Eleven

Guillermo Fadanelli

La Canción de Tijuana / The Song of Tijuana

T hat afternoon, I was ambling along looking for some shade to

protect me from the slight ordeal of the 2 p.m. sun. At the corner
of Avenida Constitución, a black guy, his skull criss-crossed by tense
veins, was talking to an average-looking girl, staring at him with her
mouth agape. He wanted to sleep with her, but his six and a half feet
plus his gigantic hands made the young Mexican girl distrustful. She
was scanning the eyes of the other ladies out on the street, looking for
any kind of advice at all: “And what happens if you don’t have a good
time? You going to strangle me with those big hands of yours?” She
was joking ner vously, avoiding her conquistador’s gaze. Let him look
for a girl his own size, the malicious giggles from the other street-
walkers seemed to say; they were watching what was happening out of
the corner of their eyes. “You’re either going to have to pull together
two beds or do it on the floor,” an old hunchbacked man said as he
smiled and toked on his cigarette in the door of a hair salon. The black
guy didn’t speak any Spanish, but he just had to gesture a little and
show her his dollars; she was the one who had to think through the
situation and make the important decisions. I had no idea I’d find my-
self in a similar situation two days later; I just kept on walking toward
Coahuila—a street everyone associates with their crudest dreams and
most urgent urges. An endless number of doors gape open to the
street, devouring people passing by, all the customers used to the fun
going on forever no matter the harsh glare of the sun, which doesn’t
seem to bother the night at all. Rundown hotels, tenements, houses
converted into brothels, cabarets with ordinary names like Chabelas,
Adelitas, and La Botana make up a raunchy catwalk of vice.
That afternoon, I walked all around the streets downtown with a
deep sense of calm. I was remembering my first visit to Tijuana a de-
cade before, when I could still survive a couple straight nights of party-
ing: at that time, I could go head to head with this city, drink in a cof-
fin, or take jokes to places they started to get dangerous. About ten feet
before I got to Revolución, I saw two blond guys from San Diego with
 la canción d e tijuana 213

huge beer bellies rush down some stairs that led up to the rooms of a tiny
boarding house. Their smiles were almost as magnificent as their bloated bod-
ies. They’d gotten laid an hour before lunch and an hour after leaving their
Dodge truck in a dusty lot that charged twenty pesos an hour to park there.
They lit up two Cuban cigars in the middle of the sidewalk—maybe as a way
to celebrate their valiant copulation—and bit on them between waves of happy
laughter: cheap cigars, almost always phony cosmopolitan delusions. As if they
only had to cross the border to get to Cuba, the Yucatán, or Patagonia: there
was nothing like strolling down Avenida Revolución in shorts smoking a
Cuban cigar while they figured out which noisy dive bar they’d throw away a
few dollars in. Why go any further than Revolución if they got that feeling of
being in another country just by walking down this street? People from the
United States think they can find all they need in Tijuana to satiate their provin-
cial curiosity and their hankering for travel. On one sidewalk, a blond-haired
woman with ridiculous freckles yells to her husband on the opposite side of the
street; he doesn’t hear her because he stopped to try on a Santo mask: “Hey,
Bill, come over here! We’ve got a new pet!” There’s no money left for a mask
because she decided to spend it on a sculpture of a life-size dog covered in vel-
vet. While the couple argues from one sidewalk to the other, a gang of youths
from California with sickly-looking bodies debate which bar to spend the af-
ternoon downing tequila in, listening to Madonna, and hooking up with Mexi-
can women. From the window of a car taking me to my hotel in the Zona Río, I
watch a Chinese family of twenty pose next to a white donkey painted like
a zebra. According to the tiara that crowns its head, the donkey’s name is
Mónica. Near the Bar Animal, a person in a Spider Man costume waves his
arms about to get the attention of the passersby, but no one looks at him. The
heat’s intense and everyone on the sidewalk looks a little dizzy. Two hours wan-
dering around downtown have been enough to make me remember the ex-
hausting days of my first visits, when my tijuanense friends labored to keep me
in a mental state that, without anyone noticing, was pretty much the same as
being dead.
It’s a well-known story, but I’m going to tell it. More than a century ago,
the San Diego authorities prohibited boxing matches, but the fight promoters
found a way around this Puritan infamy by having the spectators gather on
American soil. They put up the ring in Tijuana, a few feet from the line sepa-
rating the two countries. Once the ring was set up, the boxers fought in
Tijuana, but the spectators watched and bet from San Diego. After that myth-
ical series of bouts (1886) and as the years passed, there was nothing stand-
ing in the way of all the vices conglomerating on the Mexican side: bars,
214 Guillermo Fadanelli

