Border Stories

08.16.01 | 12:56 AM ET

From the edge of Otay Mesa, looking out over the sprawl of Tijuana’s suburbs towards the Pacific, the view is prosaic. Dust swirls in the afternoon light, down towards a tidy little community called Colonia Tepancingo about a half-mile below the mesa. It’s a relatively new suburb that reflects Tijuana’s explosive growth, a place where washing hangs outside brightly painted homes, kids kick soccer balls down dirt roads and everyone knows someone who has had a baby born without a brain.

This, of course, is not the Tijuana that most people see. Most people head to Mexico’s border zone for cheap alcohol, cheap Prozac, cheap sex, cheap Rolexes, cheap food, cheap bodywork, cheap Elvis-on-velvet paintings.

But I’ll hit the bargain bins another day.

I’m on the Reality Tour and no discount pharmacies or bodyshops are on the agenda. It’s led by two women from San Francisco’s Global Exchange organization and two locals, an artist and a labor organizer. Fifteen of us have plunked down $600 to spend two days sitting through political lectures and historical overviews, strolling through one of the oldest maquiladora assembly line factories anywhere on the border, stumbling around toxic waste sites and hearing border-town horror stories straight out of Dickens. It’s not exactly fun, but fun isn’t what we’re after.

I grew up in San Diego and began making the annual pre-Christmas pilgrimage to Tijuana when I was about five. I’ve crossed that border maybe 500 times since yet never ventured into the barrios, never visited a local’s home. I know the working class neighborhoods of Tokyo better than the pothole speckled back streets of the “real” Tijuana.

I found it doesn’t get much more real than Metales y Derivados, an abandoned battery recycling plant. Thousands of eviscerated car batteries lie heaped in mounds next to stacks of rotting 50-gallon drums containing a toxic stew of lead, arsenic, sulfates. A low cinder block wall surrounds the main work area, marked every few feet with stenciled skull-and-crossbones and the word “danger.” The site is essentially open to the elements and when the winds and rain whip down on Otay Mesa the dust and water run straight down the hill to Colonia Tepancingo.

“This is the most famous toxic waste dump in Tijuana,” says Jaime, one of our local guides. “Not the worst. Just the most famous.”

Metales y Derivados is a relic of the past, but before we set foot on the arsenic-tainted dirt we walk though one of the driving forces of the present, the Sanyo maquiladora factory, only a block away.

The Sanyo plant produces circuit boards for a variety of multinationals and is one of the oldest maquiladoras in the 45 industrial parks that dot the mesas of Tijuana. It’s sparkling clean inside, a model high-tech assembly line, sealed off behind plate glass windows. Young women with hairnets sit at their tables, snapping circuitry parts together like Legos pieces. The manager who leads us through explains that yes, the pay is about $5 for an eight-hour shift. He quickly adds that with “bonuses” the actual pay (not counted in pesos but in value for company-owned and provided services) is more than double that. Still, he admits, that’s only one-fifth of what a family of four needs for “minimum” survival in Tijuana.

The heat on the mesa drives us west to Playas de Tijuana, an upscale beachside community. Here we get our first close-up look at our very own Made-in-the-USA version of the Berlin Wall. It’s called the Gatekeeper Fence, and like its Cold War cousin, it casts a giant’s shadow, looming over every aspect of life on the border. It’s roughly 15 feet high and composed of heavy corrugated steel sheets, recycled helicopter landing pads left over from the Gulf War. It begins in the ocean out at Playas de Tijuana and snakes eastward for 16 miles through the arroyos and mesas into the harsh desert and mountains inland.

At Playas, a group of local activists sets up a stage on the sand next to the fence and blasts Mexican punk and techno. As the music thumps, they transform the fence into an art installation, plastering the rusted steel with the names of some of the 500-plus who have died in the desert to the east since Gatekeeper went up. On the small bluff above the stage sits “Friendship Park,” a grassy field with picnic tables on the U.S. side. The fence segues into a section of chain link to allow families and friends on both sides to see each other, to hold up babies and exchange gossip. Former first lady Pat Nixon dedicated the park almost 30 years ago, before the fence was built.

The Tijuana activists show us detailed graphs and maps, illustrating the drastic degradation of the local environment resulting from Tijuana’s continuing population boom. But it’s been a long day and despite the whump-whump-whump coming from the sound system, my eyes glaze over and I enviously watch kids cavorting in the gentle surf.

The next day we awaken at 4 a.m. to drive into the desert outside Mexicali, two hours to the east from Tijuana. Mexicali is a major U.S.-Mexico border crossing. Today happens to be Dia de los Migrantes, and we’re heading for an early morning mass being held for the hundreds who have died from starvation, heat or thirst trying to cross the border.

We turn off the main road onto a one-lane dirt track that runs straight into the desert, dead-ending a few hundred yards from a four-foot high sand barrier that marks the frontier. Even at 6 a.m. the heat is unbearable. Every few minutes a white U.S. border patrol SUV trundles down the access road on the other side, slowing down to check out the group of locals and activists clustered in a semi-circle around a priest. We’re each given a name stenciled on tape to adhere to a large white cross. Like many, mine said “no identificado.”

After the mass half the group of locals and supporters set out to walk the 12 miles through the desert to the crossing in Mexicali. We get there in about half an hour in our van and spend the morning waiting for the pilgrimage to arrive. They straggle in about noon, dusty and flushed, and immediately start hanging plastic water jugs with the names of the dead on the fence. Empty water bottles are the most common item found with the bodies on this stretch of the border. We Americans are warned off from actively participating in the installation since it could be construed as interfering in Mexican politics and thus grounds for deportation. A crowd quickly gathers since the fence being decorated is right at the main pedestrian and car crossing.

As we stand there, chatting under the shade of the arcade with some San Diego activists, something altogether commonplace happens. Aided by a few friends, a teenager suddenly hoists himself up the sides of the fence. He successfully slings himself over, then sets off at a jaunty pace towards a McDonald’s, a few blocks away.

“This is the best time,” says one of his friends. “Mid-day on a Sunday.” Moments later, another kid makes his escape, waving to his friends triumphantly as he trots away. It’s quickly turned into a competition, a combination of reality television and X-game, and I confess, just for a moment, I think wistfully of my Hi-8, back on the shelf in L.A.

It’s 114 degrees and here on the Mexican side families are doing their Sunday shopping despite the heat, hurrying before the stores close at 2 p.m. for siesta. Over on the U.S. side the streets are deserted, like the “Where Is Everybody?” episode of the Twilight Zone.

On the way out of town, back to Tijuana, we stop to take snapshots of the infamous New River, an incredibly noxious flow of raw sewage and toxic effluvia with a bouquet you can smell for miles away. We finally get to Tijuana just after 10 p.m. where the circus is in full swing. Along Avenida Revolucion the American tourists are finishing their day of cheap nachos, cheap sex, cheap plastic surgery, and cheap Prozac with the obligatory cheap alcohol, one dollar tequila shooters. Soon they’ll be joining the river of cars swelling at the U.S. checkpoint.

At home a few days later, I read in the Los Angeles Times about two bodies found in the desert, east of Tijuana: A man and a woman and one water bottle. No identification on either.

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