Stairs to nowhere

“The Shock” by Kinsee Morlan

Prepare yourself for some garbled stream-of-consciousness crap: I drove 15 hours yesterday. I was in Ohio for a cousin’s wedding. It was lovely — that’s my programmed response — because really, it was a tad sterile. But then, everything seems sterile in comparison to Tijuana. Look up at the girl playing with the Elmo doll. I took that photo a few weeks ago at a bar called Chez. The place isn’t so much a bar as it is a broken-down two-story concrete building that sells 2-for-one drinks called nasty and offensive things liked chinga tu madre, plays death metal mixed with the occasional Portishead for the emotional rockers wearing the Chez-required all-black ensemble and has bathrooms that would make even the most hardened pee-anywhere partier think twice about breaking the seal.

Upstairs, the balcony is surrounded by chain-link fence — to keep the moshing or just straight-up fighting from becoming deadly of course.

So, the Elmo doll is actually an old car battery veiled by a hollow Elmo doll and that laughing girl up there is holding onto two metal bars that carry a pretty damned strong electric current. The guy holding Elmo cranks up the current slowly until the person holding the metal bars can’t take it anymore. It’s a novelty — a semi-dangerous novelty I suppose — and I absolutely love it. It makes me laugh every time I see it.

Television is so goddamned boring. Life in the United States can be so painstakingly dry and empty and predictable and planned. So many rules. We’re always so careful. And while I’m at it, let me just say that I absolutely hate railings. Stairs without railings — which you’ll find all over Tijuana — are so much more beautiful and interesting looking. I love stairs without railings.

The 15-hour drive wasn’t all that bad. Tornadoes in Ohio made my flight to Denver long and daunting, but once I slept for a few hours I was ready for the road. Denver, by the way, is lovely — and that’s not a programmed response at all. The dry desert-meets-mountain terrain will always and forever be home to me. The color pallet is much more muted than the dark greens and grays of Ohio or the bright blues of Southern California, but the Colorado countryside holds an inherently rustic kind of beauty that I’ve never found anywhere else — not even in the old deserts of Arizona.

Nevada was nice. Vegas, as always, disgusted me with its over-the-topness. There are radio stations, by the way, several radio stations, whose whole purpose of being is to play music for those driving 80 miles an hour down Interstate 15. They’re called The Drive, or Highway and they play riffy old butt-rock that reminds me of the guys in high school who wore John Deere hats and shirtless tanks that blew in the wind just enough to see not one, but two of their nipples. I truly cannot stand Vegas. Trump’s golden tower caught the sun and almost caused me to run into the concrete median. Screw you Mr. Trump.

The towns just outside of Vegas, though, those towns are cool. There’s one place — and I can’t, for the life of me, remember the name…Baker maybe — that’s nothing but gas stations, fast food places and an RV joint/truck stop/restaurant called Mad Greek, a well-marketed roadside attraction whose owners must pay tons more for their dozens of billboards than they do for the actual building itself.

Utah — I forgot about Utah. Utah snowed on me. I grew up a snowbaorder in the mountains of Colorado but always meant to make it to Utah for what I’ve heard is some pretty killer powder. Utah is part red-rock Mars, part rolling-hill Americana — I dig it for its strangeness. Mormons aren’t bad…they’re just silly.

And California. Ah California. It really isn’t at all like the middle of the country. It’s not even an estranged uncle or a red-headed stepchild. California is a surfer who reads too much. California is a hippie who drives a Volvo, a CEO who shops at Whole Foods, an OC kid who uses words like “like” while describing the finer points of existentialism and an over-medicated psychoanalyst who secretly loves scratching his own dandruff — it’s all those things rolled into one. It’s one giant burrito that I love to sink my teethe into, but I can’t do it every day. Too much of California would make me as soft as a burrito filled with fries and beans.

While I was driving for 15 hours in my new car with a broken CD player, I listened to my good friend NPR. Ten thousand people were killed in an earthquake in China while my wheels spun across the United States. Thousands more suffered in Burma post-cyclone. And a few dozen picked up the pieces after the tornadoes ripped across the Midwest.

But those stories didn’t touch me. They can’t. I can’t let them. If I let myself feel the sorrow of all those deaths I would collapse.

What touched me was the story about Nuala O-Faolain, an Irish journalist, author and feminist who died May 9. After listening to old interviews with Nuala I decided that, if I ever squeeze a kid out from between my thighs and the kid happens to be a girl, I’ll name her Nuala.

