Tijuana Go Back to My Place?

Down and striking out in Mexico’s mecca of class.
By Dan Gillis, III

Tijuana is the place that good souls go to die or go crazy. It’s the other half of the North American dynasty, a city that’s really just San Diego cut into two separate but unequal parts. For TJ, the city throbs with a multicultural populace funneling in from everywhere south of minutemen of Texas. The people wandering the avenues come from every diverse state in Mexico, and the indigenous people sell goods on the sides of the roads, displaced from their farms by multinational agribusinesses. Last Thursday, I went to TJ to hear Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista’s army for indigenous rights, hold a forum about the social ills festering along the symbiotic creature growing along the U.S.-Mexico border

And meet some hot Zapatista babes in the process!

It’s true, these ladies were muy caliente in the most extreme sense and I had to get in on these sweet cinnamon sprinkled churros before they went back to Chiapas and their revolutionary boys armed with bullet chains and sweetie poetic nothings to whisper in their ears. All I had was my press credential and a video camera, and that was step one to getting in with these cute little mariposas, right?

The beginning of this dirty millennium was the best time for love to sprout in a time of discord. It was also a great time for boners to sprout after meeting some fairly crustaceous protest chicks.

I mean females.

I’d been to every protest you can imagine. “Don’t attack Iraq,” “No Blood for Oil,” and I’d even stood outside Forever 21 on the Third Street Promenade shouting things about workers rights or something. I couldn’t really remember cause I was just looking at that one foxy broad – I mean female – in the bandana and the side bag she got in Argentina. I didn’t care that she had a little hedgehog of hair taking a nap in her armpit, for these girls that’s a stinky little badge of honor.

I am woman, smell my pits.

And don’t get me wrong, I was trying to smell those pits, especially the pits of that translator who was standing on stage right now in this broken down theatre on Constitucion Ave. “Pinche Migra” she said with her black jacket drawing tight as she raised her hand in the air. The gesture was for emphasis, I think, but really it just showed off those sexy homemade patches that she stitched on there herself, like the indigenous women of Oaxaca.

Or maybe it was made by the Prada tribe.

I tried to “interview” her later only to find out she was from L.A. Such a buzz-kill knowing that I might see her again at crossing her arms and rocking at Spaceland or eating squid at Cobras & Matadors. I wanted this to be a special moment.

Just you, me, and my camera makes three, baby.

But no dice, so I went to talk to the babieBrown Berets, essentially a Mexican Black Panther movement in the 1960s that was resurrected in 1994, when people were really into Rage Against the Machine and those Africa necklaces. They were looking all cute with their berets tipped to the side, so I sequestered two for a mano-to-womano moment, one step closer to my Zapatista dream.

What, you’re from San Francisco?

This was not good. I probably saw them some antiwar protest in ’03, and I most likely gave one of them a wink at the “Food Not Bombs” booth. “Oh yeah pumpkin pants, I think we should be dropping corn dumplings all over Kimmy Jong Ill”

This was going to be harder than I thought, where were my indigenous honeys – I mean females – with those hot little scarves around their necks?

I should have known, after my failed attempt for Gypsy, the cute dreadlocked gutter punk anarchist I met in Mexico City while I was there building community gardens, these ladies didn’t want some guy from the suburbs. They want a guy with a real stuggle.

And I thought a struggle was accidentally ordering a no-foam latte.

The day ended with Marcos saying a bunch of stuff in Spanish, of which I understood approximately fourteen words. So I packed up my cameras and headed for the border, empty handed and not even close to being embedded in a bed (or two) in Mexico.

Taking another bite of my pollo taco, I sat at the stainless steel counter of a restaurant in sight of America. I had gotten the numbers of some ladies I interviewed, but they were from exotic places like Santa Monica, Hawthorne, and Ventura. I was looking more for San Cristobal or Cuernavaca.

I put some more lime on the taco as the vendor said, “You need anything else?”

In my head, I began the plans for my next trip and my next attempt for getting out from behind the boring ladies of the states.

Cuba. Yeah, that’s it. Cuba, hold on to your Che hats, ‘cause here I come for all you Commie mommies!

I mean females.

For more of Dan’s strike outs, check out http://www.underbellyLA.blogspot.com