Twilight on the line
Page, Joseph A.
TIJUANA COLLISION Joseph A. Page he U.S.-Mexican border, in the words of journalist Sebastian Rotella, is a "magical place" that transforms "migrants into martyrs, intellectuals into...
...Tijuana made front-page news in 1994 when an assassin's bullet cut down Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio as he was campaigning in one of the city's slums...
...The White Tigers of Cincinnati," for instance, warns Commonweal 2 2 May 22, 1998...
...Quammen can write overlong and he does (as you can see) pontificate...
...He wrote a column titled "Natural Acts" for Outside for fifteen years, and most of the essays in this collection first appeared in the column or as features in Outside, Rolling Stone, or Powder...
...Quammen is editor-at-large for Outside, a glossy monthly whose emphasis on exotic (and expensive) destinations and pricey gear makes it the Vanity Fair of outdoor magazines...
...TIJUANA COLLISION Joseph A. Page he U.S.-Mexican border, in the words of journalist Sebastian Rotella, is a "magical place" that transforms "migrants into martyrs, intellectuals into cops, cops into social workers, teenage homeboys into jet-set hitmen, gangsters into tycoons, [and] politicians into gangsters...
...Consider this passage from "Grabbing the Loop," in which the essayist laments plans to dam the Futaleufu River, a white-water Mecca, into a series of placid reservoirs: "Humanity badly needs things that are big and fearsome and homicidally wild...
...NATURE AS SPRINGBOARD Clare Collins n the introduction to this colI lection of essays, David Quammen offers an apologia for, as he calls it, the "slick" newsstand magazines...
...The book is organized around four themes, "The River," "The City," "The Mountains," and, finally, "The Heart," that inner landscape that can be just as challenging to conquer as the most hairy stretch of river rapids...
...Federal police ambushed and assassinated Benitez on a cross-town expressway, while Duarte fell victim to kidnappers who snatched him in front of his home and shot him as he struggled to escape from their vehicle...
...Indeed, the efforts of law-enforcement officials on both sides of the line have often focused more on protecting the immigrants from the physical threats they face from human vultures who would prey on them, from the natural environment, and from high-speed traffic on the I-5 freeway...
...A lone gunman was captured, but efforts to discover whether other forces were behind the murder have satisfied few Mexicans...
...Twilight on the Line does not really tell the story of the entire border between the United States and Mexico...
...In a sense, he just can't contain himself...
...Jorge Alberto Duarte, the idealistic warden of the state penitentiary in Tijuana, permitted the wives and children of inmates from southern and central Mexico to reside within, granted conjugal visits liberally, fostered dialogue with the prisoners, and even tolerated the existence of a unique intramural society with its own laws and economy...
...Wildness is found not only on a secluded stretch of the Salmon River or Chile's Futaleufu River, but also in the foothills of Burbank, where coyotes roam, and in the urban "canyons" of New York City, which have fostered amazing evolutionary adaptations in the "postmodern pigeon...
...Both Benitez and Duarte paid the ultimate price for their earnest efforts...
...Border Patrol captures a fraction of the entrants and returns them to Tijuana, where they regroup and try again...
...Today, Tijuana is the second most populous metropolis on the west coast of the Western Hemisphere, a world capital of narcotics trafficking, a transit station for large-scale illegal immigration into the United States, and a window into what Rotella terms the "dark side of the economic integration envisioned by NAFTA...
...But Quammen, author of the prize-winning The Story of the Dodo, uses his exotic subjects as a framework for explaining everything from biodiversity to the physics of fluid dynamics to evolution...
...He rarely resists the urge to throw in one more aside or digression...
...According to Rotella, the border at Tijuana is "the future in the making," where California meets Tijuana and the best and the worst of both societies collide...
...But I don't recommend that approach...
...Quammen himself has a rare ability to write with broad appeal on topics ranging from white-water kayaking to trout fishing to Telemark skiing...
