San Diego Reader

Why Tijuana? That’s what everybody asks me these days. I know. These days, the headlines about Tijuana feature murder, mayhem, and misery. But here’s the thing. These days, when nobody’s going to Tijuana, wouldn’t you know it? I can’t help thinking about Tijuana…

At the risk of sounding nostalgic, I’m getting nostalgic about the place. Like, in the Blind Lady Ale House in Normal Heights the other night, I got to talking with this binational fellow, Gonzalo. About, natch, TJ. “The TJ I love is no more,” he said. “It has lost its identity. Look what’s gone: the bullring, the Jai Alai, Agua Caliente racetrack, the casino. TJ never was beautiful, but at least it was different. And now, nobody goes down there anymore. It’s empty.”

He got me thinking. What is Tijuana turning into? East L.A.? What about the violence? And, yes, if you’re a turista, you do have that thing in the pit of your stomach. Let’s call it wariness. You wonder, Why risk it? What is Tijuana to me, anyway?

Well…why climb Mount Everest? Because it’s there. And TJ is here, and it’s so much more than a rock. This place where we live — on either side of this crazy line — it’s like ET and Elliott, fingers outstretched, touching. Ping! Two civilizations meeting. When you go through that clanking gate, magic happens.

Bottom line is, I just love the place, problems, differences, and all. So think of these stories as pictures at an exhibition. A retrospective, okay? Scenes from one guy’s experience over the past few — heck, several — years stepping across the line to the Village by the Sea. Ti Wan, as the Kumeyaay called it.

SIXTEEN YEARS ON THE BRIDGE

Most times I go down, there he is on the footbridge across the Tijuana River, like a good omen. Jorge. He has a movie star’s face, with intelligent eyes and long dark wavy hair. And useless legs. He lost them to polio, when he was one year old. He looks 30 but says he’s 40. He scoots himself around on a skateboard, with his bag, a heavy construction-glove for his scooting hand, and his box of cellophane-wrapped four-tablet Chiclet chewing-gum packs. The box is still two-thirds full. Not a good sign at this end of the day. “Hey, Mr. Ed,” he says. “¿Como estás?”

“Hey there, Mr. Jorge,” I say. “Muy bien, gracias. And you?”

“Mas o menos,” he says. And I know mas o menos means hard times. I know he’d be much cheerier if things were even a little bit good. It’d be muy bien, or excelente, or bien, bien. Not today. “No tourists,” he says. “They stop coming. This is worse than after 9/11.”

For seven years I’ve been saying hi to him here, with the dry hills of El Norte as a backdrop on one side, and the giant national flag of Mexico and TJ’s oversized bicycle-wheel reloj (clock) on the other. Oh, and then there’s the garbage-strewn concrete spillway below, the proud Tijuana River wafting up its interesting smells.

This bridge is a good-enough location for a business like Jorge’s — selling gum as a way of inviting donations. It concentrates the foot traffic of people heading toward the bars of downtown. But it’s not the greatest place for a 40-year-old legless man to spend his working days.

“How are your children?” I ask.

He says they’re fine, but I have to wonder how he gets by. With a wife, kids, and a couple of grandkids, Chiclets can’t do it. He’s the only Mexican man selling Chiclets here; the others are Mixtec mothers. Their children weave back and forth across the bridge as point men, to keep after you if you show the slightest hesitation or weakness.

I buy a couple of packets. Hand Jorge the three single dollars I have in my pocket. At this point, I usually head on toward Mischief Lane, where there’s good eats, and where Dr. Solorio the dentist has his business — when I can afford him.

But on this day, Jorge is packing up and leaving. Turns out we’re going in the same direction.

“You walking to the centro?” he asks, when we get to Avenida Negrete.

“Yes,” I say.

“Me too. I’m going home.”

So we walk — well, I walk. Jorge scoots along on his skateboard, his legs crossed meditation-fashion, using his hands to push himself. When we come to bumps — and there are a lot of them, lumps, broken curbs, and potholes that his skateboard can’t navigate — he lifts, levers, and tips himself up and down like a gymnast.

We get up to Third, then where a little alley, Callejón Zeta, dives off it, he stops. “My house is down here,” he says. “Would you like to come?”

I can’t believe a callejón so close to el centro would be unpaved, but this one is. It’s narrow, dusty, with cinderblock walls and little houses oh-so-close to you on either side. Jorge maneuvers his way along until we come to a white, wrought-iron security door. He pushes it open and rolls on in. I follow him down a low, narrow passage, where washing hangs on a line strung from the ceiling. We enter a square room. There’s one large bed, a bookshelf with a TV on it showing one of those Mexican telenovelas, a microwave, peach-pink walls, a torn picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe, other religious pictures, a microwave, a fridge, and, just this side of the door to a second room, crowded four-level shelves, a bottle of gas for cooking, and a stove.

Two women, a couple of kids, and a baby sit around, on the bed and in a chair. “I am Juana Ynez Gonzalez,” the younger woman says from the bed. “Jorge’s wife. And this is my old friend Maricela Navidad.” Maricela, seated in the chair, extends her hand.

Jorge offers me a soft drink. Soon we’re into how he keeps a family going, selling Chiclets. “We pay $240 a month to live here,” he says.

“And every week we’re late, we pay another $10,” says Juana Ynez.

“But what can you do?” Jorge says. “I have to be close to the bridge. Otherwise, I can’t get there. I depend on it.”

Jorge was born in the state of Colima, on the mainland Pacific coast of Mexico, in a fishing port called Tecománpeseta. “My dad was a campesino. He was hired to climb coconut trees and cut down the coconuts.” Jorge says he was fine till he caught polio at the age of one. “It’s a picturesque village,” he says, “but if you can’t climb the mountain and collect limes, or chiles, or bring down loads, it is impossible to survive there. I went to a home for the disabled when I was a young kid, but every day they put us onto the streets to beg. For me, it was impossible to survive in Colima. So I came to TJ when I was 19. Here, it’s difficult but not impossible.”

He found work in a maquiladora. “But they took advantage of my disability. Where they paid others 1500 pesos a week [about $120], they paid me 480 pesos. That’s about $40. It was discrimination, and Mexico has laws, but nobody enforces them. Back then I had to pay $100 a month for rent and pay for transport to get there and back, and food, and water and light…. I was fired after five years for complaining, and you know what? Selling Chiclets on the bridge, with no boss, and no transport, and not having to get up at 3:30 in the morning just to get to work, I made more money. Until the economy and the violence. The last three years have been bad. Really bad. Wednesdays, for some reason, I usually come home without a single peseta.”

That’s when the family, and especially his son — the younger one who has a job as a waiter — have to pitch so that no one goes hungry.

“I was a waitress,” says Juana Ynez. “We met one night when I went for a beer and a dance at the Valentina, across from the Adelita in the Zona Norte. I knew right there that he was serious. And he has been a good father. Yes, I have to help him with his disability, and he has terrible hemorrhoids, sitting on his patineta [skateboard], but he has not failed us. I love him too much. And every day, every day, he goes up to that bridge. After 16 years, that takes courage.”

“I don’t believe in being sad,” Jorge says. “I have life, and I have las fuerzas [my powers] to fight for it. And it’s mostly good on the bridge. People know me by now, and they buy Chiclets when they can.”

But, man, I’m thinking this guy’s a hero. I couldn’t do it.

This is when I notice Maricela, the neighbor, near tears. You can see flashes of a beauty that must have floored the guys back in the day. The big eyes, the swept-back hair, the laugh lines that still get exercise — just not now.

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