The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (20 page)

Except, of course, these two gringos.

Now, about the Hall of Fame: Eric and I aren't sure it exists. A motel owner, a shopkeeper, and a cabbie haven't heard of it. They're not alone. I call Freddy Sandoval, a Tijuana native who played third base for the Angels. “I didn't know we had a Hall of Fame,” he says. Freddy Sandoval's picture is
in the Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame.

One morning the cashier at Ricardo's restaurant gives us a tip. We walk up Avenida Madero, past cheapo fast-food joints and auto repair shops. We come upon a triangle of parkland bordered by three noisy streets. A man and his two dogs are passed out in the grass. Another sits on a park bench displaying his tricked-out bike. We see two cops from a police force we have been eagerly trying to avoid. And in the middle of this dingy urban still life, a bell tower that looks like a giant white chess piece rises toward the sky. A hand-painted sign reads,
SALóN DE LA FAMA DEL DEPORTE
. The Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame.

Balancing on four legs, the Hall of Fame proper begins about three stories in the air. You can walk under the building and gaze up at it. We climb the outer staircase, and the metal bows under our feet. The final step feels like it could give way at any second.

Eric and I peek through the door. The Hall of Fame is as empty as the Revo. We don't see any customers—or any employees. We walk inside and sign the guestbook.

The Hall's first exhibit, on our right, is an odd photo collage devoted to
lucha libre.
There are old wrestlers who look like Fidel Castro, and new ones who look like Tijuana's answer to Doink the Clown. On the left-hand wall, we come across an exhibit marked “Golf.” Only there aren't any photos of golfers. There are only photos of the exterior of the Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame. “Maybe the exhibit is on tour or something,” Eric says.

Moving tentatively forward, I get interested in a team photo of Equipo Vikingos, the 2000–2001 champions of Tijuana's amateur baseball league. Los Vikingos, a swell-looking bunch of guys, are celebrating with a well-endowed brunette in a leopard-print dress. What's confusing is that I can't find photos of the team that won the amateur title in 1999–2000 or 2001–2002 or any other year. Los Vikingos and their valet, it seems, have been awarded a singular honor. The Hall of Fame is as idiosyncratic as your uncle's mantel.

Another mystery photo: grim-faced Maria Hayde Gomez, described only as Tijuana's 1983 Youth Athlete of the Year.
¿Quién eras, Maria?
We see a glass case packed with strange memorabilia: a baseball glove with the name
Rudy Campos
written on it in marker; a leather jacket from Tijuana's hunting and fishing club; wrestling trunks; a photo of Esteban Loaiza.

The Hall bulges with sports history:
hundreds
of Tijuana men and women stare back at us from neat 11-by-14-inch black frames. There are chess players, archers, matadors. A geriatric woman bowling in brow-line glasses. A high school football team holding aloft its coach, a Mexican John Madden, after a big win.

The Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame has the soul of Canton, Ohio, and the inventory of a wall at Chili's. We have to know: What is this place?

Back downstairs in the park, I walk up to a man. I'd picked up a color brochure in the Hall of Fame and located a photo of the director.

How do I find this man? I ask.

The man in the park says, “He's dead.”

Oh. I point at another man in another brochure. What about this man?

“He had a heart attack.”

We'll try back tomorrow.

 

What do we
turistas
want from Tijuana? Well, first we want vice. Tijuana is our Larry Flynt. During Prohibition, vice was something as simple as getting a beer. Tijuana,
Liberty
magazine once proclaimed, was the city “Where There Aren't No Ten Commandments and Where a Man Can Raise a Thirst.” Vice also meant sports.

In 1907 the mustachioed Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz decreed that gambling was legal here. Tijuana Racetrack was opened less than a decade later by “Sunny Jim” Coffroth, the on-the-make son of a California state senator. (Americans and Mexican politicians were teammates in the creation of Tijuana's vice culture.) Americans crossed the border and walked a mere 150 yards to get to the track. Members of the clergy put up a sign at the border that read:
THE ROAD TO HELL
.

With sports, Tijuana was a clever demon. The horses ran in Tijuana on Sundays, when Santa Anita called such a thing unholy. They ran during World War II, when Santa Anita was a Japanese internment camp. The city's Agua Caliente Racetrack popularized the “5–10” bet—later renamed the Pick 6—which drew thousands of suckers south in search of a payday.

