Mike, the unwily coyote

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.”

Baja’s Medical Ombudsmen

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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.”

Yet another appreciation of tequila

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.

Dollars or Pesos?

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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.

Day-trips for alternative tourism

photos by Derrik Chinn

by Cristina González Madín

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.

A few quesadillas

 

The oldest published recipe for quesadillas, from 1831, is found in El cocinero mexicano. These are remarkably similar to the ones we still make today.

Quick quesadillas  Either make or buy small, soft tortillas. In the middle of each tortilla place some cheese, which can be fresh or aged cow’s milk cheese or even goat’s milk cheese if you add a bit of salt, then fold the tortilla in half and sew it together with cornbrush or maguey fiber, or pin the halves together with three blades of sacaton [Sporobolus wrightii]. Cook the quesadillas without delay, on a grill over live coals or on a griddle, until the cheese just starts to melt. Remove the threading and serve at once because they’re no good cold. Some people fry their quesadillas in deep fat or sprinkle them with salt and sauté them in black butter.

This recipe is unusual for a couple of reasons. It’s the only antojito to appear in Mexico’s first printed cookbook, which distinguishes it from things like tacos, memelas, and sopes. The gente de razón (as the upper class referred to itself), for whom cookbooks were published in those days, felt that indigenous cuisine was beneath their dignity. Even now restaurants that would never consider offering tacos, memelas, or sopes proudly offer some sort of quesadilla as an antojito, entremés, tentempié, or appetizer.

Further on we present several examples from our own Baja California restaurateurs.

When Hernán Cortés dined with Moctezuma, they ate what later became known as tacos. By using a corn tortilla the way that Ethiopians use njira bread, one can pick up bits of almost anything and eat it wrapper and all. But Cortés and Moctezuma did not eat quesadillas – there simply was no cheese among the hundreds of dishes at Moctezuma’s table. The quesadilla had to wait until Mexico developed a dairy industry. And that brings us to another unusual thing about quesadillas: Mexico is the only lactose-intolerant part of the world where cheese plays an important part in the local cuisine.

Do I need a passport to visit Baja California?

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The simple answer for all visitors from the U.S. and for most visitors from Canada is No, you don’t need no pinche passport. Here at the border, we see people crossing all the time without one. Across the border, at Across the Border, Anna Cearley has been collecting up reports from readers whose experiences confirm what we say.

And yet people continue to ask and the Internet’s self-appointed experts continue to give the same mistaken answer. The confusion has been caused from what both governments have been telling us. The U.S. government puts up frightening-sounding websites like “GetYouHome.gov” to talk about their “requirement” for “WHTI-compliant documents” and the Mexican government talks about enhancing security in order to continue the disastrous war on drugs. Nonetheless, people keep crossing into California and Baja California just as they have always been doing.

Those of us in The Real Tijuana cross the border, collectively, pretty much every day. We are Mexican citizens, U.S. citizens, and dual citizens. Our documentation varies but only the Mexican nationals among us use WHTI-compliant identification (laser visas and green cards) – the rest of us cross with expired U.S. passports, one of which is more than thirty years old. We have never been sent to Secondary for not being WHTI-compliant. We often see other people crossing with just a birth certificate.

Since the same questions have been cropping up over and over again, we thought it might be helpful to present a FAQ on the subject as it applies to our beat, the border between California and Baja California.

We do not intend to discourage the use of passports – we agree with the Mexican government that the passport is the “ideal international identity document” – but we disagree with irrational impediments to tourism and we are categorically opposed to any restriction on fronterizo culture. Since it is to the government’s benefit that its citizens carry passports, it behooves our governments to facilitate our access to this document. And yet both the Mexican and the U.S. governments place escalating burdens on the individual citizen instead.