text by Fernando Daniel Martínez photos by Infobaja staff
In a workshop in the Colonia 20 de Noviembre neighborhood of Tijuana filled with Canadian and German spruces, Indian rosewood, Honduran cedar, African ebony, and other rare woods, masterpieces renowned as some of the finest classical guitars in Mexico are being made. They carry the name of Fructuoso Zalapa.
Zalapa comes from four generations of luthiers in Paracho, Michoacán. He has spent his life building guitars that are now commissioned by professional guitarists who demand the unique acoustical properties and fine craftsmanship that his work is known for.
After his life took him down several paths – among which he studied to be a classical guitarist and a teacher – he settled four years ago in Tijuana because this city allows him to build outstanding guitars thanks to the select woods available across the border. “For this work,” Zalapa comments, “excellent materials are essential even though they cost ten times more than ordinary materials.”
During an interview with Infobaja magazine, this maker of fine instruments and characteristic acoustics talked about his craft, with which he has achieved international fame.
Fernando Jordán Juárez (1920–1956) was trained as an anthropologist and worked as a journalist. In 1949, the magazine Impacto asked him to write a series of articles on the entire Baja California peninsula. That work was later collected into two books, still in print today and well worth reading.
Jordán was captivated by the anthropology, sociology, and history that he found throughout the peninsula but, when he got to Tijuana, the culture of tourism then present caught him off-guard. His horrified reaction, copied and caricatured by generations of chilangos since, is reflected in El otro México: Biografía de Baja California, in which the chapter on our fair city is entitled “This is going to annoy some Tijuanans”.
“While noisy, Avenida Revolución has always seemed to me to be childish. It is unpleasant but not sordid” he wrote. “The Americans are simple-minded and very clean even when drunken. At daybreak they end their binges by cheering and by taking photos of themselves on little mobile stages of ‘Mexican’ scenes drawn by white burros painted with black stripes – ‘Mexican burros’ (!) – found at every street corner. The sailors climb onto these stages and arrange themselves among the cardboard cactuses, exchanging their sailor caps for charro sombreros, and smile for the photographer. The burros are impassive, enduring all manner of abuse: they are the philosophers of the carnival.”
In that same annoying chapter, Jordán has left us an early poetical approximation of our special form of bilingualism, which he addressed to his Spanish-speaking readership. To show that modern-day Tijuana holds him no rencor, we would honor his memory with a side-by-side semitranslation to accommodate our English-speaking readership.
The Popul Vuh teaches that humans, the gods' creation of the current Long Count cycle, were made from maize. (The creation of the previous great cycle, which was made of wood, spoke without understanding and so was condemned to spend this great cycle as monkeys.) We continue to acknowledge our origin by sustaining ourselves on tortillas, tamales, and atole even to this day, as our own Long Count comes to a close and we ponder our fate.
The historical role of atole as the agua de uso - the liquid taken throughout the day to slake thirst - has been declining as quickly as our farmland, while plastic bottles of brand-named reverse-osmosis city water have taken its place. Too plebeian for the fancy restaurants and too filling for the mainstream ones, atole now tends to be served primarily by aunts and grandmothers in remembrance of their rural childhoods. It is passing into a cultural symbol enshrined by clichés... If you're más viejo que el atole, you are even older than the hills. If you have atole en las venas, you're more unflappable than if you had ice-water in your veins. If you are dando atole con el dedo (serving atole with your finger), you are telling someone a story bit by bit, a sure sign of deceit.
Atole is made principally by boiling masa and water to the consistency of a thin porridge. By tradition it has been drunk instead of plain water, hot or cold, from calabashes throughout the day. It's now served in mugs as a comfort food and is most particularly trotted out for the festivities of First Communion, Christmastide (12 December to 6 January), and Candelaria (2 February). Variations include the addition of plum in Morelos and Guerrero, pineapple or coconut in Veracruz, cacao pod in Uruapan, blackberry in Michoacán; throughout the country strawberry, guava, nance, prune, walnut, capulín (Prunus serotina var. virens), almond, pumpkin, or tamarind might be added. The original recipes involve a lot of time and effort, so modern food science has made the more common atoles available in the instant-drink aisle of every Mexican supermarket. (There's a good chance, however, that people who hold to the powdered stuff will spend the next Long Count as Republicans.)
