Outside of my Tijuana apartment

“Afuera” by Kinsee Morlan

Outside of my Tijuana apartment, there’s a taco shop called Jazz Tacos. It’s run by my landlord and his family. The double quesadillas are gooey and delicious.

Outside of my Tijuana apartment lives a group of about a dozen black bunnies. Yes, bunnies. They jump on the streets late at night and eat trash.

Outside of my Tijuana apartment lives a family of hippies who sleep in their old VW van. A cross hangs in the font window and the back window is broken.

Outside of my Tijuana apartment lives a gray and white cat. I feed it dog food when I’m in a good mood.

Outside of my apartment, my landlord’s 2-year-old, Nannette, dances in the driveway. She dances and says, “balando, balando, balando.”

Immigrants aren’t so bad afterall

“Road Sign Wars” by Kinsee Morlan

Immigrants don’t cause as many problems as people think, that’s according to a recent study released by the Public Policy Institute of California. Of course, the study is already making waves in the racist and nationalistic worlds.

This morning, my radio alarm went off with the squawking sounds of Chip Franklin’s voice hammering on what he deemed the report’s fatal flaw: The study did not differentiate between documented immigrants and illegal immigrants.

Yep, that’s right. The researchers decided to look at immigrants as a whole rather than divide them up into legal and illegal. And in doing so, they were able to come up with easy to understand stats like this one: “among men 18 to 40, the population most likely to be in institutions because of criminal activity, the report found that in California, U.S.-born men were institutionalized 10 times more often than foreign-born men (4.2 percent vs. 0.42 percent).”

The study wasn’t looking to understand legal versus illegal immigrants, the study was out to compare immigrants versus non-immigrants. Chip and friends just can’t hold themselves back from any opportunity to rail against undocumented workers. You should have heard him going off on the heinous, unforgivable crime that is crossing the border to feed your family.

“That was their crime,” he said, quickly trying to discount the entire report.

What a jackass.

Tijuana dogs

“Dogs not Dead” by Kinsee Morlan

It’s hard to walk or drive by one of the thousands of homeless dogs in Tijuana. Not once, but twice I’ve tried to take one of them home with me.

Last night, at about midnight, I almost turned a cute little furry terrier into a fur pancake. He darted right out in front of me on Agua Caliente, one of Tijuana’s busier roads. I freaked out, pulled over and jumped out only to find he was still alive and cowering right in the middle of the road. I picked him up, put him in my car and took him home.

My bf was asleep and was far from happy when he awoke to the sounds of the poor little thing scratching at his fleas. He was even farther from happy when the dog insisted on sleeping at the foot of the bed.

I wanted to keep the little guy — I even walked to Calimax this morning and bought some dog food — but my landlord wouldn’t be happy and the dog himself was anxious to get back on the streets. I let him out this morning and he happily went on his way.

It got me to thinking about what I should do next time I can’t resist the look on a homeless Tijuana dog’s face. The solution is taking them to Baja Animal Sanctuary, but with tourism down, I don’t think many people are actually adopting the dogs anymore. My bf’s friend works at the Sanctuary and he says they’re in desperate need of leashes, food and any other dog-related items anyone can muster up. I think I’m going to stop by the Sanctuary this weekend. You should, too, if you’re in town. Here are the directions:

DIRECTIONS TO BAJA ANIMAL SANCTUARY

From the border, take the cuota (toll road) toward Rosarito

Take the first Rosarito exit

Turn left at stoplight (McDonalds is on the corner)

Go over the toll road to the top of the hill

You will see a carnitas/taco shop on the right hand corner. It is a red and yellow building,

and says “Coca Cola” on it. Make a right.

Follow the road until it bears to the right to go downhill. Go left and the street in front of you is Tlaxcala.

Follow this dirt road and it will dip down into a valley and then go up hill past a blue church on the right

Keep driving on this dirt road and after about 5 minutes you will see the sanctuary on the right hand side.

You will see a mobile home first and right after the mobile home is the wall to the sanctuary. Pull up to

The wrought iron gate and ring the bell – one quick ring is all you need to do otherwise the dogs really

Start barking a lot….

Tijuana tourism down but not dead

 

In case you missed it, the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story on the decline of tourism in Tijuana. An informative piece with descriptive anecdotes and straight-forward stats, my only complaint is the ominous ending:
“We never imagined that tourists would stop coming,” said Clark Alfaro of the Bi-National Center for Human Rights. “It’s a shame.”