brothels, and casinos were erected to receive the people fleeing from the
prohibitions on the other side. Bulls, horses, and greyhounds made up the
most important zoo of gambling along the border. In the 1920s, when the
American Senate made gambling, boxing, and racing illegal, Tijuana became
the land of Eden for businessmen, gamblers, and cardsharks who found a
veritable land of opportunities in Mexico, the idyllic West where the doors
would open for the first time at the Agua Caliente Casino, Montecarlo, Sunset
Inn, Foreign Club, and more. The die was cast: Tijuana would be a space to
practice everything Puritan morality didn’t allow. All or nothing, after all it
wasn’t a city, but a territory in the process of being settled (Tía Juana or Ciu-
dad Zaragoza as it was called at first). In his book Tijuana the Horrible, Hum-
berto Félix Berúmen elucidates the historical roots of Tijuana, but he adds
the overwhelming mythological weight to the reality of the city: that need to
embody evil or to represent human corruption as the polar opposite of Puri-
tan morality: “In the construction of Tijuana’s imaginary, there is an even
more important element: the biblical myth of fallen or corrupt cities.”
When I get into a taxi around midnight to head back downtown, I get the
feeling that, by staying in the Zona Río, I’m also on the other side of the bor-
der: sumptuous hotels, restaurants, shopping centers and office towers, wide
avenues, a prosthetic city that is supposedly Tijuana, but which looks like any
other city where there’s progress. In the end, as Robert Walser has written, all
those who attempt to achieve progress end up looking practically the same. I
leave the comfort of my modern hideaway to look for and eventually immerse
myself in that reality that thumbs its nose at civilized optimism, at the busi-
nessmen’s dreams that become conventional models, at the hope for a Ti-
juana that progresses forward or tries to elude its ill-fated legend. On Paseo
de los Héroes, I look up at the statue of a furious Cuauhtémoc looking north
with an impudent expression on his face, like he were blaming other people for
his misfortunes or his carnal weaknesses (it reminds me of El Indio Fernández
dressed as a charro welcoming visitors to the Wax Museum on Calle Primera).
The old Ford station wagons operating as taxis remind me of the enormous
cars my father bought thirty years ago to show off in front of his friends; the
Fords circulate on the streets of Tijuana like funeral hearses taking on more
and more passengers as they get closer to their destination. Their under-
ground dungeon smell doesn’t dissipate even with the air streaming through
the windows: not coffins, but mass graves.
Just like on my first visits to Tijuana, I start out the night drinking a beer at
La Ballena. I decided not to call my friends because, at least this time, I plan to
move at my own pace. That’s possible in this area where no one is surprised
 la canción d e tijuana 215