Mike is one of Tijuana’s newer immigrants from the United States. He moved here during the twenty-first century. He recently found himself involved in what the law broadly refers to “human trafficking”. In our local slang, he was a coyote. Or, as he says, “I helped people get into the U.S. without all the red tape.”
Mike had been a salesman in southern California who was “transitioned” into a commission-only job. He came to Tijuana because he couldn’t afford the place where he used to live. He wound up near the Otay crossing because, as he says, “the rents are low and we’re real close to the border”. Unfortunately for Mike, sales jobs were still far away.
“I tried a lot of jobs. Another gringo in the Zona Norte hooked me up with a telemarketing gig, a boilerroom in Mira Mesa, but I couldn’t meet their sales quotas. I walked the streets of Bonita for a remodeling contractor, telling people they had mold in their homes in order to get them to sign up. I started a website but it isn’t making any money. I went to Telvista because they said I only need to speak English, but that wasn’t true – I also need to permission to work in Mexico!” Mike hasn’t bothered to do any immigration paperwork.
“One day I was walking down Calle Coahuila and a chicano from Sylmar came up to me asking if I wanted a job. All I had to do was drive somebody else’s car across the border and they’d pay me a thousand dollars. ‘What’s the catch?’ I asked. The guy said it wasn’t anything illegal or dangerous but Juan would be the one to explain.”
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Every culture has its own expectations concerning their medical profession. The ancient Chinese paid their physician every day they were healthy in order to be treated for free whenever they were ill. In Mexico, doctors tend to be extremely Hippocratic in their approach – the idea here is that people whose social position has allowed them to learn a great deal now want to help you feel better. But what happens when a patient doesn’t see the improvement he expected?
In the United States, an unhappy patient pays a lot of money to a malpractice attorney and hopes for the best. In Mexico, that sort of patient has more options: he or she can go to the Ministerio Público (the district attorney) to file a criminal complaint for malpractice, go to PROFECO (the federal attorney for the protection of consumers) to file a civil complaint, or ask a medical commission to resolve the problem with expert arbitration. There is no cost involved in any of these options. Additionally, one can hire a private attorney to file the case in civil court, similar to what is done in the U.S. More and more, the medical commissions are becoming the preferred route.
CAME-BC, the Comisión de Arbitraje Médico del Estado de Baja California, is part of the state government and has been around in one form or another for about a decade. Originally it maintained a single office in Mexicali, the state capital. “To do our job, we have to be where the patients are,” says Dr Agustín Escobar, the head of the commission, “so we came to Tijuana in 2008. That’s where most of the medicine is being practiced in this state. Very soon we will be opening offices in Rosarito, Ensenada, and Tecate. We’re also working on a web presence like the one our big brother in Mexico City has.”
Although tequila does not come from Baja California, it is an integral part of our local culture. Tourists have been coming here for generations in search of it, so much so that a spring-breaker bar in Rosarito Beach once called itself (fancifully) The Tequila Museum. With the turn of this century, Tijuana has been setting aside a week in October to host an annual Expo Tequila. Similar festivals crop up frequently throughout the peninsula. And so a few words about this quintessentially Mexican spirit are in order.
Surely no other liquor is more misunderstood. Nor is there another that offers as varied or as rewarding a spectrum of flavors, everything from raw vegetal spirit to refinement rivalling cognac. Those who know tequila only from frat parties or chain restaurants will be surprised to discover that Don Julio blanco tastes exactly like raspberry eau-de-vie, that Gran Centenario añejo is reminiscent of a twenty-year-old Demerara rum, or that the flavors of Don Abraham and Herradura Antiguo surpass the descriptive power of words. To appreciate this spectrum, one first must get beyond the misunderstandings.
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Both work just fine. You can even use major credit cards.
