Storming the Gates of Paradise (16 page)

Many of the downtown condos, he tells me, are second homes, meaning that they are often empty. The emptiness of affluence annoys him, and one of his plans is a series of drawings showing how “a McMansion can be turned into three houses”—that is, how ostentatious waste and selfishness could be retrofitted for ordinary people and more environmentally reasonable living. “Well,” he says, “if we were really to look at the factors, the conditions that have transformed the last forty years, could we anticipate that in the next forty years the third and fourth forces, immigrations, will be equally transformative?” Clearly, he hopes so.

He said on local television not long ago, “I could be in the center right now of one of those new communities in Del Mar and, just viscerally, when I’m in the middle of that place, I just . . . feel completely sad. Twenty minutes later, I’m in the middle of Tijuana. I feel a lot more charged. . . . I cannot help but want to escape that kind of sterility in San Diego and then embrace this, what you might call chaos.” Chaos, as in a lot going on and a lot of kinds of people present—as in social density.

We leave the car to walk into a parking structure where the work of another InSite artist, Aernout Mik, is installed, a huge screen in the sepulchral gloom of the garage showing a video that mixes footage of subdivisions seen from above—San Diego—with images of a fictionalized version of Tijuana’s pharmacies. Cruz finds it amusing that the place that was once a magnet for the illicit is now a mecca for people looking for cheap but legal drugs; the pharmacies that line Avenida de la Revolución are temples—mirrors multiply the carefully arranged piles of toothpaste, drugs, and toiletries into a confusion of abundance, and employees in white doctors’ jackets solicit customers at the open front.

The sight of the pharmacies whets our appetite for something livelier than this abandoned zone, and so we drive south on I-5 to another parking lot—this one a short walk from the militarized carnival zone that is the border. And with that, all the rules are about to change, which is part of why Cruz brings people across so often. There you can see difference, see the innovativeness born out of poverty and its sometimes exuberant results.

To enter Mexico is easy; there are no delays, no checks, no armed officials sorting out who may enter or who may not. You walk up a long ramp lined with vendors
and keep going, until the down ramp spits you out into a pedestrian plaza circled by makeshift buildings. Women and children approach, selling crafts—my pale presence is a magnet for them, Teddy ruefully notes—but we walk on to the city center, down streets as gleaming and theatrical as in Dutch artist Mik’s parking-garage video. Somehow the very texture changes when you leave San Diego for Tijuana. There’s more color and more people, even the texture of sidewalks and streets is different—more potholes and irregularities, a veneer of dust and grime that tints the energy and the vividness of this other world.

Cruz decides on a detour, and suddenly we leave behind the gringo-commodities zone to join a mostly Mexican crowd. Men and women, walking in a large group, are chanting angrily and carrying placards we cannot read from behind. They march down the middle of the street, and cars and trucks in the one remaining lane honk in solidarity. Street and sidewalk are crowded and bustling. We follow the protestors for blocks, and at an intersection lined with onlookers and vendors of cut fruit, Teddy asks one of the participants what’s going on. It’s a demonstration against the Tijuana mayor’s decision to eliminate the unofficial transit network, the Blanco y Azul buses that transport workers around the city and its sprawling periphery of slums and sweatshops. For Cruz, this is a sign of the Americanization of the place, the insistence on official monopolies and the banning of the unofficial options, whether they work or not.

It’s the improvised solutions to poverty that he seeks out among the slums and favelas of Latin America, starting with Tijuana, and he admits that it’s easy to romanticize poverty rather than admire the poor, whose solutions are often creative, subversive, and environmentally sound—Tijuana does much to recycle the discarded materials of San Diego. On an earlier tour, he took me to see the small houses salvaged from San Diego as an alternative to demolition, homes that had themselves emigrated across the border. Whole structures have been imported to Mexico and resituated, often on raised metal scaffolds so that the first story becomes the second. The improvised architecture of Tijuana delights him, the homes built piecemeal and the retaining walls made out of tires, the squats and guerrilla housing that Mexico, with a very different attitude toward real estate rights, often allows to become neighborhoods of legitimate homeowners.