The restaurants, hotels, and brothels that grew up around the racetracks and casinos became Tijuana's main street, later renamed Avenida Revolución, which became—under a few coats of irony—the official vicelandia of the gringos.

There were stadiums in Tijuana that felt like they were designed by Dr. Seuss. In 1947 an enormous jai alai palace was built on the grounds near our motel. A version still stands with
JAI ALAI GAMES
in giant letters on the outer wall and a statue of a player holding a
cesta
out front. A guard lets us inside and we can see that the betting windows have been perfectly preserved.

When American sports rejected you, Tijuana welcomed you. California's ban on bare-knuckle boxing led promoters to move a highly publicized 1886 bout just south of the border. Wyatt Earp served as ref. Dennis Rodman, when America tired of him, spent an end-of-the-trail season grabbing rebounds for the Tijuana Dragons.

If bullfighting is your vice, you can still find a $24 ticket to see bull-slayers like Humberto Flores and Lupita López. Ricardo “Cheto” Torres, who runs a boxing gym downtown, tells us he used to work the bullring in the 1970s. He sold seat cushions to
turistas
for five bucks. When the crowd threw roses to the matadors, sometimes drunk Americans stood up and threw their cushions.

In the bullring's parking lot, we notice a sign:
MANAGEMENT IS NOT RESPONSIBLE IF YOUR CAR IS STOLEN, DAMAGED . . . OR CATCHES ON FIRE.

 

At the Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame the next day, Eric and I are surprised: there's another visitor. “What in the world are you doing here?” the man exclaims. This is Roberto Montaño, forty-two, who will guide us into the sports-obsessed mind of Tijuana.

“In Tijuana, baseball is the big thing,” Roberto says. “I grew up as a Padres and Chargers fan.” If you lived in Tijuana, you grooved on America's sporting vices just like America grooved on yours. Put up an aerial antenna and you could siphon off all the Padres and Chargers games.

“I grew up with Dan Fouts, Charlie Joiner, and John Jefferson,” Roberto says, “and, on the Padres, Randy Jones and Dave Winfield. I remember when Ozzie Smith came up in 1978 as a rookie shortstop. I remember when the
Clippers
played in San Diego.

“I used to watch the Saturday Game of the Week. Joe Garagiola, Tony Kubek, Vin”—he pronounces it
Veen
—“Scully. My dad, who would be seventy-two now, was a Yankees fan. There weren't any Padres when he was growing up. Basketball wasn't big in Tijuana unless you were a sports fan like me. I remember Kareem, Magic, Worthy. And the white guy with glasses. What was his name?”

Tijuana has boxers like Érik “El Terrible” Morales, who keeps a gym in Zona Norte. But, interestingly, twenty years ago Tijuana was not a soccer town. Roberto and old-line
tijuanenses
will tell you soccer was brought by migrants from the Mexican interior who came to Tijuana hoping to get to the United States. Many got stopped short—it's a lot harder to cross near Tijuana than it used to be. They began the soccerization process, and satellites beaming in the Champions League did the rest. Tijuana's home club, the wonderfully named Xoloitzcuintles, just joined the first division of Mexican league.

We climb into Roberto's car. He's on his way to San Diego to go shopping, but he'll drop us in the red-light district. (My friends! I see you're back . . .) “Tijuana has grown so ugly,” Roberto says as we cruise down the Revo. “Even in the seventies it was beautiful. Then a lot of outsiders came here to go to the States.” While Americans fear an invasion of immigrants, Tijuana fears an invasion of soccer fans.

Roberto points down a side street and says, “Can you see the border fence?” We can just make it out, a string of silver tinsel glittering in distant hills. Even with an American passport, the lines to get back can take three hours.

At about that moment, a bile-raising smell wafts into the car. Roberto's wife and son cover their faces. “That incomparable Tijuana odor,” Roberto says. “It smells like rotten dog.” It smells a lot worse than that.

We accelerate down the lonely Revo. Roberto points out a woman walking away from us. “That girl in brown? She's a prostitute.” Her? “I can tell. Her walk, her face . . .

“We miss the gringos, man,” he says wistfully when he drops us off. “They all left, like the Mayas did.”

 

Pink flamingos swim in the fountain outside the Agua Caliente Racetrack on the night of the dog races. See, Tijuana indulges America's upscale fantasies too. It is our Larry Flynt
and
our Robin Leach. Eighty years ago the Agua Caliente's casino was a great gringo mecca—“a dazzling, dream-like city,” in the words of a pilgrim from
Vogue.
Its owners came to Old Mexico and built . . . Europe.