Baja has been using dollars and pesos interchangeably ever since it received its first tourist a century and a half ago. Pretty much everyone accepts both, although out-of-the-way places, which keep very little money in the till, might make change in pesos. Even the symbol that both currencies use, $ (for solidus and shilling), is the same. To avoid confusion, the convention along the border is to use a distinctive suffix: “$25.00 m.n.” (moneda nacional) and “$2.00 dlls” (dollars).
The fun starts when you worry about the exchange rate. Every shop sets its own. Businesses that want dollars, such as supermarkets and Pemex stations, will offer a rate slightly better than the casas de cambio. Those that prefer pesos, usually the smaller operations, will offer a slightly lower rate. People who look to get the best price all around town will carry both currencies – but that certainly is not necessary.
What do you call a calafia bus full of gringos who visit the most surreal parts of Tijuana and who take part in our most ordinary activities? Turista libre.
If the mental picture of this seems a little odd, we still have to mention that the fellow who organizes these day-trips is from the United States and lives in Tijuana by choice. Derrik Chinn is twenty-eight years old. Three years ago, he left his apartment in San Diego in order to move to Tijuana. And this journalist has enjoyed living here so much that, like so many who are fed up with the city’s bad press, he decided to do something about it.
“I couldn’t stand to hear all the nasty things that were being said about Tijuana. The place is actually very cool, life here is like nowhere else in the world. A lot of people in the U.S. tell me they’d like to visit but they’re afraid to or they don’t want to put up with the wait at the border or they don’t speak Spanish or, well, you get the idea. Sadly, they don’t care that pretty much everyone here speaks at least some English. There’s no reason to use the culture or the language as an excuse.” he says.
If you’re in the right restaurant at the right time, something unusual will happen. A bunch of guys show up dressed in Renaissance clothes, carrying Renaissance instruments. They begin playing in bright tones and quick rhythms – possibly Italian, to gringo ears, but the lyrics are unmistakably Spanish – while the little guy with the tambourine capers theatrically.
What happened to the mariachis and “La Bamba”? Has Tijuana suddenly become addicted to Lope de Vega? Or maybe the restaurant thought we’d like to watch “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” in translation?
It’s a bit disorienting, here in the city that began as a Hollywood-style fantasy, to encounter something so deeply traditional and so authentically hispanic as Baja’s first tuna universitaria. Even the name is confusing … the locals know tuna to be cactus fruit and the gringos think it’s a fish … but the term refers to a group of tunos, university students who sing for their supper.
The tradition can be traced back continuously to the beginning of the thirteenth century with the founding of the Studium Generale (now University) of Palencia during the reign of Alfonso VIII. Nowadays tunas are established throughout the Spanish-speaking world. They’re even found in such unlikely places as Oxford, Belgium, and Japan. In central Mexico, tunas date back to the Porfiriato. For UABC (the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California), however, the tuna arrived in 2008.
photo courtesy of Cindy Mosqueda, loteriachicana.net
If you can make it to only one restaurant on your first trip to Tijuana, that one may as well be La Cantina de los Remedios. It offers a quintessential Mexican experience that can serve as the keystone to understanding all the culinary arts of Baja. The menu is Mexican comfort food, the inspiration for all our alta-cocina/Baja-Med pretensions; the setting, reminiscent of the good old days, includes sly references to the Tijuana of half a century ago.
Because the nostalgic details are historically accurate, and because the menu is strictly legit (no combination plates even though they do serve tacos, enchiladas, and tostadas), the place attracts a lot of locals out for a good time. It's also gringo-friendly – you can get both waiters and menus in English and they accept all major credit cards.
Their menu is varied enough to allow customers to share a snack over drinks, to eat a full meal, or to throw a small party. They offer more than a dozen botanas, four salads, a pasta, five soups, and three tortas. The main dishes include about a dozen forms of chicken, half a dozen shrimp and two fish fillets. Choices of grass-fed beef are extensive, including four parrilladas (mixed grills), arrachera, tampiqueña, a few filets, and a couple U.S.-style steaks. The desserts include favorites from both sides of the border such as crepas de cajeta, flan, carrot cake, and guava cheesecake. And they make one of the best margaritas in the business.
