The Tijuana Spectator: Up and Coming
Rocca, Francis X.
"The Tijuana Spectator: Up and Coming" Up and Coming Our man in Tijuana finds the fabled border town...
...In the mirrored lobby of the main building, leopards blink at me from behind smeared Plexiglas...
...Autefi*can Spe&ator Visit the TAS home page: HTTP://www.amspec...
...In the meantime piles of wood sit on the roofthe disassembled parts of houses north of the border, waiting to come together again here...
...So I step through the waist-high turnstile and onto my native soil...
...1 work for several years with the help of neighbors to finish its dwelling...
...FI Ncis X. RoccA is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut...
...The air is pungent with diesel exhaust, and sweet with the flying sausage and peppers for sale from sidewalk carts...
...T H E T I J U A N A S P E C T A T O R Up and Coming Our man in Tijuana finds the fabled border town...
...The city's name conjures low life and vices prohibited, or at least prohibitively expensive, in the United States...
...A delicate and vaguely Moorish tower is all that remains of the Casino, a Prohibition-era glamour spot, but the Hipodromo is still in business, though now they race dogs instead of horses (all bets in U.S...
...Most of the Americans on this summer Saturday night are headed to the Avenida de la Revolucion, whose first eight blocks are an array of nightclubs, restaurants, and all-night pharmacies selling drugs at lessthan-U...
...You are about to apply for admission at the world's busiest border crossing...
...The owner of the track, part of a complex that includes a popular cockpit, is a wellknown animal lover with a private zoo, and everywhere on the grounds are specimens of his hobby...
...But in order to get to the darkened beach along which they must walk (for most of them come at night), the illegals have to cross eight lanes of highway on which traffic often reaches 70 miles per hour...
...chains (or plausible Mexican equivalents) and the same hit movies playing in San Diego...
...They are apparently Mexicans, but how they got here is a mystery, for at the end of the alley is yet another set of turnstiles...
...At lunch time the next day I am two miles uptown, where the same street bears a different name (Boulevard Agua Caliente) and no resemblance to the clubland of Revolucion...
...Once safely past the ceramic Virgins at the last-chance souvenir stands, I take the pedestrian bridge...
...once past these, the Americans find a line of taxis waiting to ferry them downtown...
...I have brought my passport, as the travel books advise, even though a driver's license is sufficient...
...There is nothing desperate about my trip and I don't expect any danger, beyond the piquant touch...
...less than five minutes later I am but a few feet from the immigration officer...
...U.S...
...For most, the best chance for a decent living obviously lies on the other side of the border...
...dollars-but this is Sunday, after all: a time for small luxuries in an increasingly prosperous city...
...In the restaurant where I am lunching, a band of middle-aged men in cowboy hats and checked shirts is playing norteno ("northern") music, which sounds a lot like country and western...
...currency...
...The showcase of the "New Tijuana" is closer to the border, along the south bank of the river (which is normally just a polluted trickle down the center of its concrete bed...
...yet it is rusted and rickety, and topped with nothing more than steel prongs-a surprisingly unforbidding obstacle just blocks from the heavily patrolled border fence...
...It turns out that street-walking has been banished to the nearby Coahuila district, which is perhaps where the man offering a certain exotic form of stage entertainment is proposing to take me...
...It is a gauntlet of beggars: old women in black shawls, children as young as three or four...
...It has proved fatally easy to misjudge the necessary lead time, especially with a family in tow...
...Now it's $600 just to San Ysidro on the other side...
...And then I see the reason for the fence and signs: On the opposite, northbound side of the road, uniformed border patrolmen are stopping cars and trucks for a look inside...
...There is even a statue of Abraham Lincoln, though in a startling departure from the standard iconography: with a grim, even angry look, he stands holding two lengths of broken chain...
...But these roadside images are reminders of a more timely and consequential border drama...
...Alternating with the Spanish version, the message is constantly repeated...
...Beyond the turnstile stretches an alley, empty but for a few young men who stand alone or in clusters along the walls, waiting for who knows what...
...I have no need for such a service, of course...
...A full hour north of the border, this is the last barrier illegal aliens hit on their most heavily traveled route into the United States_ A smuggler will drop off his clients a few miles to the south, then pick them up after his vehicle has cleared the checkpoint...
...From another direction, a very short woman in similar attire staggers out of the shadows...
...It's like the villain's headquarters in some low-budget James Bond movie...
...The very poorest Tijuaneros, typically recent arrivals from distant rural areas of Mexico, live in true shantytowns such as the area south of the race track...
...the officer asks, as if offering me the choice between plastic and paper...
