Threat looms over the city: of heartbreak, of violence, of petty crime and pickpockets. Many will die trying to cross, or be separated from loved ones, or be disillusioned by a lack of opportunity. But for many, of course, what lies on the other side of the border is far from a promised land. Tijuana-based urban planner Gibram Sanchez, 29, calls his city a “melting pot” of influences migrants from Haiti and El Salvador and China have all wound up here, at the doorstep of the United States, many of them hoping to complete the very last leg of the arduous journey to their American dream. The population is an amalgam while official surveys count around 1.6 million residents, the many binationals who travel back and forth daily spike the number closer to 2 million. They have an easy way about them, their shoulders relaxed, their face muscles smooth.īeing so close to the border, Tijuana is a swirling site of transience and transformation. Behind buckets of Tecate, they sing and sway along with Mexican love ballads from the 1980s. At the bars that line the plaza, under black lights and in the dark, men perform in drag and hold each other tenderly in narrow smoke-filled halls. In the shadow of Tijuana’s iconic arch, which marks the northern edge of downtown and the southern edge of the red-light district, a technicolored banner announces La Marcha del Orgullo, the Pride March. On Plaza Santa Cecilia in late May, rainbows reign supreme.
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