Rubén Aguilar (left) and Jorge Castañeda (right). Photo by Manuel Montoya.
by Fausto Ovalle
Rubén Aguilar and Jorge Castañeda unveiled their new book, El narco: La guerra fallida [The Failed War on Drug Trafficking], on 20 January 2010 at the Tijuana campus of the Universidad Iberoamericana (UIAT).
The president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, used false assumptions to justify his failed drug war, say Vicente Fox’s former presidential press secretary and the former secretary of state. They point out that this war against drug trafficking was something Calderón created in order to legitimate his presidency and that it was not in his platform when he was running for office.
When Jessica and Evan moved to Tijuana, they didn’t plan on starting a charitable service. They came for the same reason that many have done lately – rents are high and incomes are low north of the border. They initially thought they’d live here while working in San Diego, but Tijuana had other plans for them.
They started in an apartment and commuted across the border. That got old fast, especially after they added a relinquished puppy to their household of cats … and then another puppy. It became obvious that there was a great need to save pets from abandonment … and that they could do this themselves … and that they’d surely be needing larger quarters.
They found a house with front and back yards close by the border and settled in to create a place “where dogs and cats of two countries unite”. To fit into their neighborhood, both Jessica and Evan started to learn Spanish. A scant year later, they’re proud to trill their RRs.
During the last year, Tijuana showed up in the news of the furthest and most unlikely parts of the world. Never in the history of the city has it received reporters from so many countries nor ones so distant. From the end of 2008 through 2009, journalists of eleven different nations came to Tijuana in order to file special reports. Sadly, they did not come to write about our restaurants or our sports teams. They came to write about the incidents of street violence.
The efforts of the governmental tourism departments, the city’s visitors and conventions bureau, and the various PR agencies did not achieve such lavish publicity as that created by the Dantean imagery evoked in the wave of violence that followed September 2008.
Entijuanarte always manages to pull off something iconic. This year’s memorable event was an open-air concert combining the efforts of Tijuana’s most respectable musicians with those of Tijuana’s most autochthonous musicians and ending with more than twenty-five thousand spectators shouting “Tijuana! Tijuana! Tijuana!”
The event was memorable because of the performance’s emotional effect. The audience, after having to endure so much depressing and uninformed media coverage of Tijuana, found their civic pride validated by a stage full of photographic imagery and seriously ebullient musicians. It was also an historically memorable event because this might very well be the first time orchestral performers and popular composition collaborated truly as equals.
They would rather accept dollars but, when there are no tourists, the businesses on Avenida Revolución are out to attract local customers by offering restaurants, fine art, high-quality folk art, good prices in pesos, and improved customer service.
With the reduction in cross-border traffic brought on by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, by the U.S. policy for its citizens to carry passports, by the worldwide economic crisis, by the drug wars, and finally by the flu scare, Revolución can no longer expect much from foreign tourism.
The days of plenty are gone. The famous avenue is now a shadow of its former self. Sixty percent of the shops are empty. Potential customers look but don’t buy. The merchants who remain are finding it increasingly harder to keep their doors open.
With the Cow Parade came the discovery that local customers could be a source of income. For several weeks last year, entire families roamed the streets simply to enjoy the bovine statues installed along Avenida Revolución and the Zona Río.
“That exposition created a good image, raised our spirits, and attracted a lot of people” said Andrés Méndez Martínez, the coordinator of Ceturmex, the leading merchants’ association for Avenida Revolución. “It brought in local customers, something we hadn’t seen in a long time. Because of that, the association started to work on the idea of offering discounts just for local people.”
According to Méndez Martínez, Ceturmex, which is made up of a significant number of businesses on Revolución, will be adopting the recommendations offered by the state university’s school of marketing. “They suggest that we bring in good restaurants and culturally oriented businesses. We need to offer more diversity in our merchandise. Offering the same items store after store won’t keep Revolución going.”
