BY LESLIE JAMISON
ILLUSTRATIONS BY BENJAMIN MARRA
SAN YSIDRO
I’m at the busiest land border in the world. I get across quickly because I’m headed in the right direction, which is to say the wrong direction. I’m going where no one wants to stay. On the opposite side of Highway 5, a sparkling line of gridlock points north toward the United States of America.
Over there, the traffic lanes are supermarket aisles. You can buy popcorn, cookies, lollipops, cigarettes. You want coffee? You can get it from a boy barely tall enough to reach your car window. You want the paper in Spanish? Great. In English? Maybe. You want an animal-print towel? There are hundreds.
I’m headed to a literary gathering held in Tijuana and Mexicali that’s been billed as an encuentro. I’ve gathered this means something between “festival” and “conference,” but there’s no word in English that does justice to encuentro. It coaxes the word for “story” (cuento) out of the word for “encounter” (encontrar) and hints at what will happen at this upheaval of debauchery and roundtables: Stories will be currency, people will be confused, people will be signing books, people will be making book deals, people will be talking shit about Mexicali and wishing they were in Oaxaca. People will be having sex. Nothing will happen on time. Cookies will be served with Styrofoam cups of coffee in the morning. Cocaine will be served in bathroom stalls at night.
Videos by VICE
I hear that Tijuana has gotten much better in the past two years, which is what the American media has recently begun to say as well. But variations and fluctuations are inevitably glossed over in conversations where we, up north, talk about how bad it’s gotten “down there.” Of course,
down there isn’t one place but a thousand, and the truth is it’s gotten better in Tijuana and much worse in Tamaulipas and simply stayed horrible in Ciudad Juárez, where life is so violent it’s hard to understand the gradations between bad and worse.
I hear something interesting about living in Tijuana during the worst months—not so much about living under the constant threat of violence but about talking about living under constant threat of violence: It’s impossible to speak when you’re still in the middle of it.
This is what it was like in Tijuana, a few years back: Even when people got together for dinner, somewhere private, they wouldn’t focus on what their lives had become: scared to go drinking, scared to go to work, scared to catch a bus or buy a pack of cigarettes or cross the fucking street. Now they can talk. Speaking is easier when the worst has been pushed out of earshot—past the point of being taunted, by delusions of safety, into some vengeful return.
TIJUANA
Avenida Revolución is lined with the hollowed husks of cheap tourism. Empty bars stand like relics of a vanished civilization felled by its own hedonistic excess: silent dance floors framed by thatched walls and faux-jungle decor, balconies full of tiki torches and flapping banners advertising tequila happy hours no one is attending. The clubs feel like foreclosed homes. The tourists have been scared away. Some must still come, I suppose, but I don’t see any of them on the streets. The Centro Cultural Tijuana has a surprisingly lovely domed ceiling fitted with squares of glass that filter the sunlight into jeweled colors: fuchsia, tangerine, deep mint. But the only people I see inside are men selling bus tickets to other places.
Everyone is hawking wares along the streets, but no one is buying. If I wanted, I could get all kinds of things: a zebra-striped burro, postcards showing ten pairs of titties and the red stump of a Tecate can in the sand, a little frog carved by an old man before my very eyes and fitted with an actual cigarette between its wooden lips. I could get a t-shirt printed with the stoic face of Pancho Villa or the inevitable face of Che, a t-shirt with a joke about beer, another t-shirt with a joke about beer, a t-shirt with a joke about tequila, a t-shirt with a joke about mixing beer and tequila, or a t-shirt that gets to the heart of what all this drinking is about (in English: “I Fuck on the First Date”). Conveniently enough, there’s a hotel across from all these kitsch bodegas that advertises rooms for 99 pesos an hour. I don’t see anyone going in or coming out.
The whole time I am thinking of Tijuana two years ago, the never talking. All across the border, other towns are still in the thick of this unspeaking. The people who call Ciudad Juárez the most dangerous city in the world are the ones who don’t live there.
I think maybe if I walk the streets where someone was afraid, where an entire city was afraid, I’ll maybe understand the fear a little better. This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It’s a quick fix of empathy. We take it like a shot of tequila, or a bump of coke from the key to a stranger’s home. We want the inebriation of presence to dissolve the fact of difference. Sometimes the city fucks on the first date, and sometimes it doesn’t. But always, always, we wake up in the morning and find we didn’t know it at all.
I wake up in the morning and get huevos con jamón at a place called Tijuana Tilly’s. I could have gotten a waffle but I didn’t. I could have gotten pan francés with whipped cream, but I didn’t. I’m going authentic. I’m eating with a publicist named Paola and a novelist named Adán. They both get waffles. Paola tells me she can’t believe that DF (Mexico City) is quite possibly the safest place in Mexico these days. Not what she’s used to. Adán tells me Mexicali, where we’re going to meet the other writers for the conference, is relatively safe as well. Relatively is an important word around here.
Mexicali, in any case, is two hours east. It first exploded during Prohibition, just like Tijuana, but otherwise they’re not much alike. Adán’s Spanish is fast and I’m not sure if I’m getting the gist of what he’s saying—or at least, the right gist—because it seems like he’s talking about an underground town full of Chinese people. As it turns out, my Spanish was close: During the 1920s, Chinese laborers outnumbered Mexicans in Mexicali by a ratio of eight to one, and a network of subterranean tunnels connected their opium dens and brothels to those eager and prohibited Americans living just across the border.
Tijuana blurs. Once I leave, I’m eager to talk about it—the way you’re eager to talk about a dream when you wake up, afraid it will dissolve if you don’t pin the details to their places, sketch a path between absurdities. As soon as I leave it, I think, what was that city? It was an unlit hallway next to an office with broken windows (my hostel) and a plate of shredded pork cooked with oranges (my dinner). It was a band composed of young men called La Sonrisa Vertical (the Vertical Smile) and a band composed of old men, I don’t know what they were called, who asked repeatedly for more Charles Shaw Shiraz and played the hell out of their electric guitars. They had two eggs perched on their amp, maybe raw, maybe hardboiled, not making any sense but belonging absolutely just where they were.
MEXICALI
More
From VICE
-
Screenshot: EmberTalks x Steam -
Screenshot: Curveball Games -
Screenshot: Atlus, SEGA -
Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