Tourism is down, yes.  People are freaked out about the crime and hesitant about the new passport requirement, but if any place could survive and overcome a lull, Tijuana can.

I remember when they passed the law about the bike lane to cross the border. The idea was to encourage regular commuters to ride their bikes then take the trolley to their jobs, but about a week or so after the law went into effect, Tijuana’s crafty moneymakers set up shop right in front of the border and rented out bikes to tourists who would rather pay $7 than wait in line for two hours.  The whole thing became a prosperous little business venture until the border folks caught on and eventually shut the bike lane down.

My point here is that the collective memory is fickle and will soon forget the violence, which has ebbed and flowed in Tijuana for years, and Tijuana’s ingenious tourism tradesmen will hang in there in the meantime and figure out a way to get the crowds to come back down.  I mean, where else can you legally bet on a sports game, see a live lucha libre fight and drink cheap tequila in one day?  Tijuana is too tempting to stay away from for too long.

An unexpected meeting

“Crusin’ the VeeDub” by Kinsee Morlan

Every Friday night when I drive by the Costco in Tijuana (yes, there are Costcos in TJ) I see a line of Volkswagens in the southeast corner of the parking lot. Kids weave through parked vans and bugs while the adults form small circles, chatting and laughing and occasionally snapping a photo of a the cars.

My curiosity was killing me last week so I finally stopped and snapped a few photos of my own. It turns out the group is the official Tijuana Volkswagen Meetup, and they congregate every Friday night. Sometimes they plan group drives to Ensenada or Mexicali, but mostly they just meet at Costco.

How cool, I thought, as I pulled out of the lot in my Honda Civic. I love when people join together under such superficial auspices. I often wish I were part of some group like the Volkswagen Meetup, but I’m such an ADD-inflicted nut that I can never seem to pay enough attention to any one thing.

In high school, I noticed that all my friends had some sort of weird collection — one collected frog things, another collected those stupid Special Moments figurines — so I haphazardly started a collection of my own.

Roses, I thought, would make an excellent grouping of things in which to display on my bookcase. Not just real roses, you see, I was going to collect rose posters, stickers, figurines and so on and so forth.

The collection made it through two birthdays before I decided it was faux pas.

I didn’t attempt to collect anything or belong to any particular group for that matter, until I reached my last year of college. A few schoolmates and I decided to start a women’s beading group, in which we would get together to drink and bead things like necklaces or bracelets.

That group met up twice, then fizzled out.

Now I find myself again looking for some thing I can either collect or make people unite around. I need some sort of strange obsession.

I ride my bike, and that’s super hip right now, but the trend hasn’t made it’s way south of the border. I have a guitar, too, but learning how to play it seems like such a lonely pursuit. I listen to This American Life every spare moment of my day, but I don’t know if a TAL meetup group would feel right since the show is sorta all about personal growth.

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just continue being the observational outsider.

Saving the city

I just got this invitation from my friends from an arts collective named Bulbo. The text pretty much sums up how I’ve come to feel about Tijuana. There’s something wrong with the city, but, at least in term of corruption and the broken government, I feel like it’s a situation that has passed the point of repair.

That’s the macro sense of the things, but the microscopic view is much better. I’ve said it many times on this blog, the network of people I’ve met in Tijuana astound me. There are strangers I’ve met who’ve helped me on my worst days. Strangers who’ve given me their phone numbers and honestly meant it when they said I could call if I ever needed a hand.

The number one question people are asking me now, after all the reports of violence, is ‘when are you moving back to the U.S.?’

And now, with the new passport requirements in place, I no longer get the “I want you to show me around Tijuana” requests.

People in the U.S. just want to turn their heads and forget that Tijuana exists.

CityBeat contributor Carl Luna wrote an interesting piece on the number of Tijuanenses who’ve packed up and headed north, looking for the safety Tijuana may never be able to guarantee.

I’ll admit that I did start looking for a place in the U.S. a few weeks ago, but I quite that search and decided to dig in my heels. Perhaps I’ll buy a bat and keep it bedside, but other than that I refuse to run for the hills.

Right now, Tijuana is my home, and I plan on meeting up with some of my neighbors this weekend and at least entertaining the idea of making it better.

Ah-hah!

 

“Suburban Dreams Downsized” by Kinsee Morlan

Just as I suspected.  The long border waits to get back from Tijuana to the U.S. are a gigantic waste of time and money.   Dean Calbreath’s article in the U-T yesterday is an interesting read. It sheds light on the economic impact of the border line and talks a bit about how the new passport and birth certificate requirements are likely to have a huge negative impact on the region, too.