Nuala is my homegirl. She always wanted a normal life — husband, kids, house and all of that — but life didn’t work out for her that way. She was probably infertile — she wasn’t quite sure, but her years of unrestrained, unprotected sex unofficially confirmed her suspicions — and she ended up falling in love with both men and women.

What I really liked about Nuala was how she talked about her impending death from inoperable lung cancer. She quite honestly said it sucked. Life sucks because of death. Knowing — really knowing — you’re going to die isn’t easy to deal with at all when you’re a rational woman who treats Heaven and Hell like the cute little stories they are. All Nuala could say was that she hoped she got to say goodbye to everyone and that death would come to her when she was alone, so she could deal with it alone. That’s the way it should be.

Death, like the important parts of life, have to be dealt with alone. Nuala reminded me of that. She said most men and women fill themselves or give themselves meaning by getting married and having children. They make raising the children the purpose of their lives. That’s fine. Respectable even. But what about those of us who can’t or won’t have kids? What the hell are we here for? Nuala decided to be a writer and gave her funny, brutally honest yet magically poetic voice to thousands of people like me who needed it. We need to hear that we’re not alone every once in awhile, especially after being surrounded by white people in Ohio who have been doing the same thing for hundreds of years and will do the same thing for hundreds more. Grow up. Go to school. Get a job. Get married. Buy a house. Have kids. Retire. Die.

I’ll most likely do the same, but at least I pretended otherwise even if but for a moment.

“Playas for Life” by Kinsee Morlan

Wow. I made it. I survived. There was one point when I didn’t think I’d make it. I was in a tent somewhere outside of Rosarito, and as an inordinate amount of flashlights streamed by the broken flap in the tent, I tried my hardest to look away from the lights and focus on the rapid-fire Spanish the crowd of Tijuanenses surrounding me were speaking.

I picked up every sixth word or so and began to freak out as my mind went into dark places it doesn’t belong. I felt alone, alienated, confused, stupid and out of place.

Full disclosure: I may have partaken in the pot brownies. Maybe. I’m not admitting anything here, I’m just saying that I was suffering from the worst case of paranoia I’ve felt in a long, long time.

As Goa Gil played his speedy set of spiritual techno outside on a stage built into the trees, I sat inside that damned tent, freaking out like a chihuahua on crack.

“What the hell am I doing here?” I started to think, as more and more kids tried to talk to me in Spanish and I was barely able to respond.

But as 2 a.m. turned into 4 a.m., I calmed down and eventually slipped into my roll as the outside observer. A beautiful little lesbian Tijuanense crawled into the tent and talked to me about what she wanted out of life. She tried her best to speak in English while I tried my best to pull out my Spanish.

And the boy who had invited me to the two-day rave — isn’t there always a boy behind these type of things? — eventually got me to calm down, too. We talked about cow bones (he says he uses cow bones in the handmade electric guitars he makes in Playas) and other such nonsense and we intermittently tried our best to go back outside the tent into the world of black lights, loud music, stars and trees, only to gyrate for a few moments before we’d give each other this look like, “Man, it was just so much nicer inside that tent, wasn’t it?”

In the morning, when the dust from the all-night dancing and partying had settled, I finally got to see the true beauty of the place. Apparently, every year the same party promoter rents out a ranch off of kilometer 81 on the free road from Rosarito to Ensenada and they invite the Great Goa Gil to play. And the kids (as in kids as young as 14) come swarming –they pack up their little tents, or casitas as they call them — ‘Where’s your house?’ they kept asking me all night — and sleeping bags and head out for two days of dancing.

When we first arrived, our tent had been one of just a dozen or so, but by the time I woke up we were surrounded by hundreds of tents filled with kids who would have been full-blown hippies if only they’d been born two decades earlier. And for a moment, while picking my way through the squashed Tecate cans and empty plastic water bottles, I felt as young and as free as they all seemed.

“The Leaning Tower of Booze” by Kinsee Morlan

Life without a car in Southern California is impossible. Life without a car when you work in Southern California but live in Tijuana is even less possible.

My engine blew up a few days ago. My life feels like it’s blowing up, too. But before you tell me to stop being a whiny pussy, let me squeeze in a few more complaints.

First off, I recently got audited. Yep, the IRS does actually care about the money you make, even if it’s less than 30,00 a year. I guess I learned that the hard way. Now I owe money, and I can add that to the increasing number that is not unlike the National Debt. Seriously, student loans are sucking my blood. Credit cards are eating my soul and now the IRS is munching on my heart.

Living in debt is the American way, but it’s finally hit the point where I feel like it’s hopeless. I’m tempted to drive down the coast of Baja California and never come back. First, of course, I’ll pull out a molar and fake my death. That seems more logical than actually attempting to pay off my debt.