Raúl Mendiola started the Emporium half a century ago as a way to showcase the best arts and crafts that Mexico has to offer. He began in the historic Pasaje Rodríguez but quickly outgrew the place. He moved to larger quarters at the entrance to Pasaje Sonia, next door to the historic Hotel Caesar, where he’s been ever since. In that time, his offerings have diversified, he’s added two partners (a cousin and a godson), and he’s created thousands of repeat customers from around the world.
The shop looks to have outgrown its present location as well. It’s stuffed floor to ceiling with collectible items – fine Taxco silver jewelry, stained-glass windows, repoussé tin wall ornaments, ceramic birds, talavera from Puebla and Tonalá, unique stoneware from Ken Edwards’s atelier, wood carvings and black pottery from Oaxaca, fine ceramic sculptures by the artist Tlalli, pure cotton guayabera shirts from Mérida, local stained glass, and for Christmas, nativity scenes (known as nacimientos or pesebres) in a variety of media from all over Mexico.
Mendiola attributes the success of the Emporium to the philosophy of the three partners: “honesty, quality, service”. The merchandise is accurately described and fairly priced. Selection is unusually broad. Not just a piece or two from Ken Edwards, instead, the entire Collection Series is available from open stock. Not just run-of-the-mill Oaxacan woodcarvings, but rare pieces from recognized masters like Gerardo Ramírez of San Antonio Arrazola and the Tribus Mixes of Trinidad de Viguera. As for service, “if a customer is afraid because of those stories they read in their local papers, we’re happy to drive them in our own cars to a restaurant or to the border, or wherever they want to go. We want our customers to feel comfortable here,” says Mendiola.
In March of this year, the city of Tijuana inaugurated an ambitious open-air program called Vía Libre, La Calle Es Tuya in which, every Sunday through October, a section of Paseo de los Héroes was closed to vehicular traffic. From 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on these days, the full width of the boulevard is turned over to families out for a stroll, joggers, skaters, dog-walkers, street performers, and pretty much anyone else who wants to enjoy the urban outdoors.
How many tourists have ventured south of San Diego for the day simply so that they might return home to tell their friends that they have visited Mexico and it’s just as horrible as one might think? It does not matter that all they saw was a sham Mexico concocted to play on the visitors’ preconceptions, like Tom Sawyer’s Island in Disneyland. Nor does it seem to matter that the three millions of us here in Tijuana are offended by such an off-handed characterization.
And yet the tourists keep on coming in spite of the bad press. What’s our attraction? For that matter, why are these tourists satisfied with knowing only seven blocks of Avenida Revolución (known locally as La Revu) or two square blocks of the Zona Norte (known locally as La Coahuila)? The answer to these questions, I suspect, is waiting for a long and psychologically complex book that few will care to read. The short answer is most likely that one’s expectations will always color one’s perception of reality: the real Tijuana is nothing like folks north of the border have experienced nor is it what they would have you believe.
Tijuana is a product of its historical isolation. It was more wild than the Wild West; it was more remote than Anchorage. And then, shortly after 1985, it was drop-kicked into the modern age.
Back around 1980, a couple of us were heading out of town in search of horses that we might ride on the beach. It’s against the law in California to ride a horse on a beach (unless you happen to own the beach) but there is no such prohibition in Baja California, which is a good thing because in Mexico you can’t own a beach unless you're Vicente Fox. We didn’t know quite where we might find horses for rent so we pulled off the road to ask at a desolate fonda somewhere near San Antonio del Mar.
This was one of those rural businesses that sell basic groceries, simple meals, soft drinks, cold beer, and even shots of hard liquor. The proprietor was out on the property; he saw our dust as we pulled up and came inside shortly after we did. Under these circumstances, it would be terribly rude to blurt out “Hey, man, where are the horses?”, so we got to know each other a little first.
“Where are you from?” the proprietor asked. “From Los Angeles” I said.
“Ah. Do you know much of Mexico?” He might be at this for a while, so I tried to cut him short. “Well, we did just drive through Tijuana” I said.