The casino was constructed in 1928, pre-Vegas. The chandeliers were imported from Italy. The columns were made of marble. Designer shops had a UN roll call of fashion. (You could take $100 worth of stuff back across the border legally. You smuggled the rest.) In his book
Satan's Playground,
Paul J. Vanderwood notes that the owners boasted that the Agua Caliente was built in the shadow of an ancient Spanish fort. This was horseshit, but there was a certain glamour in the image of a Spanish don leaning on the craps table. The casino's motto was “Agua Caliente, where all nations meet and speak the tongue of happiness.”

A San Diego pensioner could feel like a rich man at Agua Caliente. Charlie Chaplin hung out there. Howard Hughes was photographed at the racetrack. Will Rogers played cards at the grandly named Monte Carlo across town, and Tijuana's top-ranked bordello was called the Moulin Rouge.

Lured by a fat purse, Seabiscuit outran an overmatched field at Agua Caliente's horse track. So did studs like Phar Lap and Round Table. By 1929, Tijuana's promoters—imagine Mark Cuban with fewer legal controls—were staging an annual $100,000 handicap, dwarfing the purse at the Kentucky Derby.

The grand old Agua Caliente was closed by Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas in 1935 and later turned into a school. The new Agua Caliente, owned by Mexican oligarch Jorge Hank Rhon, is your basic, utilitarian casino. The drug war cleared the place of Americans: Naim Lajud Libien, director of the dog track, tells us that 5 percent of the clientele are from the north. I'd heard of one absurdly upscale touch, however. I'd heard Hank kept a private zoo on the premises.

Naim smiles. “Mammals, birds, what do you want?”

He boasts that Hank's menagerie rivals Noah's. “We have tigers. Lions. An ostrich. A giraffe.”

“. . . kangaroos, macaws . . .”

“. . . peacocks, panthers . . .”

“. . . jaguars . . .”

“. . . camels, buffaloes . . .”

“. . . bears—black, grizzly . . .”

“. . .
focas.
How do you say that? Seals . . .”

“Come with me,” Naim says. He leads us behind the first turn of the dog track, not 100 feet from where greyhounds will run. We see lions and white tigers—five, six, maybe seven of them—prowling listlessly in a chain-link cage. My notes end here. Naim hurries us away—this is just a “preview.” You've got to be a high roller with a reservation to see camels, buffaloes, kangaroos, macaws . . .

 

Tijuana, you might have heard, is frightening. Americans cross the border for this too. They don't want to be robbed or murdered, but they get a kick out of walking mean streets where such a thing happened to someone else. If you're scoring at home, Tijuana is our Larry Flynt
and
our Robin Leach
and
it's also our Freddy Krueger.

The Tijuana Racetrack opened in 1916, five years after the city was captured by rebels in the Mexican Revolution. Indeed, the Revolution led to a loud scream of panic in the United States, what historian Ricardo Romo called the “Brown Scare.” For decades after, tales of murderers and pickpockets rippled through the Revo—some real, some the product of the hyper gringo imagination. You cross the border into Mexico and your sense of security melts away.

“There's a kind of mysteriousness about Mexico,” says the historian Paul Vanderwood. “But even more than that, a kind of
unpredictability.
You never know quite where you're at, quite what's going to happen, you don't quite speak the language . . .

“Entrepreneurs didn't really want to clean up Tijuana,” he adds. “They may announce once in a while, ‘We're going to do this and that.' But they want to leave that ‘what's going to happen next?' kind of atmosphere.”

The drug war sent Tijuana's danger from a semiromantic,
Touch of Evil
variety to a full-on,
Faces of Death
freak-out. The bodies piled up in 2008, when two lieutenants in the Tijuana Cartel vied for control of the city. They were El Teo (Teodoro García Simental) and the Engineer (Luis Fernando Sánchez Arellano). The Freddy-versus-Jason battle was a typical
narco
debate—the mutilated body as message. (A typical note, left atop eight headless, tongueless corpses: “Here you go Engineer.”) This created a grimly ironic situation at Camp Pendleton: U.S. Marines, who were deploying to the most dangerous cities in Iraq, were discouraged by their commander from going to Tijuana.