Matthew Suárez

Matthew Suárez
Matthew Suárez is a writer, musician and photographer who worked in Los Angeles as paparazzo for Bauer-Griffin and National Photo Group (2007-2011). His celebrity pictures appeared in newspapers and magazines all over the world. For the Reader he covers music, food, border and Baja stories. He also writes in his own blog, Matingas.com. As a musician he holds a BA in classical guitar under the tutelage of O. Nicholas Raths from Saint John's University. He is also the creator of Tijuana Adventure, private tours in TJ.

Articles by Matthew Suárez

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Landslide buries Tijuana neighborhood

Residents ready to lynch looters, contractor

There are neighborhoods in the hills of Tijuana that always seem to be on the verge of collapse. Narrow streets that lead up steep hills give you a sense of vertigo as you’re riding a ...

Tijuana does Hollywood… again

Local social media responds

Tijuana’s National Chamber of Commerce has unveiled its plan to build a Tijuana sign on the hill of Cerro Colorado similar to the famed Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. The proposed sign will be similar ...

Tijuana's ambivalence toward marijuana

"Legal in your country, but it’s not legal here."

“I’ve been crossing weed [into Tijuana] since before it went [fully] legal,” says Jorge Fierro, a 23-year-old Mexican-American who resides in Tijuana. “Marijuana in Mexico is sh*tty and you don’t know what quality or how ...

Maguana has gone to Heaven

Tijuana’s famous homeless woman dies

Homeless Tijuana icon, Maria Luisa Castro, also known as “La Maguana,” passed away on March 21 at the age of 61. Ladened with mental diseases and infections like HIV and schizophrenia, Maria Luisa died in ...

Tijuana morgue can't keep up

45 days to claim a corpse, but the state of emergency reduced it to 15 days

‘The smell doesn’t reach all the way to my house,” comments Diego Silverio, a writer and high school teacher who lives a couple blocks uphill from Tijuana’s morgue. “But [the smell] is unbearable when I ...

Irish reporters seek out border-wall prototypes

We were approached by federales a couple of minutes after filming.

“In Europe, all we hear is about Trump’s wall,” commented Eimear Lowe, an Irish reporter for RTÉ. “We came to Mexico to find out what people here have to say.” Lowe and Ken (her cameraman) ...

Tijuana's Chiki Jai goes bye-bye

Temporary closure was planned for famed restaurant, fire was not

I never had a meal at the famed Tijuana restaurant Chiki Jai, and now I never will. The restaurant burned down on January 19th. Founded in 1947, Chiki Jai (“little party” in Basque) was a ...

Self-deported to TJ

My friends called me stupid

My friend Jaime crossed the border illegally in late 2015. He didn’t climb the fence, sneak through a tunnel, or swim around the wall. He walked up to the Otay gate and told a Customs ...

Tijuana rain + garbage + rats = chaos

Planned water outage kicks in after the storm

Many Tijuana residents woke up on Wednesday (January 10th) to find garbage in the streets and no running water in their homes. The state’s water utility, known by its initials CESPT, had planned to suspend ...

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