“Ah, Tijuana.” He shook his head sadly. “Tijuana is not Mexico.” At the end of our visit, the proprietor suggested we take some beers with us. “I wish I could”, I said, “but I’m driving. I don’t want to get into any trouble.” My answer confused him. After thinking about it for a moment, he said “You won’t get into any trouble here, not unless you cause an accident.” So we took a few draught Coronas with us and the trip was that much more enjoyable.
For the longest time, Tijuana really wasn’t Mexico. Its natives belonged to Misión San Diego de Alcalá and its somnolent ranchos derived title from the old land-grants of the Spanish Crown. Tijuana was part of Alta California – the dividing line in those days was Rosarito – but with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 someone noticed that the peninsula needed to be connected to mainland Mexico and so the border was drawn more or less where you find it today.
Tijuana was as remote a place in Mexico as you could find, lying at the northern tip of what has been called the forgotten peninsula, the other Mexico. And yet it was of great strategic importance to the country because, were it to be populated, it could serve to keep Mexico’s imperialist neighbor from invading once again. With no apparent natural resources, with no overland transportation to the mainland, and with the closest seaport a day’s journey away, what else might Tijuana do but open trade with the gringos of San Diego and offer them what they could not find at home?
A hotel and spa utilizing the local hot springs (agua caliente) opened in 1880, before title to lands in the area had been settled and while the area was still part of the municipio of Ensenada. The first racetrack was also built in 1880: tourists arrived by regularly scheduled wagon service in order to attend the horse races as well as boxing matches and bullfights.
The town of Tijuana was founded under the name of Pueblo Zaragoza in 1889 in an attempt to quell the land disputes that had arisen among the holders of the Spanish grant (the extended Argüello and Olvera families) and to prevent foreign speculators (the Compañía Americana and the Compañía Inglesa) from using contemporary presidential edicts to take that land for themselves. With title settled, the land was parceled out and development began in earnest. In contrast, San Diego had already experienced four real-estate booms by that point.
As early as 1911, Tijuana's main street, then called Olvera, contained bars, liquor stores, and night clubs in response to the vices that had already been prohibited north of the border. When California outlawed horse racing in 1915, Tijuana responded by building a world-class hippodrome near the present City Hall. The new track’s innovations included a moveable starting gate, the first photo finish, a sprinkler car, races on Sundays, and a public-address system.
On the first day of 1920 the U.S. imposed Prohibition, in response to which the Cantina La Ballena (“the longest bar in the world”) and the Azteca and Mexicali breweries were founded; on July fourth of that year, sixty-five thousand people attended the horse races and 12,654 vehicles crossed the border. Most visitors of this decade were wealthy or upper middle-class, well-behaved, and generous: Tijuana was happy with them and the city prospered.
The 1930s were lean years. Prohibition came to an end and a series of morally conservative presidents ruled Mexico. Tijuana all but dried up and blew away. What a sorry irony – those same presidents had relied on Tijuana’s income to fund their armies during the Revolution.
As the U.S. militarized in the late 1930s in order to enter the Second World War, San Diego became a major naval base and Tijuana responded to the sailors’ needs by saturating the area around the old bull-ring with hotels, restaurants, and bars. Informal betting along the lines of three-card monte was common. The vida alegre, that is to say, prostitution, extended into the suburbs of Colonia Libertad and Colonia Independencia. In 1947, the jai-alai palace opened for more betting. All of this infrastructure was again useful during the U.S.’s Korean conflict in the 1950s. And so two generations of corn-pone warriors came to remember Tijuana as the place they visited before they shipped out. No wonder that Tijuana’s sullied reputation became so entrenched.
