Last Friday started as most Fridays do: me tickling my sister at 6:30 am until she squirms, yells, and says, “fine, fine, I’m getting up.” 7:30 am and we’ve already dropped her off … Laura and I are cutting through the morning fog (usually there is much more of this morning fog in San Diego’s “gray may” but this year has been pure blue) on the I-5 south listening to Morning Edition on NPR. After Laura’s class she comes meet me at Influx Cafe where I am usually screaming at my laptop because it’s not doing what I want it to do. Laura pulls out her book (currently reading Vivir Para Contarla or “Living to Tell the Tale” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez) while I chant: “just five more minutes, just five more minutes.” This means, ‘in half an hour I’ll still be yelling at my laptop but I’ll give up and we can go on our way.’

Usually we would go home, or go to work, or go to the gym, but last Friday the plan was to go to Tijuana to pick up Laura’s plane ticket from the Aero California office in TJ’s upscale Plaza del Rio. We took the trolley – which back in the day trolley owner John D. Sprekels (San Diego was called his “one man town”) used to shape San Diego as he wished – from City College to San Ysidro Border crossing, pictured here.

The heat was oppressive as we walked across the ugly overpass and through the clinking metal rotating doors which let you into Mexico, but won’t let you out. We both had Manu Chao’s song Welcome to Tijuana stuck in our head.

If I had to describe Tijuana in one word I would say “Khaki.” Somehow, crossing the border is like stepping into an alternate reality where everything is sepia colored. Even the most strident colors are transformed into subtle earth tones. I’ve never understood that about Tijuana, but it’s this browness that permeates its character.

Walking alongside a mother and her five-year-old daughter as we entered Laura’s country, she asked them the best way for us to get to Plaza Del Rio. It was a hot day for walking the woman replied but she showed us the general path anyways. Walking along the shop and vendor lined footpath that crosses Tijuana’s mostly dried up concrete riverbed we were bombarded with: “Amigos, come have a cerveza or two. Amigos, two for one margaritas, best in town. Amigos, please, come sit down, many lunch specials.” Laura was clearly getting bothered that they didn’t recognize her as Mexican.

As I said in the previous post, there is nothing geometric about TJ. Navigating its streets is a testament of faith in your inner compass. You pick out a spot on the hillside above and head that direction, hoping that you’ll bump into what you’re looking for. By now, Laura and I know enough of Tijuana’s landmarks that we generally tend to bump into something familiar which will guide us to somewhere else, eventually a destination. We walked first through the produce section of town, then through the automotive repair section where East County Gringos and Chicanos alike bring their low-riders for paint jobs and cheap chrome. Then miraculously we hit Paseo de los Heroes, TJ’s largest and ritziest thoroghfare. Unfortunately, there are so few Americans who have ever been off of Revolucion to see what else Tijuana has to offer.

Paseo de los Heroes is where old Tijuana and new Tijuana come to meet. It is where you will find a Senor old enough to remember the anarchist/socialist takeover of TJ in 1911 painting a billboard right across the street from a xerox corporate building. I should pause here, because so few people know about the Magonista’s anarchist takeover of Mexicali and Tijuana during the first years of the Mexican Revolution. Many anarchists, including Emma Goldman herself, came to San Diego in vain hope of extending Baja’s Rebellion north of the border. Even Jack London wrote a manifesto supporting the Magonistas:

We socialists, anarchists, hoboes, chicken thieves, outlaws and undesirable citizens of the U.S. are with you heart and soul. You will notice that we are not respectable. Neither are you. No revolutionary can possibly be respectable in these days of the reign of property…I for one wish there were more outlaws of the sort that formed the gallant band that took Mexicali.

Today’s Tijuana – especially around suburban clean Paseo de los Heroes is (unfortunately) a much more passive environment. I can guarantee that if you were magically teleported to Plaza del Rio, you would think that you were still in the United States. It only took about 10 minutes to get the ticket at the (thank god it’s air condtioned) office of Aero California. We resisted Sanborns in favor of diez peso fish tacos and then headed over to the Centro Cultural to check out what the free exhibit was.

And I’m damn glad we did. Just a few days before we saw a thought provoking border art exhibit entitled Rules of the Game by Gustavo Artigas at the Downtown Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibit at Tijuana’s Centro Cultural was just as impressive. (and both are free ) There are two exhibits – one of which are modernist paintings inspired by the border (La Puta Frontera was my favorite) and the other a collection of hanging banners from artists throughout Latin America expressing how American media and consumerism has effected their own cultures. Many of them played on American ads with Adbustersish humor.

We took a taxi collective back to the border. The line wasn’t that bad. Walking out of the Immigration building and into the daylight and colors of San Diego, Laura said her knees were shaking. She said they always shake whenever she goes across the border, that she’s sure this time they’ll say no. I so often take it for granted that the possibility even exists. That there are people out there saying you can or can’t enter this country. That is something I have never had to deal with or even think about before. We got onto a very crowded trolley heading back up to downtown and I pulled out my iPod to listen to some Propellarheads while staring out into daily lives of passerby of Imperial Beach, Chula Vista, and Barrio Logan.