As if that crap weren’t enough, the Border Patrol agent in the Sentri line almost took my Sentri card away. As my friend put it, it’s amazing how techonologically savvy credit cards companies are, but our own government still can’t figure this whole internet thing out. My card was stolen, I reapplied for a new card, they issued me a new card, but the system still thinks it was stolen. Awesome. So let me just drive out to Otay when I don’t have a car and waste an hour or two explaining how this mixup isn’t my fault. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

I’m going to get a new car, but getting the new registration and plates and insurance and then taking it back out to Sentri so they can approve it just seems so freaking daunting. I hate beauracracy. I hate lines and official forms and my life, at least for the next month, will be filled with them.

And on top of all this crap, I have crap in my lungs and nose and throat. I went to the doctor after two weeks of it and she said I’d be fine. It’s been a week. I’m still not fine. I’d like to stop choking on phlegm if it’s at all possible. Thanks for nothing, doc.

Yes, there are starving babies in Africa. My life isn’t so bad, I know, but now and again I’m allowed to bitch.

The way I found out about the shooting in Tijuana early Sunday morning was through a concerned email from my mom. Hours earlier, I had been at a house party where a friend of mine had been telling me about the time he was kidnapped in Tijuana and taken to a house filled with Americans who’d been kidnapped, too. He said some men dressed as cops nabbed him and told him to call people he knew and tell them to bring cash.

He obviously survived the incident, but that friend now lives in San Diego, and I completely understand why. Tijuana is dangerous, I acknowledge and accept that, but it doesn’t mean people from the United States, people from San Diego especially, should turn their backs on the city. Ninety percent of the drugs — the stuff the cartel is fighting over — is on its way to junior-high stoners and college-aged coke heads in Estados Unidos. Globalization should be about more than just sharing goods — black market or not — it should be about sharing resources. Our neighbors obviously need some help.

“All in a Day’s Work” by Kinsee Morlan

This morning, my car pool from Tijuana got called into secondary inspection. My driving companion and I watched as Border Patrol agents slowly drove a small green four-doored car in front of us. A drug dog one Border Agent was playing with started going nuts and nosing the trunk of the green car.

“I hope we at least get to see a big drug bust,” said my driving companion.

But alas, it wasn’t a drug bust. Instead of pounds and pounds of marijuana, what came out of the trunk of the car shocked the hell out of me. Not one, not two, not three, but four adults crawled out of the trunk, sweaty and rubbing their eyes since they’d likely been crammed inside for over two hours.

People must make it through every day; otherwise, why would they subject themselves to the crowded and hot trunk of a car? The coyote who owned the green car didn’t make it — perhaps he was nervous and the Border Agent could tell, or maybe he was the subject of a random check like me and my friend — but I’m willing to bet that the old humans-in-trunk bit actually works from time to time.

You can read my driving companion’s account of things here.

“This Girl Proceeded to Manize Him” by Kinsee Morlan

Zokalo is a relatively new upper-class lounge in Tijuana. I’ve ignored it for the past year due to a $20 cover and what I imagined would be crowds filled with bags so large and douchey that I wouldn’t be able to breathe, let alone dance and enjoy myself.

But last Thursday night, my curiosity got the best of me. It was ladies night, which meant I got in free and drank free all night. Sometimes, having a vagina really pays off. And as if the freebies weren’t enough, at about midnight, the male strippers made an appearance. Ah yes, male strippers — a party favor that isn’t offered anywhere in conservative old San Diego.

Would I recommend Zocalo to my hipster friends who tend to hate fancy bars outfitted with LED lights that change color constantly, lighting the white pleather lounge furniture as well as the trying-waaaaay-too-hard faces of the people sitting on it? No. But for all you girls out there who haven’t enjoyed the pleasure of letting a male stripper take a dollar bill out of your pants with his teethe, I’d say you just found something to do on Thursday nights.

I have one of the best, most interesting, most understanding and most entertaining families in the world. That, my friends, is a fact. They recently visited me, and although my mom demanded on staying in a nice Victorian in Coronado rather than staying with me in Tijuana for the entirety of the trip, they did come down for a day.

Here are some tips if you’re planning a family Tijuana day trip:

1. Take them to Playas and drink fresh coconut water from one of the many coco vendors along the beach.

2. Walk along the beach and show them how ironic and ridiculous the fence running into the water is.

3. Drive to Rosarito or Puerto Nuevo for lunch and shopping.

4. Take them to downtown Tijuana so they can get their meds.

5. Take them to a fancy restaurant that serves something other than Mexican food. I recommend Dolce Salato or Saverios. Impress them with Tijuana’s sophistication.