Baja has been a duty-free zone off and on ever since 1885, and during such times tourists avoided the Customs and excise taxes on a varying list of imported luxury goods. Around 1965, “duty-free” was extended to include maquiladora services for U.S. companies, thus providing the benefits of cheap Mexican labor without the stigma of wetback employees. Prostitution experienced a resurgence in the 1960s due to the Vietnam War: now the Marines of Camp Pendleton joined the sailors of North Island in pilgrimages to what coalesced into La Coahuila. During the 1980s, the sale of ethical pharmaceuticals was liberalized such that U.S. visitors could buy most medications over the counter easily, cheaply, and legally without the prescription they needed back home. About the same time, Playboy magazine glamourized the area as a haven for so-called underage drinking, in response to which the bars on La Revu became so festive that their younger customers occasionally died from alcohol-related accidents.
In the final third of the twentieth century, the tourist business was booming. Those were La Revu’s salad days. We shall not see their like again.
Thoughout Tijuana’s short and colorful history, the city has made its living by providing U.S. tourists lawfully with goods and services that they could not acquire legally in their own country. An unfortunate confusion has arisen as a consequence: there is a widespread notion among the tourists that one may come to Tijuana in order to break laws.
It really doesn't work like that. You can come to Tijuana in order to enjoy the culture, the people, or even the relative liberality of its laws. You can behave lawfully here in ways that you cannot in your hometown. But you may not violate local laws nor offend local decency with impunity – those who have done so have returned home to tell horror stories and to spew dire, ignorant warnings about the strange and devious people who lurk just south of The Known World.
All the while that Tijuana has been San Diego’s sinful sister, it was also growing into a full-fledged metropolis thanks to the influx of grocers, educators, auto mechanics, doctors, dentists, lawyers, restaurateurs – people who service those who worked in the tourist industry. These people also offer their goods and services to the tourists, albeit not with the in-your-face style of Avenida Revolución. They are not always as facile with the English language nor as forgiving of gringo rudeness as are the tourist-tenders of La Revu. These, however, are the people who have been instrumental in Tijuana's development.
Tijuana has been changing quickly and radically. There were 353 inhabitants in 1900; a hundred years later there were perhaps two millions. Because of this growth, the ideas that tourists retain about the place are necessarily out of date. Donkey shows? If those existed, that would have been in the 1950s and ’60s. Bacteria-infested municipal water? That became passé in the 1980s – nowadays the Escherichia coli are showing up in San Diego's water instead. Dogs in the streets? All but gone by 2010. The haggling for trinkets and the bribing of traffic cops? Who knows, we might keep those around as part of the folkloric ambience, rather like that authentic Indian turquoise jewelry you find in Phoenix.
When friends visit me from other parts of Mexico, I try to take them to La Revu in order to give them the True Tijuana Experience. We come in from a side street in order to encounter one of the zebras unawares – that always gets me a nervous, sidelong glance. After a few more steps we are beset by the touts, the enganchadores or jaladores, who seem to jump out of nowhere shouting in deliberately bad English for us to come into their curio shop or for us to enjoy two-for-one margaritas or for us to see, no cover charge, the most beautiful naked girls in Mexico dancing for our pleasure. I do not need to translate what the enganchadores are shouting: my friends are already shocked by the tone of voice and the aggressive gestures. “What the hell is this?” they invariably ask me. “Why, it’s Mexico, of course” I tell them. “It is no such thing. What is this really?” they counter. “Really, we’re still in Mexico,” I tell them, “but this is Mexico for tourists. Folks here have been acting like this for as long as anyone can remember. The tourists expect it of them.”
An earthquake in Mexico City demolished a lot of their newer buildings in 1985, primarily because of lax enforcement of building codes on governmental construction. The consequences of this earthquake brought a tidal wave of chilangos (people from Mexico City) into Tijuana. Their initial reception was hostile: the slogan ¡Haz patria, mata a un chilango! (“be patriotic, kill a chilango”) showed up everywhere because the newcomers were felt to be too aggressive, too ill-mannered, and pretentious. And yet, with their advent, Tijuana joined the twentieth century. We have the chilangos to thank for developing Playas as a residential community and for bringing us such niceties as chipotle, huitlacoche, and Victoria beer.
