Troublemaker's Journal

I've spent the last few weeks on the border where I grew up, just south of San Diego in the town of Imperial Beach, adjacent to Tijuana. I joined my brother and sister in celebrating the 83rd birthday of our mother, Betty — dinner and drinks in an Irish restaurant — but most of the time I spent in Tijuana doing research for a book.

I am fascinated by Tijuana, fascinated by both its reality and its image.

Tijuana embodies the fantasies and the fears of the American people. It is the Wild West, where drunken American military men, students and tourists can engage in behavior frowned upon back home. It is Maquilapolis, the City of Factories, where U.S. corporations hot-housed the North American Free Trade Agreement and established one of the nodal points of globalization. It is the staging area for the undocumented immigrants to the United States, who, in the words of Carlos Fuentes, are carrying out the gradual but sustained invasion that constitutes the "re-conquest of America." It is the narco war zone, where rival cartels of drug dealers suborn the police and military with million dollar bribes and then murder each other with AK47s and Uzis in spectacular massacres apparently inspired by Hollywood movies.

Most recently the Pacific coast between Tijuana and Ensenada, an hour to the south, is the site of an American investors' invasion bringing condominiums, beach houses and Spanish style mansions for aging baby boomers, all available through Re/Max and Century 21. Tijuana is the tourist strip and industrial park, the canyons' slums and the hilltops' mansions, but it is also Nortec music and the blues of Javier Bátiz, a monumental sculpture of Christ and a local artist's huge statue of a female nude.

I love Tijuana with all its chaos, its corruption and its creativity.

While in Tijuana I thought about Cincinnati and the connections between the two, and there are many — more than you might think. Almost everyone who has visited family in San Diego or Los Angeles has made the obligatory visit to Tijuana's Avenida Revolución and come back with a poncho or a sombrero, a case of gastroenteritis or a hangover.

Though you might not have known it, your television set was probably made in Tijuana, the world center of TV manufacture. If you have a new Latino neighbor, co-worker or employee, there is a good chance that he came through Tijuana on the trip north — perhaps hired a coyote there to get him across the border. The boy down the block who joined the Marines and did his boot camp in San Diego also went to Tijuana to visit the bars and bordellos as his father and his grandfather did before him.

Then, of course, there's Traffic, the film that linked suburban Cincinnatians to the Tijuana drug trade; and so, as you know, if you've been smoking weed, snorting coke or shooting heroin, there's a good chance your drug of choice was smuggled across the border by the contraband entrepreneurs of Tijuana.

Tijuana is now also the way station for Mexicans being deported from the United States. So the former neighbor or co-worker no longer on your block or in your shop might now be found at the Casa del Migrante in Tijuana.

Father Luiz Kendzierski of the Scalabriniani Missionaries, which runs the migrant refuge, explained to me that it once mainly sheltered migrants to the United States but now 80 percent of its 80 to 140 residents are deportees heading back home.

Homeland Security's division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been carrying out Operation Return to Sender, a round-up of immigrant lawbreakers who have been deported back to their home countries, most to Mexico. Some of those I talked to at the Casa had been released from prison, while others had been picked up in ICE raids. Now they were on their way home, though many had not been home for 30 years and some spoke no Spanish, for they had been raised in the United States.

Manuel Álvarez told me that he had just been released from prison in Lompoc, Calif. He carried a U.S. Department of Justice identification card showing him to be inmate number 32752-180. Born in Chihuahua in 1975, Álvarez told me that he been deported and then illegally re-entered the United States; and for that crime, he had been imprisoned for two years, first in Oklahoma, then in Bakersville and finally at Lompoc. Except for a couple of tickets, he had no criminal record, he told me.

"We're not criminals," he said. "We're working people. We sacrificed everything to work in the United States, to earn our living honestly. We left behind our families: our parents, our spouses, our children. We went to the United States fleeing hunger and poverty. In Mexico the wages are very low, and in the United States they're better. I'm a master carpenter, and here in Mexico I couldn't make $20 a day, while there I could make $15 or $16 an hour.

"Some of the migrants marry American women and have children there. And then la Migra comes and breaks up those families. When they do that, they don't realize what they are doing to those children, and that's the hard part. That's tough, isn't it?"

Not all of the men there were like Álvarez. Some had committed real crimes: robbery, drug deals and worse. But most were like him, working people caught up in the American national hysteria about "illegals" and "terrorists." Workers nabbed in a raid, those neighbors of yours now staying there in the Casa del Migrante.

Meanwhile the Marine has gone to the Tijuana brothel, the auto parts for American cars are being stamped out in the Tijuana factory, your dope is heading out of a Tijuana warehouse on a truck bound north and your new TV is on its way to the showroom.

Everything moves across the border freely — everything but the workers.