6. Take them to Dandy Del Sur then Estrella for drinks and dancing.

I’m on the phone right now with the DMV. It’s the last important piece to the puzzle that is putting my plastic life back together. My purse was stolen last night at a club in Tijuana, and with it the plastic cards and IDs that make modern life so much easier. Especially modern life that involves crossing international borders on a daily basis.

The stolen purse was totally my fault, as usual — I pulled the old hide-purse-in-dark-corner-so-I-can-dance move and came back an hour later to find it had been taken. Apparently, people don’t do that sort of thing in TJ. Pinchy gringa. Sometimes my happy-go-lucky nature borders on downright jackassery.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

After we gave up pretending that the purse still might be somewhere in the club, my Mexican friend, my gringo friend and I took a cab home (my keys, along with my driver’s license, Sentri pass and credit cards were also in my purse) and I canceled everything and immediately reapplied for a new Sentri pass. My fellow crossers know that the Sentri pass is as good as gold down here in TJ.

I have spare keys, thank Jebus, but I don’t have a spare key to my steering wheel lock (the lock, actually, is a result of another gringa move I pulled not too long ago). That key is with my ex-boyfriend, who says the key is likely lost. I look forward to the fun of figuring out how to get that damned lock off.

This morning was fun, too — standing in the walking line for two hours then hitchhiking on the side of Interstate 5 to get to my office in Mission Valley (I didn’t have a dime to my name, so the trolley wasn’t an option). Thanks, by the way, to my old neighbor who happened to drive by just a few minutes after my thumb went up in the air. I can’t imagine what she must think of me. Crazy, crazy gringa. Not too far off from the truth, I suppose.

But here’s the thing: I’m still smiling. I had a BLAST last night dancing, watching male strippers, drinking free beer and meeting an immigrant from Ghana who’s working as a bouncer in Tijuana until he can figure out how to cross the border. I still love Tijuana as much as I did before the dreaded moment of realizing my purse was gone. Last night, while I was dancing and flailing my arms and hair about in a way you can only do without a damned purse weighing you down, Tony Tee, the guy who was promoting the club where my purse was stolen, made his way into my dancing sphere and whispered, “I love how much you love Tijuana.”

Who cares about plastic and purses. I’m having fun.

Another one from the Red Maquiladora Network:

It is appalling to learn how much maquiladora managers are willing to sacrifice their workers in order to increase company profits. Alicia Lobato, mother of four children, used to work for the company Corrugados de Baja California, when, as a result of an “accident,” her back was injured. As a result, she is now a paraplegic, condemned to use a wheelchair, perhaps forever. A company manager forced her to operate a defective machine from atop a ladder. When Alicia fell down, the company blamed her for the “accident” and fired her. We ask for your support for Alicia in her fight against the company.

Alicia Lobato Palacios had an on-site work related injury on 03/02/2007 at Corrugados de Baja California- a maquiladora that manufactures cardboard boxes, and she continues to fight the employer and the Mexican public health system know as “Seguro Social” (social security) to resolve the matter of her pension.

On 3/02 Alicia was asked by her supervisor to work in the production line. She requested if anyone else could be asked and the supervisor replied with a threat- if she declined she would be sent home for a week with no pay. She was set up on a ladder to climb a platform of about four steps that had no safety measures and asked to fold cardboard boxes which is where Alicia fell. Alicia remembers waking up in the company’s infirmary and recalls intense hip pain without being able to stand up on her feet.

The human resources executive at Corrugados de Baja California while pretending to stroke her head for comfort whispered in Alicia’s ear that when the Red Cross came to pick her up she would need to claim the accident had taken place during her lunch hour. Alicia responded that she agreed, but when the Red Cross arrived to pick her up she instead told the truth. If Alicia had said what the human resources executive wanted, she would have almost lost the right to sue the company and obtain disability compensation.

The Mexican Constitution stipulates that the Mexican government must provide workers medical service. The Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS) is a government institution that provides that service. It is funded by dues paid by both employees and employers. IMSS also pays disability compensation to workers affected by labor-related accidents or diseases. Each time an accident or disease is reported to IMSS, the company where the accident happened ,or where the disease was acquired, has its dues increased. That is why maquiladoras try to hide any labor health and safety problems in the factories. That is why Corrugados wanted Alicia to say her accident was personal, not job related.

Each year, the Mexican Department of Labor certifies Corrugados de Baja California, the company where Alicia used to work, as a “safe company,” meaning that labor health and safety standards are respected. However, insufficient fire prevention equipment in a factory where paper and cardboard are some of the main materials used has produced two fires in 2004 and 2005.