We saw La Mona, the five-story statue that dominates one poor barrio—a voluptuous, naked, plaster-white woman that is not a public monument like the more prim Statue of Liberty but a private home, built by Armando Muñoz in this zone of no zoning codes. Kids running in the dust of the unpaved roads, power lines with dozens of lines spliced into them, houses in vivid lavenders and oranges and lime greens, laundry on the line, and stray dogs are fixtures in this barrio. Just past it is the international border, the new fence being put in, a row of deceptively open-looking, off-white vertical strips that look less brutal but are also more forbidding than the corrugated metal landing pads from the Gulf War that were erected in the early 1990s (a recycling suggesting that this too is a war zone). In his presentations, Cruz often shows a picture of Colonia Libertad, this border neighborhood, in the early 1970s, fenceless, with a little boy flying a kite on the undeveloped U.S. side of the line. The border has grown steadily more massive and more militarized over the past two decades. It didn’t used to be such a big deal.

On the Mexican side, homes push all the way up to the fence—“zero setback,” Teddy likes to say, adapting zoning language to the layout of international relations. Such shifts in scale are a big part of his language and worldview; he is as interested in the borders that govern the single-family home as those that divide two nations on one continent. Tijuana “crashes against this wall. It’s almost like the wall becomes a dam that keeps the intensity of this chaos from contaminating the picturesque order of San Diego. . . . It’s a whole country leaning against the other.” But he goes on to explain that there’s more than physical distance at stake: “I’m talking about an attitude toward the everyday, toward the space, toward the way that we use the space, toward ritual, toward the relationship to the other.” Not the utilitarian architecture he encountered in school in Guatemala City, but the vernacular, improvisational responses and networks that could do much for more affluent realms.

The ever more militarized border makes San Diego in his terms, “the world’s largest gated community.” Though the United States likes to consider Mexico a corrupting influence, it’s the Mexican city serving the United States that is regarded as shameful, weird, and not quite part of its own country, while the booming U.S. city abutted up against it calls itself “America’s Finest City.” That’s
part of the great paradox of the border. Another is the abrupt line where two worlds meet—or rather where one world presses forward and the other shrinks back. Even the ecology has become different on each side. And yet there are countless ways it doesn’t divide anything. Mexicans emigrate north with or without papers; Americans who work in San Diego have moved south to buy affordable waterfront homes on the other side, an American dream no longer in America; California as a whole becomes more and more Latino, with Latinos due to become the majority population in the next decade; and by some accounts 40 percent of the San Diego workforce lives south of the border. Tiendas selling Mexican washtubs and other goods show up in San Diego, while U.S. chain restaurants spread in Tijuana. It’s a dam that builds up pressure without truly stopping the flow, a line that does and doesn’t divide.

This reading of the border lets Cruz think about the two great forces of globalization and privatization in relation to everyday life. Globalization as the influx of human beings from other cultures to the United States and as the export of dubious U.S. models of architecture, urban (and suburban) design, and consumption; the spread of chains; and the concomitant erosion of local culture. Privatization as the spatial and psychological withdrawal from the public sphere and the collective good that accompanies an ideology of individualism and free enterprise. And perhaps a counter to privatization in the reinvigorated sense of public life and public space that sometimes comes with Latino immigrants.

And though Cruz is interested in what the United States could learn from Latin America, it’s clear that Latin America and much of the rest of the world are learning from the United States—there’s an elite development in China that he points to in dismay, an exact replica of an Orange County suburban tract, with lawns, boxy stucco houses fronted by garages and driveways, and curvy streets. And then there is the subdivision in Tijuana we went to look at one day, a strange grid of miniaturized single-family homes plopped like a carpet on a rolling landscape. Each home had a driveway out front, but there was not enough room for them to be freestanding; instead they pressed against each other in long rows. “The first image is that of a cemetery, these small mausoleums,” he remarks. “This is not that different from San Diego, in that sense.”

For him, the Tijuana subdivision redeemed itself through the quick customization of each home, painted different colors, with wrought iron safety gates or ornaments added, with small businesses and built additions, so that they began to diverge into something more varied and more expressive—in other words, the dwellers became informal collaborators with the architects, a step he welcomes. Such customization also happens in non-Latino American neighborhoods, he agrees; it is more because this is where his roots are that he comes back again and again to the world south of the border—that and the fact that what the United States is getting from Mexico and from Latinos is highly politicized now.

