I
tijuana is the culo of la bahia de san diego. imagine if they put a border wall on 8 mile road. between new orleans and jefferson parish. between baltimore city and baltimore county. i am sitting in an idling car with an art school professor and his brother, both of whom i met through couchsurfing, in the tiny parking lot of el yogurt place, a coffee shop, placed in between tijuana’s enormous old bullring, now mostly used for concerts, and a small wall looking into a cliff with a small sign reading “yoga lessons.” ahead is the border, the unflatteringly industrial wall dividing playas de tijuana, tijuana, baja california, from imperial beach, san diego, california, and crosses, and murals: one reads, “forgive U.S! for our sins.”
II
tijuana is best experienced in the back of a slightly-worn but nevertheless respectably new used automobile. tijuana, like its true siblings, los angeles and las vegas, is the experience of watching the panoply of colors, some faded, some bright, melt into the streets. from graffiti and informal housing to rows of tourist bars to local art galleries to compact, blink-and-miss residential neighborhoods with tiny pedestrian isles and impossible intersections, to the jarringly strange series of small cliffs and valleys that dot the city’s landscape, tijuana is wealthier than you, poorer than you, every second, every minute, with flying colors, incomprehensibly mutable, always building, always destroying, a city of endless entropic work-and-party-ritual.
III
the man i am staying with lives in a crisply designed, painting-covered, compact multi-level apartment home facing the pacific ocean in playas, home to large numbers of american and asian expats mingling with what, strangely enough, feels like the mexican version of venice beach. he has much to say about the american media’s interpretation of the supposed dangers of baja california. the americans try to keep people out to stop them from reading foreign media, he says. that tijuana is safer, statistically, than new orleans, st. louis, detroit, baltimore. the united states economy exports misery, he says. it is a dying country. at the intersection of two deaths, there is life.
III
the americans are all gone. they stopped coming when the narcos showed up. avenida revolucion, where the tourists used to go, is slowly being gentrified by young mexican street artists. in place of the drunken, fratty tourists are mexican migrants, poor and comfortably middle-class, as well as expats, mostly san diegans who can’t afford astonishingly high real estate prices and seek the near-bottomless (and growing) good life manifested in blossoming art and food scenes. some people who move to playas, my host informs me, are people who first emigrated to the united states, then, as he puts it, “had enough.” $1,000 a month property blocks away from the ocean in a relatively secure neighborhood wins others over.
IV
before parting ways, my host takes me to CECUT, tijuana’s flagship cultural center and art museum. aside from frida kahlo-inspired contemporary art, the focus is on colonization: the spanish colonial history of tijuana, the mexican-american war and the devastating effects on mexico. the border exhibit, ironically, features an old television tuned to an endless loop of U.S. minuteman project volunteers talking about the immigrant menace and the need to defend the border. irony kills. i buy a large, glossy book on the san diego/tijuana rave scene and we pile in the car to say goodbyes.
V
i wait over an hour to cross the border on sunday morning, along with an almost completely latino crowd. i strike up a conversation with one young, fairly light-skinned, skinny boy who appears to be in his late teens. is the line usually like this? depends. do you live in tijuana? sometimes, but i go to school in san diego. the occasional vendor passes me by, trying to sell me chewing gum for a peso. i buy a stack of gorditas from an elderly woman at the gate and end up next in line to an american in his early twenties, who tells me about applying for community college in san diego and looking for cheap housing in the tourist district, near the red light zone. tijuana is a dangerous place for us, he concludes his story. the wiriness of his voice is interrupted by an occasional cough. unlike my experiences crossing back from canada, i am not looked at apprehensively or asked questions haughtily by anyone at customs. the officer laughs at my high school haircut and wishes me a good day.
VI
tijuana is starbucks and huitlacoche. tijuana is musica nortena on MTV. tijuana is a long drive in a small place, the protest of recycled culture, southern california’s filthy id dreaming of latin america, latin america’s prideful, rapidly industrializing, idealistic exhaustion hoping for that unattainable dream of southern california. even tijuana knows the best thing to do is to laugh at it all and have a few beers and pray, time and time again, that san diego’s music can transform, that san diego’s exhaust won’t kill.
