is saving these world-class coastal and ocean ecosystems—such as the gray whale berthing lagoons and the mangroves.” The work extended northward from the Baja California peninsula to the U.S. State of California, where “we are doing the same things as we do in Mexico, really helping to develop and manage those ocean protected areas and parks, and working with communities to protect them.”
Not surprisingly, after Wildcoast opened its offices in Imperial Beach, Dedina began re-focusing on the city and environs he had loved since he was a boy.
“The way we work at Wilcoast is community driven,” he said. “We have an ethic about working with and for communities and getting people engaged in nature conservation.” In Imperial Beach, he said, he became “despondent” over what he perceived as the city going in the opposite direction seemingly ignoring the wishes of the community.
At one point, he said, the city proposed as a way of earning revenue to privatize the operation of the Little League fields, “which had been managed by four generations of Imperial beach families. … They wanted to charge kids to use the Skate Park, which my wife and I had raised money from Tony Hawk to help develop…. I was increasingly concerned that the city was turning on the community to raise revenue, and that the people felt really disrespected by the city. I realized that it was important to take back the city for the community and to create a city and community where people respected each other and collaborated.”
So in 2014, he decided to launch a grass-roots, door-knocking campaign for mayor, opposing two-term incumbent Jim Janney. It was hardly a runaway election. Dedina, in fact, won only by 43 votes, garnering 2,200 or 50.33 percent versus Janney’s 2,157 votes or 49.35 percent. Though no landslide, it was enough to get Dedina into the office.
Besides being 50 percent Hispanic, another 10 percent of the city’s population includes African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Native-Americans, the mayor said. The city has a 25 percent poverty rate, “so it is a very different community than the small [and wealthy] beach towns of north county. There are some unique challenges with that. Seventy-one percent of our residents are renters. When I came on the scene we had entire neighborhoods that didn’t have paved alleys. They had difficulties to wheel their wheelchairs down. There were neighborhoods without sidewalks. We had areas, mostly where low income families lived, where there weren’t crosswalks or safe streets. We didn’t have a major grocery store.
“I ran as someone who was going to get investment and basic infrastructure into our community, and create a culture of respect at City Hall. Three years later I can say that we have done that. We have accomplished a lot in that time frame.”
I mentioned that outsiders perhaps know Imperial Beach for two things: Its annual sandcastle competition and the periodic ecological disasters caused by sewage from Tijuana flowing through the estuary and onto the beaches and into the ocean. I asked him to brief me about both.
The two-day sandcastle competition, begun in 1982, has morphed into Imperial Beach’s “Sun and Sea Festival,” which, though smaller, is broadened in appeal. There are athletic events like an Iron Man competition, arts events, and, on the second day, a music festival, said Dedina.
He responded that tourism is an important part of the city’s program. “We are a city that until quite recently didn’t have a major hotel,” he said. “We built the Pier South Hotel with the redevelopment funding inaugurated when I first got elected, and we have built one hotel since then, and probably have two more hotels coming. What tourism means is those revenues from the transit occupancy tax really improve the quality of life for working-class families. It allows us to invest back into infrastructure and hopefully build a new senior center, a new swimming pool, and do things to improve the quality of life of our residents.
“In this country we should make sure that we do the most for those who have the least,” he added. “That’s really important to me and it is exciting that is what we are doing in Imperial Beach.”
He said that tourists who come to his city “love our grassroots, small town vibe—something that pretty much has disappeared from southern California. It is really a slow, friendly town that is surrounded by beautiful open space. People come here and they walk in the estuary, ride their bikes along the Bayshore Bikeway, and we have beautiful beach front. You can walk all the way to Mexico when the tides are right. So when conditions are right and the water isn’t polluted and things are great, it is really a nice place to come to.”
He pointed out that Imperial Beach is largely surrounded by open space, which “makes us a little bit like an island. … People who have come back recently have noticed a really profound transformation that the city has undergone, and how the infrastructure has been improved. We have a lot more restaurants, but we still manage to retain that small-town vibe. We have really invested in eliminating blight, so we have turned empty lots into little parks. We’re trying to open up our community and crack down on absentee landlords.”
At the bay front, “We just built something called the Bikeway Village. It is a redevelopment project. We put in a bike store and a coffee shop – a really nice building, understated, pulled back from the Bay.”
Concerning the sewage overflow, the mayor said “the mythology is that it is a wet-weather problem, but Tijuana is expanding so much and its sewage system is collapsing so much, it has become a year-round problem, whether the weather is wet or dry. We have an increasing number of spills into the Tijuana River and into the canyons along the border, a whole series of spills that happen all the time.”
The sewage is filled with toxins, which have caused illness to people working along the border, including members of the Border Patrol, whose union has become an ally in the drive to persuade the federal government to allocate funds and talent to help fix the problem on both sides of the border.
“Imperial Beach got the County of San Diego, the City of San Diego, National City, and Chula Vista to join it in filing notice of intent to sue the federal government over its inaction on this problem,” Dedina said. “I have been working non-stop with Mexico as well to try to get investments into their sewage system.”
On the U.S. side of the border, he said, capture basins are needed to catch the sewage and divert it from the river into already existing U.S. sewers. He said the area’s five members of the House of Representatives—Democrats Scott Peters, Juan Vargas and Susan Davis, and Republicans Darrell Issa and Duncan Hunter—along with U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) have been supportive of the effort to have the federal government take a more proactive role.
“We thought we would have a budget bill for EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] projects on both sides of the border, but that fell apart and Trump’s rhetoric on Mexico has been deadly for this issue – it has not helped at all,” the mayor said.
If money can be found, the goal would be to improve the sewer system on the Mexican side of the border, and capture infrastructure on the American side, said Dedina. “That’s what we’re asking for in our lawsuit.”
We walked from his office across the street to the Imperial Beach pier to look over a relatively small weekday beach crowd and to gaze upon the waters he regularly surfs. En route, we saw a number of teens riding bicycles, causing Dedina to smile broadly. “We came up with bike sharing and within two months we have had 15,000 rides, and 43 percent of them are to take bikes to transit,” he said. “We’ve flipped bike sharing from something that was considered for tourists to something for low-income residents who are going from their apartments to bus stops, or taking their bikes to trolley stops. School kids are riding them to school.”
As mayor of Imperial Beach, Dedina sits on the board of the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG). He heads the committee that deals with borders – not only the Mexican border, but those with the surrounding counties – Imperial County, Riverside County, and Orange County—as well as those with 18 Native American reservations inside San Diego County.
On the day following our interview, he attended a meeting across the border of Tijuana Innovodora, a privately funded group headed by Jose “Pepe” Galicot, that serves as a cheerleader for grassroots community improvement projects.
“We are similar,” Dedina said about Galicot. “He is a cheerleader for doing the right things, using arts, culture and community spirit, to reinvigorate his city. He helped bring things back there, and that played a role in what we are doing in Imperial Beach.
“Cities can be places that can help people thrive,” said the mayor. “You have to flip the idea of government on its head and make sure that government is empowering residents to actually improve their lives. Especially in low-income communities, it is really important to do that. It takes a lot of work to serve the people who need help the most rather than those who need help the least.”
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com