Oda a Tijuana La Bella

I.
In a tender womb
I was carried to you mi Tijuana
into your crying nights
your incandescent deserts, your eerie lake, now seco

Esa madre mia que corrio hacia ti buscando un refugio
running away girl, hiding the rising little bulge
the creature growing inside of her

Too young, only fifteen
determined to mother a child

when she herself was
forced to bury her own childhood
at the sake of feeding a family
led by a single matriarch

and so this girl
my mother made the mistake
of falling in love too early
but yet, at 15 she was really 30

and a seed was planted in her
me occupying her; habitando su tierno utero
I just can’t help it
But cry at her strength for letting me be

She left her Nayarit and took a Tres Estrellas bus headed northbound,
that took the road up, up, up, hacia la gran ilusion del norte
the bus full of hope travelled the black asphalt leading to
the northern promises, oh those empty promesas del norte

this story only matters because
I’ve come back to you Tijuana, now as a grown woman

To many I tell about you, about our story:

My simple equation of being
I was born into you Tijuana
Out of a run-away girl you forged me
De una cimarrona ilegal you made me who I am:
You planted in me the ability to face crudeness

it thickened my skin
but yet I weep at your poverty
so really, who am I fooling?
my skin is as thin as our first encounter
when I first heard you and smelled you and felt you, y te metiste dentro de mi piel

You Tijuana, blob of me
Me pieces of you, we wounded together, bleeding stubbornness, bleeding

We were apart once,
And I leave you often now
But when I was gone the longest
I actually missed you, no podia llegar a ti por no tener papeles

I dreamt of you for 17 years
Imagining your curves
Your street vendors, your children playing
Hide and go seek, cops and robbers, migra contra polleros, vida contra muerte

Desde San Diego, del otro lado:

You grew inside my mind
I formed cobwebs of you, heard shrieks of your people
Tus calles con sus colores chillantes, I heard the laughter of your taco vendors,
Smelled the sweet aroma of your warm elotes cups,
the icy texture of your conos de fresa melting in my tongue,
Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu the camote horns will howl,
Y estos suenos mios casi siempre terminaban with your sunsets in playas

I longed for all of you
For walking barefoot in your concrete
But laws of men stopped me,
Should I specify: Laws of white men y su politica de odio me pararon en seco
Tratando de secar mi humanidad y tambien la tuya Tijuana


II.
Mi mama
Worked in your maquilas
She slaved away
Her fingers gluing tiny
TV components, like miniature cities

But she left you, Tijuana
And your broken promises
the U.S. border line didn’t scare her
ella dijo:
A mi la migra me hace los mandados

like many others, she crossed defiantly

Fearless, mi madre
She was and is still is heavy artillery
It’s what you would do, its what people do
Men women and children
When there are no more choices left for them

It’s a human right for parents to feed their children
No matter the costs, aunque les cueste la vida

Y en efecto, hay tanta muerte en la frontera
Madres, hijos, primas, tios, compadres, hijas, sobrinos, nietos
Pero es no nos quita la necesidad de cruzar


III.
Tijuana, now I
Walk your streets
Deambulo por tus calles
Por tus arterias, por tus canales urbanos tan llenos de gente
Mas sin embargo tan embriagadas de soledad

Seeing your TJ ways in Revolucion
Perfect street name for
Your chaos, for the revolting
Margaritas in foreign stomachs

Ojos perdidos intentando poseerte
Getting drunk off of your veins
Yanking pieces of you, llevandose recuerditos tuyos, across the line

What is it that they want from you?

Sex, absinthe, a boob job, a mule, an innocent child

Te quieren devorar completa Tijuana

You whose sexuality
Is overexposed and exploited
So cheaply sold, it’s defecated upon
An artist once said that your were the color of feces

You are viewed that way
because there’s a monster lurking over you, a very clean looking monster
But it needs you Tijuana, te necesita tal como eres, sordida e irreverente
so it’s own nation can shine and gleam perfection

But yet they still come, los del norte vienen a ti Tijuana
They need your waves, your pills, tus espejos de arena
your cold beer and the comfort of your warm prostitutes

The cheapness of your medical hands,
the blade of your surgeons for perfect femininity or masculinity
You are the perfect get away plan Tijuana
el escape barato, aunque en realidad, eso a ti te viene saliendo tan caro

Escapees flood you, run to you
South bound and northbound
Terrestrial animals go through your membrane daily

IV.
You never rest Tijuana
At night your are
Throbbing with life
As in daylight

It’s hard to say how I prefer you
Si de dia o de noche, you are charming either way
Another woman said that you were of the color in between: Gray
Like the hue of the steel bars that hold you down, from eating San Diego, uy que miedo!