...Inside one dark place, I can make out four or five fat women in bathing suits, like figures from a Botero painting, listlessly moving around on a small stage...
...Working in the maquiladoras, the assembly plants that have been thriving since well before NAFFA, they earn as little as 23 pesos ($3) a day in a city where milk costs 17 pesos a bottle...
...But crossing has become much harder lately, thanks to Operation Gatekeeper, whose most conspicuous emblem is the steel fence which runs intermittently fourteen miles inland from the Pacific...
...The neighborhood is dominated by "the Castle," an abandoned white mansion near the top of the hill where American women used to come for abortions (still illegal in this country...
...Now it's $6oo just to San Ysidro on the other side, and $1,2oo to L.A...
...One tot plays a miniature guitar, a paper cup set out optimistically in front of him...
...Here, instead, they bear the silhouettes of a man, a woman, and a pig-tailed little girl impetuously dashing from left to right...
...This part of town shows the marks of both past and present prosperity...
...In a working-class neighborhood such as Colonia Guerrero, people come out to weekend street markets to buy and sell shoes, toilet paper, screwdrivers-whatever turns up...
...The contraption looks like a threshing machine, and threatens to catch and extrude me in strips...
...Many cars parked along the streets have California license plates...
...At others, touts call loudly in English to passersby, promising two tequilas for the price of one, or ten cocktails for five dollars...
...With a Cultural Center designed by a prestigious architect and a Plaza Financiera of gleaming bank buildings, the Zona Rio is the kind of area city fathers everywhere love to hype...
...In a well-lit cafeteria, three young Mexican women dressed like office workers are enjoying a quiet meal...
...Three years ago, says a taxi driver whose side line is referrals to smugglers, $350 could get somebody all the way to Los Angeles...
...Long, unmoving lines of young people emerge from the doors of the more popular spots, including the local Hard by Francis X. Rocca Rock Cafe...
...A few miles later a chain-link fence ten feet high rises up between the guardrails in the highway divider...
...Inside the immigration station at the other end, a cool-almost syntheticfemale voice comes over the loudspeaker: "Welcome to the United States of America...
...they belong to green-card-holding Mexicans who make their living stateside and travel back home at the end of the work day...
...Please have your documents ready...
...Bears and tigers pace their small cages or loll on the concrete floors...
...I choose a legal gateway to Los Estados Unidos de Mexico: a one-way, fullbody turnstile of the kind at New York subway exits...
...The caption is a single Spanish word, PROHIBIDO...
...I answer nervously, yes, and begin to raise my passport-but he has already turned to the next person...
...much cleaner than its image, and on the move-north...
...The use of fraudulent documents is a federal offense...
...The pavement is littered with plastic cups and cigarette butts, but garbage men are swiftly at work, emptying the corner trash cans into a waiting truck...
...that lends a place like Tijuana its roguish allure...
...It moves surprisingly quickly...
...Heading south on Interstate Five, I start to see them just north of San Clemente: the black-on-yellow signs that normally warn of men at work or sharp turns ahead...
...This strip, which helped to make the city's name internationally notorious, now seems hardly more tawdry than Georgetown's M Street...
...S. prices...
...Naturally the market reflects the change...
...Here are the fashionable discos most visitors don't even know exist, and upscale malls offering U.S...
...But most of the natives cannot afford to shop in the Zona Rio...
...Below us runs the motor traffic, arranged in zigzag lanes with concrete jersey barriers to stop any vehicle from rushing the gates...
...She has the expression of a zombie...
...com/tas/home.html 67 The American Spectator - September r 9 9 6...
...I join one of the dozen lines, all about fifty-people long on this Sunday afternoon...
...The prices are high for Mexico-a plate of marinated pork carnitas and a beer come to more than eight U.S...
...Police cars parked crosswise in the Avenue block south-bound traffic, to keep johns from cruising up and down for prostitutes...
...Working-class families with small children are talking, 66 September 1996 • The American Spectator listening to the music, or watching the wide-screen TVs...
...When I come upon the signs I am on the way to cross the border myself: the other way, into Mexico...
...They look toward me and beckon...
...For the less adventurous, Revolucion still offers plenty of strip bars, yet these are beginning to look dated...
...Their houses are often built with second-hand wood from the States, and a family might 44 Crossing has become much harder, and the market reflects the change.Three years ago, $350 could get you all the way to Los Ange les...
...Here are the shiny, twenty-five story "twin towers," one of them the Grand Hotel, and nearby are houses with BMWs in their driveways and swimming pools or basketball courts out back...
Vol. 29 • September 1996 • No. 9
