Published in The New York Times, August 25, 2006. By Wiliam L. Hamilton WHEN you walk across the border from the
United States to
Mexico and the steel revolving doors clank behind you, locking you in, there they are — the pharmacists in their crisp white coats offering you discount drugs on the street, as if they were Sno-Kones, not bottles of pills, and the junk taxis making their rush at your pedestrian confusion. The Avenida Revolución stretches ahead like a psychedelic version of
Disneyland’s Main Street, with its multiplex margarita bars and outdoor party music and throngs of
San Diego teenagers enjoying a day’s parole from being under 21.
Everything you expected to see, you see, and you think you know Tijuana.
But a few blocks from Revolución is the Centro Cultural Tijuana, a monumental arts complex with a planetarium centerpiece, a recently opened a native-plants and pre-Columbian sculpture garden, and a new gallery and performance space under construction. Down the Boulevard Sanchéz Taboada is La Querencia, a five-month-old restaurant that is the tip of the iceberg of Tijuana’s new Baja cuisine movement, which now includes more than 20 chefs and a new culinary academy.
And the city keeps surprising as you go: the Emporio, a boutique hotel with enough Corbusier settees, blond plywood and pedestal candles in the lobby to satisfy any denizen of South Beach; Tabule, a martini lounge with a throbbing dining room and a mobbed marble bar; and techno clubs and art bars and magic-realism cabarets and derelict Art Deco hip-hop theaters.
“People think we have nothing,” Miguel Ángél Guerrero Yaguës, the chef and owner of La Querencia, says of Tijuana. Mr. Guerrero Yaguës, a sportsman, serves things like boar tacos and scallop ceviche, what he calls Baja Med, or Mexican, Mediterranean and whatever, combinations that seem emblematic of Tijuana’s new sense of urban experiment. He opened a pizza place a few weeks ago, with pies topped with local ingredients like manta ray.
“We have everything,” he says, standing in La Querencia’s dining room, a stylish loftlike space with concrete floors, lacquered steel dining tables and two open kitchens. Patrons dressed California-casually in linens and leather sandals, with cellphones and balloon wine glasses at the ready, crowd the restaurant, creating a happy noontime buzz. “We have two seas, the Pacific and the Sea of Cortez,” Mr. Guerrero Yaguës says. “California only has one.”
This is a Tijuana you don’t know. Most Mexicans, who don’t cut Tijuana much slack — dismissing it as a provincial backwater, a border badlands — don’t know it either.
But Tijuana is Mexico’s fastest-growing city (a population of 750,000 in 1990, 1.2 million in 2000 and projected to be 2.2 million by 2010). And it is changing. Cosmopolitan by default because of its proximity to the United States — 60 million people cross the border there each year — Tijuana is developing a new identity that is bringing it out of the shadows of its own reputation. Its fabled lawlessness has become a kind of freedom and license for social mobility and entrepreneurship that has attracted artists and musicians, chefs and restaurateurs, and professionals from Mexico and elsewhere. (The United States Consulate acknowledges that public safety continues to be an issue because of drug-related crimes and kidnappings, though Americans have not typically been the targets of these crimes. The consulate advises travelers to carry photo identification at all times.)
IN several trips to Tijuana last month, I discovered a city that was excited about itself and the turn it was taking, and newly proud of what has always made it Tijuana, like the taquerias and the tortas stands. Taco makers like Javier Campos Guttiérez at Tacos Salceados (Tijuanans call it La Ermita, after its address) are becoming stars. The night I ate there, sitting at the counter, people pushing at my back (including Ana Laura Martínez Gardoqui, the director of the cooking school), the last plate Mr. Campos Guttiérez sent out was a shrimp-and-strawberry taco that was a play on words as well as tastes. “Fresa,” or Spanish for strawberry, is also slang for “young, hip and chic.”
“You can see the cultural development of the city growing with the city,” says Adelaida del Real, who operates El Lugar del Nopal. “So many artists have moved here, who want to show here or sing here.”
El Lugar del Nopal is a cafe, bar, restaurant and cabaret on a small residential street in Centro, or downtown Tijuana, behind an inconspicuous wooden door that you might have found by following a cat that wandered through it. Inside, Nopal is like being inside someone’s dream life, set in someone’s living room, with a stage at one end. There are carved and painted masks on the walls from various regions of Mexico, fierce and folkloric, that Ms. del Real’s partner, José Pastor, collects and that make Nopal’s ramble of rooms a bit of a spirit world. Outside, a terrace roofed by tall trees and vines sits above a colony of casitas that jazz musicians, making the stop in the 60’s, when Tijuana was on the circuit, stayed in.
Ms. del Real and I talk at a table as patrons take the air, drink, browse through alternative newspapers like Tijuana Metro and Arte de Vivir and generally imbibe Nopal’s atmosphere of wise repose.
Jenny Donovan, a writer who moved to Tijuana from San Diego a year ago to explore the exploding arts scene, is my guide this day. Ms. Donovan drives by Multi Kulti, a baroque movie palace now used sporadically as a performance and exhibition site, its broken plaster facade roiling with faded gilt cartouches and big cartoon seashells and barricaded by plastic net between scheduled events. The cinema was gutted by fire and is now surrealistically open to the sky — an accidental amphitheater where festivals of Mexican horror films, hip-hop battles and other evenings are staged.