...Considering that this essay collection is one in a string of recent books to grow out of articles first published in Outside--the others include Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air--the magazine's literary stature hardly seems in peril...
...The linkage between immigration and the drug trade comes across vividly in Rotella's account, which also points out how cracking down on the illegal crossings can serve to increase the costs of Commonweal 2 | May 22, 1998 entering the United States and thereby increase the economic incentives for organized crime to become involved...
...Rotella puts the killing in the context of the emergence of Tijuana as the headquarters of a multibillion-dollar commerce in narcotics, and describes in detail the corrupting influence of the city's drug lords upon local politics, local law enforcement, and ultimately the national political scene...
...Rotella describes the difficulties that plague efforts to control the human waves crossing into California, as the U.S...
...For that reason, I began reading section by section, essay by essay...
...The book's title doesn't refer solely to the unmarred, out-there wilderness...
...It is rather the story of the border near Tijuana, and a vivid portrait of that once sleepy town best known in North America for the appropriation of its name by Herb Alpert's brass ensemble...
...Tijuana drug dealers were involved in the shooting of Cardinal Juan Jestis Posadas Ocampo of Guadalajara one year before Colosio's murder, an incident that likewise has yet to be explained adequately...
...The lawlessness endemic to Tijuana complements the massive flow of illegal immigrants across the nearby border...
...The PRI nominee was favored to win despite the relaxation of his party's iron grip, and his assassination profoundly shocked Mexico...
...For example, Federico Benitez, who became Tijuana's police chief in 1992, was a lonely crusader who struggled to modernize his force, foster respect for human rights, and combat criminal elements among his own officers as well as within federal and state law-enforcement agencies working in the city...
...A startling aspect of the prelate's death was the participation of members of a San Diego youth gang, who had been hired by a Tijuana narcosyndicate in a grim parody of the free trade promoted by NAFTA, and were sent to Guadalajara ostensibly to assassinate a rival dealer at the city's airport...
...The latter had been seriously corrupted by the narco-traffickers, to the extent that on one occasion a vicious firefight broke out between federal and state agents working for competing gangs...
...Colosio had received the nomination of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had ruled Mexico for decades and was at last yielding to pressures that were opening up the political process to genuine competition...
...Joseph A. Page, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, is the author of The Brazilians and Per6n: A Biography...
...Perhaps the most touching aspect of Twilight on the Line emerges from Rotella's portraits of Mexican reformers who have labored heroically to overcome the challenges posed by the border...
...Some believe that it was not a case of the cardinal being in the wrong place at the wrong time...
...At the same time, as this account of the border phenomenon demonstrates with power and insight, the line separating the United States from Latin America also serves as a focal point for violence, corruption, and other evils that have hindered the process of democratization in Mexico, and have cast an ominous shadow northward...
...In lesser hands, I suspect that most of these adventures would prove interesting only to hard-core devotees---or madmen...
...Wild Thoughts is too exhausting...
...Quammen's writing is energetic in the extreme, stuffed with information, but also with brash, provoking, indeed wild thoughts...
...By doing so, he managed to avoid the kind of killing and rioting that has occurred in penitentiaries in Brazil and elsewhere...
...He then berates the "safely tenured academics and high-minded literati" for not seeing past the "advertisements for fancy sunglasses and Rollerblades and miraclefiber underwear" and the "stories that might politely be called fatuous junk," to the meaty, imaginative nonfiction work slick magazines also publish...
...Counterintuitive as it may seem, we need to preserve those few remaining beasts, places, and forces of nature capable of murdering us with sublime indifference...
...Although he gives somewhat short shrift to how Southern California (and especially Anglo-dominated San Diego) is reacting to the collision, his portrayal of the Mexican side of the line is deftly drawn, thoroughly disturbing, and constructively provocative...
...Quammen's "Wild" is an existential destination as well: places "unpolluted by absolute safety and certainty...
Vol. 125 • May 1998 • No. 10