It’s a trip
Your relationship with the rest of the world
I’ve come to think of you as a Republic
A country of your very own
For you dress of Mexico in September
But English tongues inhabit your houses

Those are the Tijuana-green-card-holders,
The daily crossers
Those living in you, and that you accept as
Bi-linguists, cutting you in two
But somehow you know how to sew their contradictions, the splits, you are an artful costurera and a healer



Like the way tu y san diego aqui en la frontera
Dismantle differences and make love like any real lovers
Of flesh and bones do

zona norte

I. Hector

Tijuana has a certain magic, it exists on her very own terms, its really not part of Mexico. It’s a city made of hills, and so most streets are sensuous curves of deteriorated black asphalt that go up and down all over the urban landscape. Clouds make the city look darker and cooler in the early mornings, the ocean is close enough to inundate the air with a breeze, to make it seem like it sits on top of a mountain.

The streets of Tijuana are almost never empty. The city hardly sleeps.

Hector was on his way to school. As he stood alone on the corner of Constitucion and Calle Madero waiting for the bus, Hector felt like crying, but he held back his tears. It made him shake, this feeling of despair, this uncontrollable anger that traveled through him and burned his intestines, it boiled his heart and made it shriek as if it had been ripped out of his chest and had been thrown into a burning stew.

He took a deep breath while looking at the ground, and as soon as he lifted his gaze, he saw the festive dark blue bus come from over the hill, a roaring monster against the foggy morning. He held his hand up, and the bus took him away to start his day. In his seat, he took a look at the Tijuana morning before he closed his eyes.

He heard her come in late (very late). It must have been close to dawn already. She walked straight to bed, sliding her body under the sheets, drunk and clumsy, he could smell her stench of alcohol and cigarettes from across the room. He looked outside through sheerness of the curtains: daylight was slowly creeping in, gently overtaking the Tijuana sky. Tormented, thinking only about her, he had been unable to fall asleep. Now that she was home though, the sounds of fading police sirens outside, the distant Norteno music, the laments of the mariachi singers hummed him to sleep; at least for a couple of hours.


II. La Bayamesa

Alberta opened her eyes, late into the day as usual. It was Monday, minutes to noon and the stuffiness of the Tijuana summer had awakened her; she was sweating. Her skin was transpiring last night’s alcohol, the mix of Presidente rum with Coke, the famous cubas, the cocktail of the poorest. The cigarette smoke impregnated the fading yellow sheets. Her ears were stunned by the piercing traffic outside, by the zooming sound of the speeding cars on the Via Rapida right underneath her balcony; the main road to the beach towns of Rosarito and Ensenada, the one that runs perpendicular to the border, following it all the way to the western end, to the Pacific Ocean.

The sun streaks filtered through the white sheer cotton curtains, through the tender skin of her eyelids. She looked across the room and realized Hector was already out for the other twin bed was made with impeccable detail. She couldn’t help but smile, to think of what a perfect son she had. The indolent sun had been steaming and suffocating the air in the apartment all morning long. She stood up and shook up her drowsiness, her mouth was a desert, drying creases lined up her lips; and so she walked up to the window, faced the world outside, her caramel eyes fixed on the passing cars, on the rest of Tijuana existing by daylight. Not her, she was a night creature, a middle aged vampire woman, a border soul.

She looked much older than her 47. She had a damn good reason for it. It was the result of life in the streets; of the endless nights spent forcibly awake, among the other night owls, standing there with the other rental women, long past the first sights of dawn. Her body was drying slowly, holding onto the last bit of dignity that had been eating her inside out. An infernal thirst led her to the dark kitchen, a little rectangle with nothing more than a half-sized fridge and a tabletop stove. Shaking and still buzzed, she grabbed some ice cubes from the freezer and threw them into a small glass and went for the water gallons. She found one half-empty and poured the water into the glass, the ice made a cracking sound right before she drank it in one huge gulp. Her bones ached. Her real name was Alberta Dominguez, but in the streets below, she was baptized La Bayamesa