when you ask for drugs at six in the morning or when you only have twenty
pesos left to live on at dawn. Everyone seems so used to the meandering
nocturnal hordes. The vendors in the area are opening the doors to their busi-
nesses while most people are still halfway through their night of partying:
tons of liquor have been consumed before they sell the first yogurt in the
morning or before the schoolkids take their first class. Along just one block, I
count three farmacías: I don’t think there is a comparable number of pharma-
cies per square block in any other neighborhood in the world: an uncontrolla-
ble epidemic of drug stores. Besides being thriving businesses, these drug
stores also function as windows into infinite psychological worlds. Foreigners
flock to the stores to get any kind of substance. Hundreds of drug stores. What
they can’t get in these windows though is crystal meth or ice (chlorhydrate
methamphetamine), which are, along with cocaine, the most common drugs
traded on the street. For just fifty pesos, you can get a dose of cocaine (a glo-
bito), enough to keep you awake for a couple days. In the middle of the last de-
cade, I snorted crystal for the first time just to get closer to another boundary
line: my nasal passages were burning, which caused a sharp pain that stopped
as soon as the stupid enthusiasm set in. Crystal is a synthetic derivative of
ephedrine (at the end of the day, a methamphetamine too), but at this stage no
one really knows what they’re buying for a few pesos: they could be selling you
rat poison or ground-up bones. At that time, my friends preferred to inhale the
dust through their mouths, heating it up on aluminum foil or smoking it in a
pipe: no one wanted to wreck their nasal wall or leave drops of blood on
the mirror. Afterward, when the harrowing hangover hit, I would hole myself
away in a motel on the road to Rosarito, where I’d spend two days watching tv
or scribbling on a piece of paper: I wasn’t able to write anything memorable.
Buying crystal is pretty simple and, in a tiny bar in the center of town, they’ll
even pour you a sweet little line on the table. It was just that easy a few years
ago in a bar that’s not there anymore: the Kin Kle, where, as I remember it, we
had a transgender waiter who because of some mistakes with the silicone had
grown a breast close to her belly button. Nowadays, La Ballena has changed its
look: it’s a bar on Calle Argüello with uncomfortable benches, carpeted walls,
and a jukebox in the middle. The regulars have little in common except for the
fact they’ve all ended up in a pretty ugly bar: a woman dressed as a cat attracts
attention for just a few seconds. A man in a sleeveless shirt waits for his turn
to drop a handful of coins into the jukebox: it looks like an attack of insomnia
forced him out of his bed. Through the smoke, bodies become opaque silhou-
ettes. I see an old man with a lost look on his face kicking a column with freak-
ish rage while the other customers act indifferent, since they have already
216 Guillermo Fadanelli

memorized his violent routine. A few seconds before he’s thrown into the
street, the old man launches another attack as if his ancestors or whatever
caused his miserable look were buried inside the column.
At two in the morning, the movement on the streets is disturbing: shame-
less exhibitionism has turned this area into a hotel with no doors where noth-
ing is off limits. On the same street, Calle Argüello, there’s a bar tijuanenses
know as El Turístico (the real name is even more insipid). Students, laborers,
and people without any obvious work hang out long into the morning hours:
the promiscuity is seductive—the cosmopolitan boredom, the lack of etiquette,
a studied disinterest in anyone else’s life, the scant violence despite the sinis-
ter surroundings: who’s headed out and who just got back? The border as a
virtual space between two extremes doesn’t seem palpably real; so everyone
retells the legend in their own way even if it’s only to repeat the same old cli-
ché. It doesn’t matter who is looking at Tijuana; they always end up describing
the city as an exception. Claudio Magris has written that the border is a neces-
sity, because without it, there’s no identity or form: “Border is form and, as a
consequence, also art.” The border gives definition, but is itself undefined by
its very nature: it only exists to provide reality to others. And who cares about
the explanations when you can immerse yourself in experience? I pour a little
beer into my glass as I watch an obese woman with an inscrutable face, glued
into her plastic chair, hiding her eyes behind a pair of dark glasses. The regu-
lars know the woman as “La siete culos” or “Seven Assholes.” She’s nice enough
to talk with the lonely guys who approach her looking for maternal company.
On her late night throne, La siete culos puts up with all kinds of unwieldy
metaphors without even blinking: a tragic palm reader, a retired coyote, or a
mother asleep in a cantina waiting for her children to return.
A city without roots, Tijuana can’t escape its own myth. The outsider’s way
of looking at the city hasn’t changed and actually condemns Tijuana to just
being a ciudad de paso, a city to pass through on the way to somewhere else,
besieged by drug lords and assassins, dominated by a never-ending night:
Tijuana is an open door in every sense. In addition, its politicians are now
part of that delirious show, consumed like some kind of indulgent pastime.
The fact that the new mayor of the city has a dark past shows that the people
who elected him wanted to be governed by a corrido villain, an actor, or any-
one who doesn’t look like a sensible politician. Since the community has
never in reality believed the story that it is a community—as Baudrillard
says—it happily bows down to lies, because it doesn’t tolerate the affectation
of truth. It wants to be deceived, but not by just any politician, rather by a
 la canción d e tijuana 217

