skip to content
Kiosk Magazine - UCIrvine Read the magazine
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4

Imagining Tijuana
(conclusion)

I had a hot dog earlier this evening, in front of the Cultural Center in the River District. Hot dogs are a Tijuana phenomenon, an amalgamation of American ingredients transformed by alchemy into a Tijuanan tradition. These little pink dogs, always wrapped in a thin slice of bacon, are fried crisp on a thick slab of steel. You’ll get your dog on a spongy, steamed bun, too hot to hold. At their best, the cook smears the doughy bun with a layer of mayonnaise and proceeds to fry that too, toasting it to a crusty brown. He’ll top it with a squirt of mayonnaise, ketchup, chile sauce, onions, tomatoes. One dollar. The result is an interplay of flavors and textures, sweet and spicy, that shames the American original. I ate my hot dog this evening, hiding in the shadows, waiting for Delfino.

Delfino had invited me to attend a guitar recital, the second evening of Tijuana’s weeklong festival of classical guitar. Tonight’s performance was the capstone of a day of master classes and lectures attracting a Who’s Who of Mexican and American guitarists. Delfino, while conscious of the dangers of the city, refuses to alter his life out of fear. Others are not so brave. The concert hall, sold out in past performances, was only half-full. Attendees carrying guitars in worn cases addressed each other as maestro. When the lights dimmed, a man strode out onto the stage, sat in a straight-backed kitchen chair and softly plucked his guitar’s nylon strings for two hours. Delfino was enthralled, “I think I’m going to cry,” he’d exclaimed. I struggled to stay awake. This was a glimpse into the city’s arts and cultural community, a part of Tijuana life I hadn’t seen before. But this evening that begun with the concert, then dinner while listening to salsa-master El Gume, has rapidly degraded into a kind of after-concert boy’s night out.

Guillermo eases the car around the corner on to Callejón Coahuila, the heart of the Zona Rosa, and into the bright lights and flashing signs. This street, an alley really, one lane wide and one way only, bustles with loud ranchera music, trumpets and accordians. Shouts and laughter resonate from the tiled walls, men walk the terrazzo sidewalk, popping in and out of bars. A queue of cars perhaps half a mile long crawls along the alley, the occupants concealed behind the pulsating lights reflected in the glass of their windows. Prostitution is tolerated throughout Mexico, but here in La Coahuila it is perfectly and completely legal. This is a formal zona de tolerancia, an officially designated tolerance zone, where whorehouses and hookers are condoned. Tijuana has made efforts to clean this area up, to make it more respectable, to compel the streetwalkers--here called paraditas or ‘little standers’--to solicit from inside a hotel, bar or brothel. In fact the city banned street-walking for a time in 2004, but protests erupted, including a march on City Hall by about 200 prostitutes threatening to strip on the capitol steps if the city didn’t relent and lift the ban. Ultimately, the prostitutes prevailed. On Callejón Coahuila tonight, we creep past the paraditas, standing elbow to elbow, lining the street, both sides, for blocks. Hundreds of them. Young women—girls—in slutty three-inch platform pumps and slinky little tank dresses; they seem, if I had to guess, about 20 years old on average. They certainly don’t fit my conception of skanky Tijuana hookers. There is an unexpected innocence in their look, sad really, melancholy. These girls look like anyone’s daughters or little sisters, tarted-up as if for a masquerade.

Mexico, contrary to popular misconceptions, is not a poor country. It’s a middle-income nation, middle-class; its economy is larger than that of Australia, Canada, or South Korea. And Tijuana, in comparison to the rest of Mexico, is booming--it has an unemployment rate of only about one percent. No longer are the masses of migrants coming from mainland Mexico to Tijuana using the city as a staging ground for a bolt across the border. Yes, Tijuana’s population is still growing uncontrollably, burgeoning in fact, straining systems and services, but these new migrants are coming for jobs right here in the city, jobs in the maquiladoras -- the assembly plants that dot the U.S.-Mexico border. Unemployment rates are deceiving, however. On average, maquiladora jobs pay about $15 a day—far less than you’d need to live in this city, expensive as it is by Mexican standards. Prostitution pays ten or twenty times that wage.

Looking out the car window at the paraditas, I think of them arriving in this city, full of hopes for a better life, and ending up here destitute dejected, and desperate. Maybe that’s just me, a bourgeois liberal American, projecting a story onto them. I can’t help, though, thinking about their name; paraditas; parar, the root verb, you could translate as ‘to end up.’ And the paraditas, then, could be those who ended up, ended up here in La Coahuila. The guys watch me and laugh, laugh at the look on my face. I want to ask how much, you know, how much it costs, but I don’t want there to be any mistake. I don’t want any of these guys to take my curiosity for any other kind of interest. Instead I just gawk out the car window at the blank faces of the girls lined up along the alley, one after another after another. I’m not appalled; you’d think I’d be appalled, but in a way, this is the Tijuana I expected, the underbelly, maybe, but the underbelly of the Tijuana I always thought I knew.

Delfino and Sergio and Guillermo, and Luis and all the bright young things on computers and cell phones in Starbucks, and the restaurants and the karaoke, somehow don’t stand in opposition to La Coahuila or La Revu or even the violence, but exist with it, commingled and intertwined. As we round the corner at the end of the alley, Delfino points at the sign post and shouts, “Someday I’m going to have my picture taken right there, under the Coahuila sign, with my guitar in my hands!” I laugh. I’m envisioning not some metalhead, Rock On!, fist raised, with a rock and roll ax around his neck, but Professor Delfino Rodriguez, el maestro, in a tuxedo, seated under the street sign in a straight-backed chair, Spanish guitar on his knee. I can’t stop laughing. Maestro Delfino on this corner, dolled-up hookers and drunks and johns behind him. Man, this is Tijuana.