The brutal human management in the company combines with cruel treatment in the IMSS. Alicia needed surgery 24 hours after the accident. The surgery was performed after a month. The operation had negative results and she is now a paraplegic. Alicia was discharged to go home on 3/30 in a wheelchair and was warned about the need to return to work as soon as possible. Alicia presented herself to Corrugados de Baja California in a wheelchair to start her daily routine. She and her husband made an estimated amount of 26 dollars per day and 13 dollars of that amount went to transporting Alicia to work and back. The building along with the city of Tijuana is not structured to accommodate the disabled population. The maquiladora where Alicia and her husband worked had no ramp for her to enter the building and the bathroom access also has no accommodations. Alicia has no bowel control, so when the need came for her to go to the restroom she would have her husband leave his work site to assist her. Alicia attempted to work but she claimed the pain was intolerable. She first worked a few hours, then a few days but never a full week She has since not returned to work and her disability checks stopped coming since December, 2007. The Social Security agency provides physical therapy but it does not amount to the necessary time that Alicia would have any real benefits.

You can support Alicia’s struggle against the company with food, adult diapers or cash. To support Alicia, please contact us:

Tijuana: Margarita Avalos and Jaime Cota (Cittac, Information Center for Working Women and Men)

Phone: (664) 622-4269

E-mail: cittac@hotmail.com, magui2001camx@yahoo.com.mx

San Diego: Claudia Elias and Enrique Dávalos (San Diego Maquiladora Workers’ Solidarity Network)

Phone: (619) 245-9227, (619) 388-3634

E-mail: Claudia Elias, lazarela111@hotmail.com, maquilatijuanasandiego@earthlink.net

You may also send a check. Please make it out to “Cittac,” write “Alicia Lobato” in the memo line of the check and send it to the following address:

Cittac

PMB 193

601 E. San Isidro Blvd. Suite 180

San Ysidro, CA 92173

If you want your donation to be tax deducible, please make your check out to “SDMWSN” (San Diego Maquiladora Worker Solidarity Network) and write in the memo line “Alicia Lobato.” Your can also donate by using the SDMWSN website: sdmaquila.org.

100% of donations sent to Cittac and SDMWSN will be given to Alicia and her family.

This campaign is sponsored by Cittac (Centro de Información para Trabajadoras y Trabajadores – Information Center for Working Women and Men), Binational Feminist Collective and SDMWSN (San Diego Maquiladora Worker Solidarity Network).

And another bit of info from my inbox:

Monday, April 14 11:00AM in front of the offices of ACORN at Third Ave. Suite 102, Chula Vista CA 91911

The former workers of ACORN Tijuana and other organizations of Mexico and the United States are confronting ACORN over its practices against the rights of labor and the health of its Mexican workers. We demand:

A. The payment of the official judgment given which was handed down by the Local Board of Conciliation and Arbitration the 6th of September of 2007 in favor of the organizers Lilia Leon and Maria Antonieta Robles for being fired without justification and for other amounts due them such as the payment of lost wages from the day of their firing to the day they are paid, all their due under Mexican labor law.

B. The payment of 4 two week pay periods owed to Carmen Valadez as well as her medical costs in the IMSS for a week of hospitalization for diabetes in 2007 and the constitutional indemnification and other amounts owing for failure to comply with her labor contract for the reason that in the last two months of her work in ACORN they did not pay salaries due. In October 2007 Carmen Valadez renounced the labor relationship with ACORN because of the failure to pay her and the failure to provide medical and social
services owed.

C. We demand that ACORN stop its practices of violating the human and labor rights of its workers, of the health of its community organizers, women workers of ACORN in Tijuana, and of its workers in various cities throughout the United States in cities such as Saint Louis, Chicago, Seattle, and other places.

Our demands are directed to the central office of ACORN in New Orleans, to Wade Rathke, founder and chief organizer of ACORN USA and International, Ercilia Sahores, International Organizer responsible for ACORN Mexico, and Suyapa Amador, principle organizer of ACORN Tijuana, and Maude Hurde, President of the Executive Council of ACORN in the USA.

Endorsed by: Lilia León, Antonieta Robles y Carmen Valaldez Ex Trabajadoras de Acorn Tijuana in Struggle, Centro de Información para Trabajadoras y Trabajadores (CITTAC), Colectiva Feminista Binacional, La Otra Tijuana, San Diego Maquiladora Worker Solidarity Network

Information:

Claudia Elias, San Diego Maquiladora Worker Solidarity Network

(619) 245-9227

lazarela111@hotmail.com