At the same time, there was a major change in the government of Tijuana – in fact, throughout Baja – in which the ruling group, the PRI (whose corruption produced the faulty buildings in Mexico City), was replaced by the pious, conservative PAN. Many new laws have been passed since then, laws that look as if they might have been borrowed from the U.S., laws that replace the libertarian approach of the old days with “tiered response”. You can no longer drive around Tijuana with a beer in your hand and get in trouble only if you cause an accident: you will now get in some trouble for an open container, or more trouble for driving while intoxicated, or even more trouble for an open container and an accident, or much worse trouble for being involved in an accident while intoxicated and carrying a beer in your hand. Personal freedom and population density tend to work in opposition.
Nowadays Tijuana really is part of Mexico. We’re no longer the end of the world: we've become the fourth-largest city in the country. People from all over have been moving here for the past fifty years, bringing with them the accents and customs of Sonora, Sinaloa, Nayarit, Michoacán, Veracruz, Oaxaca, Jalisco, Puebla – even a few Cantonese and Iraqi Chaldeans. Tijuana still retains a lot of its frontier past, like how La Revu has remained garish to meet the tourists’ expections or how most of its older residential districts, built into steep hillsides, still lack paved side-streets and piped natural gas. But now there is a great confluence of Mexican cultures in the blood and sinews of Tijuana’s body-politic, which finds its expression throughout the city in commercial, governmental, and non-profit events. That achievement alone sets it apart from the culture north of the border, which is generally treated like its body-politic’s cellulitis.
With the repeal of Prohibition, alcohol lost its attraction to all but the 18-to-21 crowd. The hot springs and casino closed in the middle 1930s. The two breweries ceased operation about the same time (although Mexicali is now being made in Tecate by Coors). The horse races came to an end in 1992, when the current owner bought the Agua Caliente Racetrack in order to exploit its lucrative off-track gambling licences. Jai-alai and frontón became unfashionable: their palacio is now an occasional venue for pop music. Tijuana’s bull ring is now in Playas: the famous one where Lucille Ball posed has been demolished in expectation of a shopping mall. Changes in Customs laws during the 1980s and ’90s brought an end to inexpensive Lladró and Chanel. Gambling is now available stateside in the Kumiyaay reservations and homegrown prostitution is available through the Internet.
The city’s older forms of tourism have become all but extinct, leaving behind them, petrified, an unsavory reputation. About all that Tijuana has left to offer is its melting-pot culture and the difference between the U.S. dollar and the Mexican peso.
Tijuana's culture, understated by U.S. standards, is nonetheless breathtaking for those who would make the effort to know it. The arts are everywhere: half a dozen places from Playas to Otay regularly offer trova performances and poetry readings; writers, sculptors, and painters have made Tijuana into an artists’ colony; dancers not only perform post-Cunningham ballet but Arabic, Flamenco, and Irish; opera is performed, not in a pretentious auditorium to Harry Partch’s sea of blue-haired ladies, but to the rank and file of the city out in the middle of the street. Our food and our style of life hold their own against all others worldwide.
The difference in the dollar and peso means that coming here for medical, dental, and retirement needs has been making more and more sense lately. Without that stimulus, people north of the border would have little reason to discover the rest of our culture.
The real question now is whether the new tourists will be sophisticated enough to deal with such a different culture. This was not much of a problem in the past because day-trippers don't stay very long and they kept pretty much to their own street. But what now if you want to hear tuneros at El Potrero or trovadores at Cervecería Tijuana or to catch the Cuban film festival at El Lugar del Nopal? You're going to wind up in the culture for at least a few days.
The cultural issue becomes even more important for the economic refugees from southern California, those who have moved to Tijuana for the cheaper housing. A number of these people have already been deported because they couldn’t shift gears – they kept behaving as they did in the U.S. – and so annoyed their neighbors enough to call the INM (Immigration).
This blog isn’t directed at the Revu day-tripper or the hit-and-run foodie, although the few who remain will find something useful here. The blog is meant for the new tourists, the ones who come for longer stays, so that they might come to understand their new environment and enrich their lives thereby.
[The Failed War on Drug Trafficking], on 20 January 2010 at the Tijuana campus of the Universidad Iberoamericana (UIAT).
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