We drive to Zona Rio to have lunch at Negai, a fusion sushi restaurant, where “fusion,” as everywhere in Tijuana, means Mexican in the mix. The chef behind the sushi bar, Angel Villegas, who is the brother of Goyito San, the executive chef (this is a family born to fusion, apparently), dresses the tuna sashimi with tamarindo and the hamachi with serrano chili.
The real theme, 1970’s disco music, pumps against the translucent curtains dividing the bar from the dining room, the zebrawood walls and cream-leather banquettes, where young, prosperous Mexican businessmen and their dates lounge as if they are poolside while they eat. The same crowd, with smaller handbags and more rhinestones on their T-shirts, with a few more open dress-shirt buttons and with their faces blue with dial-pad light, shows up later that night at Tabule for specialty martinis and the kind of loud, singles-in-heat mash that has made the meatpacking district in New York famous.
On another day, Ms. Donovan takes me to the Avenida Televisión in a residential neighborhood in the hills where Bulbo, an arts collective of 15 people, works in makeshift offices that include television, radio, graphic and Internet design studios. Bulbo also publishes books and has a record label. Outside, in the street, a man floors the accelerator of his reconditioned Camaro, outfitted with an exhaust pipe that looks like a cathedral organ pipe (in chrome) and screeches up the hill, setting off an avenue of car alarms.
Bulbo is new Tijuana, a multidisciplinary energy that the city’s proponents say is unique in Mexico right now. (The arts and music scene is having its 15 minutes in San Diego at the Museum of Contemporary Art with “Strange New World,” an exhibition of 41 Tijuana artists, including Bulbo members, through the first part of September.)
We talk at the big table in Bulbo’s long, low-ceilinged kitchen, where the collective’s members take midday meals together.
“Tijuana’s a new city, so you can improvise culturally,” says Sebastian Diaz Aguirre, a bristle-headed man with a taut face that looks like a Spanish painting. Mr. Diaz Aguirre likes to go to Blanco y Negro, a worker’s dance hall with live music where you dance the Colombian cumbia or drink beer and watch until beer takes over and you dance too. Blanco y Negro is across the street from El Dandy del Sur, an artists’ jukebox bar where the 20-something patrons aren’t gringos slumming from San Diego, where the walls are decorated with mirrors and pictures of movie stars and crepe-paper hearts hang from the ceiling. On the best nights, Ms. Donovan says, the two establishments share patrons.
Tijuana is still the border. The line in the sand between the United States and Mexico, with its revolving steel doors that revolve only one way, is more controversial, more chaotic and more confounding than ever. Teddy Cruz, an architect and urban planner who works with Mexican communities in California and who was my guide for a day, says he believed Tijuana presented the opportunity for “a different kind of tourism.”
Why visit Tijuana?
“To be in the midst of the argument,” Mr. Cruz says. He drove me to the hills east of the city, which are rapidly being cut flat and carved for maquiladoras, or assembly plants. Tijuana maquiladoras assemble roughly 50 percent of the televisions sold in North America; ready jobs are attracting workers from central Mexico. Also reshaping the hills is housing. Gated subdivisions of miniature stucco “mansions,” modeled after San Diego developments and bearing names like Capistrano, are being built for the middle class. And big-box retailers like Home Depot and Costco are opening on Tijuana’s side of the border.
“Tijuana is becoming more of a destination than a corridor to the States,” Mr. Cruz says.
But the border is real, and, like an undertow, powerful in its pull. Michael Krichman, executive director of inSite, an arts organization in San Diego that sponsors projects that address the border and its cross-cultural issues, drove me to Tijuana’s beach, where the border fence, corrugated, chain-linked, barbed and patched, rides to my right, as we travel toward the ocean. It crosses the sand before plunging in a stumble of steel pilings into the sea.
Thomas Glassford, an artist from Mexico City, and José Parral, a landscape architect from San Diego, created a small park there for inSite last year, building an overlook above the beach and the border’s descent into the water that gives a visitor a nice view of the ocean, and of the debate. You can see San Diego as the eye flies freely out of Tijuana. For the weekend families taking the air, eating mango with lime and chili, or having their hair braided and beaded, there are two horizons to watch — the sea and the United States.
Then Mr. Krichman and I, with his wife, Carmen Cuenca, a director of the Centro Cultural Tijuana, drove to Saveiros, an Italian restaurant, for lunch. There were oysters roasted with mesquite, chilies stuffed with beef cheeks and mushrooms topped with huitlacoche, the corn fungus that Tijuanans call Mexican caviar. The governor of the state of Baja California, Eugenio Elorduy Walther, and his entourage of a few dozen people were eating in a private dining room, sealed from view by curtained French doors.
As Ms. Cuenca, Mr. Krichman and I left the restaurant after lunch, a swarm of security agents in mirrored sunglasses, like extras in “Traffic,” the Steven Soderbergh narcotics epic that was the last in a long line of films to capitalize on Tijuana’s rough reputation, parted at the entrance to clear a path for us.
“That’s what I like about Tijuana,” Ms. Cuenca says as she walks toward her car, beeping the locks open on a white S.U.V.
“Everyone goes to the same places.”