From the bus protest, we go on to wander through a mercado, a cluster of small open shops under one barnlike roof. People arrange flowers at one stand, hover over kitchenwares at another. We sidle down the narrow aisle of a taqueria, past men carrying five-gallon water jugs on their shoulders, to a bend in the labyrinth. Teddy points out the altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe built into the wall, with candles, plastic flowers, and AstroTurf, and then we turn past an old man hanging his cap on the nail in the raw wood wall rising from the countertop at which he was eating his Sunday lunch. At the entrance, we come to a fruit seller with small egg-shaped fruit Cruz has rarely seen, he tells me, since his youth in Guatemala; and he buys a few, which he will eventually hand to a beggar kid in the plaza on our way to the border, having realized that this taste of the past isn’t going to be exportable.

It has become time to return to America’s Finest City, and so we reverse our route, walking through Avenida de la Revolución and the flagstone plaza to cross the bridge over the many lanes of traffic so we can join the line to enter the United States, a line that is alarmingly long this Sunday afternoon. An hour later, we’ve moved perhaps a hundred yards, and we’re sitting on a bus stuck in the massive traffic jam at the border. We had jumped on the bus hoping it would move faster than the thousand or so pedestrians winding away out of sight on the sidewalk, inhaling the bus fumes, and mostly ignoring the peddlers of lamps and churros and other trinkets. Surrounding us at the back of the bus are blue-collar shoppers,
women with bright fingernails, squirming children, and, amassed around their ankles, full plastic shopping bags. A black man sits imperturbably with sunglasses on in the dim bus. These are not the people who have rediscovered the city, the people for whom downtowns are being redeveloped, nor are they suburbanites. They are the people who never left the urban zones, the service-economy workers who keep everything running and yet remain largely invisible to most architects and urbanists—which is why Cruz is preoccupied with them in his work, though on this ride he’s more concerned with getting home to fulfill a promise to drive one of his daughters somewhere. And he is indignant both that so many are stuck at this border this afternoon and that the border has been built with a disregard for the needs of people with lives on both sides.

This is one of those in-between zones that preoccupy him. As he says, “The immigrants bring with them their sociocultural attitudes and sensibilities regarding the use of domestic and public space as well as the natural landscape. In these neighborhoods, multi-generational households of extended families shape their own programs of use. . . . Alleys, setbacks, driveways, and other ‘wasted’ infrastructures and leftover spaces are appropriated and utilized as the community sees fit.” Or, as his friend and fan, the urban critic Mike Davis, has written, “Immigrant homeowners are indeed community heroes. . . . Latino immigrants are confronted with a labyrinth of laws, regulations and prejudices that frustrate, even criminalize, their attempts to build vibrant neighborhoods. Their worst enemies include conventional zoning and building codes (abetted by mortgage lending practices) that afford every loophole to developers who airdrop oversized, ‘instant-slum’ apartment complexes into formerly single-family neighborhoods, but prevent homeowners themselves from adding legal additions to accommodate relatives or renters.”

But just across the border in San Ysidro, Cruz has found his ideal collaborators. There, in a low-income community that’s 89 percent Latino immigrants, Andrea Skorepa directs Casa Familiar, an organization whose low-key approach to community service disguises its radical aims, which are Cruz’s aims as well: to break through the rules that prevent the creation of an urbanism that truly serves the public good. Cruz has designed two projects for Casa that will be built in the
next few years. One is titled Living Rooms at the Border. It takes a piece of land with an unused church zoned for three units and carefully arrays on it twelve affordable housing units, a community center (the converted church), offices for Casa in the church’s attic, and a garden that can accommodate street markets and kiosks. “In a place where current regulation allows only one use,” he crows, “we propose five different uses that support each other. This suggests a model of social sustainability for San Diego, one that conveys density not as bulk but as social choreography.” For both architect and patron, it’s an exciting opportunity to prove that breaking the zoning codes can be for the best. Another one of Cruz’s core beliefs is that if architects are going to achieve anything of social distinction, they will have to become developers’ collaborators or developers themselves, rather than hirelings brought in after a project’s parameters are laid out. Casa Familiar has provided his first opportunity to work exactly as he believes architects should.