character, one who transgresses the bounds of sanity in every sense, a crimi-
nal or a lunatic, but not a humanist politician.
Tijuana is still trapped by the vision of the outsider that doesn’t go any fur-
ther than Calle Revolución, the betting halls, the racetrack, the whores of Coa-
huila, or the eye-catching pinnacles of the Jai Alai: a set design that is repeated
even in the most superficial details. No one who believes in the existence of
Tijuana is going to listen to music at a Sanborns or dance in a discotheque when
the Chicago Club and the bar Zacazonapan is on Calle Constitución. After all,
it’s about sustaining the myth, not discrediting it, about patiently building cli-
chés without which it would be hard to survive: because cities would be impos-
sible to explain without the existence of prejudices. To go into the Zacazona-
pan, you go down a set of curving stairs that immediately empty you out into a
basement where the heat from all the bodies turns the bar into a Turkish steam
room. Ten years ago, I came to this place for the first time too. It was half-
empty, almost half-lit, sordid but hospitable, welcoming. I remember one night
when almost twenty of us were hanging out until the money was running out
faster than the alcohol itself. The five of us who were left at the end had to leave
a respectable writer there as a hostage, laid out on top of a table asleep, with a
waiter keeping an eye on him, while we returned with enough money to cover
the bill. The Zacazonapan has definitely become famous these days: writers,
artists, musicians, drug-addled youths dancing on tables alongside Mara Sal-
vatrucha gang members, cholos, criminals, or laborers waiting for an opportu-
nity to leave their pasts behind: La Ballena, El Turístico, El Zacazonapan are a
window into the human collage, promiscuity, the paradise promised by all
romanticism, that is to say—in the words of Schlegel—a space consecrated to
underground deities: “The meaning of creation is revealed for the first time in
the drive for annihilation.” The fact that the Zacazonapan closes early could be
a result of its celebrity, since, as we know, once a few eyes are watching us, we
start to act like something we are not. Those who live in the center of Tijuana
know all the doors will never be closed: Los Equipales, Dandys, La Estrella, El
Ranchero, Chez, and whatever other place you can find a few minutes later is
one step closer to the sun coming up.
After a week in Tijuana, there’s nothing left: the streets lose their attrac-
tion, the working-class colonias appear on the horizon, thousands of white
crosses adorning the metallic wall make the border a symbolic cemetery, the
whores are tired or drunk, like Elena, who came back to the Hotel Diamante
with me one Sunday morning, confused by the way I was acting, by my ques-
tions: “Are you all going to rob me? Then go to sleep, relax, the hotel is paid
218 Guillermo Fadanelli

for two days.” At that moment, Tijuana becomes a junkie’s dream, a turbulent
trip, until everything starts up for another round. The ciudad de paso is al-
ways all too real, it looks more like life. Maybe that’s why the artist is often
more nomadic than sedentary. So, Tijuana is an unusual city not just because
of Calle Revolución or its gambling fame or its condition as a border territory,
but because its artists have survived it. The artists of Tijuana have imposed
a constant state of siege on their city: visual arts collectives, music labels,
fanzines, bands, videos, magazines, photographers, and even indie publish-
ers have filled the city in the last fifteen years. It’s a movement without a pre-
planned course, which always finds an outlet, an original one since it takes
its inspiration from its own circumstances. As Eugenio Trías has said, the
city is a work of art, an erotic drive satisfied not with dreams but with produc-
tion, so the artist is the creator and the city is the artwork. Because without
this artistic spirit that makes the city into a human project, there is no city
but rather an undefined territory or space. This Tijuana as a place where art is
dominant stands in opposition to that other Tijuana—violent, with no mem-
ory, where murders go unpunished.
Elena didn’t accept my invitation to go over to my hotel in the Zona Río.
“You want to rob me for sure,” she joked. She wanted to sleep a few hours
more before heading back out to the wandering around she did every day on
Calle Constitución. I went back to the model city—stable, comfortable, with
perfect avenues. The taxi driver makes a mistake and drives me to the Hotel
Lucerna. It doesn’t matter. I’ll walk a few blocks before the sun, like me,
heads back to its hiding place.