Reading Tijuana through the voices of people who love it

After my first visit to Tijuana in October of 2017 I became obsessed with the city, and I wanted to find other people who shared my obsession. Surely I could not be the only person who realized how remarkable of a place this was? And I was not. Writers, poets, philosophers, and scholars have all been writing about Tijuana for decades.

This strange town and its history have not escaped the attention of artists and creatives.

So when I returned from my trip I went about trying to get my hands on every book ever written about Tijuana. My search took me through academic essays, exposes, novellas, short stories, and poetry. And I devoured it all.

Tijuana is unique. It does not have the broad appeal of a city like Paris, a place that has always drawn creatives of all types to both live in and write about the city simultaneously. Tijuana is also unlike Tangier, a city that attracted many creative people during a certain era, but is seldom written about or characterized in literature.

The people interested in Tijuana - interested enough to write about it - all share one trait: a feeling of not belonging anywhere. They are a border town within themselves, navigating multiple cultures and identities. I got this sense from all of them, whether  Mexican nationals, Americans, or Europeans. Whether they were scholars or poets. 

Here is some of the best of the writing about Tijuana:

"There are many Tijuanas. Each one of them is half myth, half temporarily out of service."

- Heriberto Yepez, Tijuana Dreaming

“I think maybe if I walk the streets where someone was afraid, where an entire city was afraid, I’ll maybe understand the fear a little better. This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It’s a quick fix of empathy. We take it like a shot of tequila, or a bump of coke from the key to a stranger’s home. We want the inebriation of presence to dissolve the fact of difference.”

-       VICE 2013 

“Tijuana blurs. Once I leave, I’m eager to talk about it – the way you’re eager to talk about a dream when you wake up, afraid it will dissolve if you don’t pin the details to their places, sketch a path between absurdities.”

-      - VICE 2013

"In my lifetime, I have not felt a love as profound as the confusing passion that I feel for Tijuana, an obsession that does not preclude criticism and which more accurately provokes sudden repudiation. Tijuana elicits a crazy love, a narcotic love. Tijuana is addictive."

- Heriberto Yepez, Tijuana Dreaming

“Sometimes the city fucks on the first date, and sometimes it doesn’t. But always, always, we wake up in the morning and find we didn’t know it at all.”

 -       VICE 2013

"We come to Tijuana from everywhere, the difference is that some of us came first and others later."

- Martin de la Rosa, Tijuana Dreaming

 

"For the deceased poet Eduardo Arellano, Tijuana rather than “a no-place is the place of saturation. As such, it accepts and continually incorporates foreign elements, because, in fact, it would seem that nothing is foreign to the city. And a particular ambiguity arises within this incredible abundance of humanity that gives places like this city a feeling of perversity. The ambiguity makes these places exceptionally favorable to diverse expression of the human, ranging from happiness to art."

- Tijuana Dreaming, 27

 

"Tijuana and San Diego are not in the same historical time zone. Tijuana is poised at the beginning of the industrial age, a Dickensian city with palm trees. San Diego is a postindustrial city of high impact plastic and desperate dieting."

- Richard Rodriguez, Tijuana Dreaming  47

"To live here is to return to the greatest myth of all myths, to be required to profess - before certain visitors, certain neighbors, certain experts - a second rate esotericism…"

- Heriberto Yepez, Tijuana Dreaming,  49

"Write something about the city and you will soon be addicted to her self-deception."

- Heriberto Yepez, Tijuana Dreaming,  49

"To live on the Border is to reside in the middle of an unexpected theology. An embezzled ontology. The suspicion that all this will soon be either less or more than a city, the laboratory of what is to come."

- Tijuana Dreaming, 50

"Tijuana is a combination of extreme situations. Perhaps it is the most reliable proof that we could survive the apocalypse." 

- Tijuana Dreaming, 51

"Coming to Tijuana on an intellectual tour assumes the old concept that walking in the streets can provide us with a special gnosis. In this sense, visiting Tijuana to write about Tijuana is a nostalgia that makes sense." 

- Tijuana Dreaming, 59

“Tijuana has more to do with science fiction now than with Mexican history books.” - 

- Torolab , Tijuana Dreaming62

“Tijuana has the look of a set design, an ephemeral set-up, a location where endless movies and simulacra will be shot, but where nothing will actually happen.” 

- Guillermo Fadanelli, Tijuana Dreaming 62

"Tijuana is like a mirage, only there for the person who desires to see her and is able to visit her. For the majority of people, though, she is transparent, she doesn’t exist." 

- Tijuana Dreaming, 63

"Writing about a place “reveals as much about ourselves as it does about the worlds represented.” 

- Tijuana Dreaming. 118

"Tijuana as an outpost posits a cardinal rule for the Middle World: “you can only survive and move forward by continuing to invent yourself.” 

- Breytenbach, Tijuana Dreaming122

"Shameless exhibition has turned this area into a hotel with no doors where nothing is off limits." 

-  Tijuana Dreaming, 216

"Promiscuity is seductive - the cosmopolitan boredom, the lack of etiquette, a studied disinterest in anyone else’s life, the scant violence despite the sinister surroundings." 

-  Tijuana Dreaming  216

 “Border is form, and as a consequence, also art.” 

- Claudio Magris,  Tijuana Dreaming 216

"In terms of ideology, Tijuana is a nightmare.

To live here is to be a character, because at the border

There are no inhabitants, only archetypes. The border doesn’t have

Life: it has metaphysics - listen to its thing."

- Heriberto Yepez, Tijuana Dreaming 219

"I love TJ, for thousands of reasons….for being creative in spite of its precariousness and for pushing on in spite of tremendous neglect…for its bar-hopping nights and its obvious social contradictions, for its incredible audacity and its obvious ingenuity dealing with everything foreign."

- Tijuana Dreaming, 307

"Why have so many people said so much about Tijuana? I think it is because Tijuana has become a symbol representing fears and subconscious desires."

- Tijuana Dreaming 57

Western Women Working in Japan

I am now getting ready for my new life abroad. Thankfully, up until June, I worked at a college, and this made researching for my new job relatively easy. 

One of my colleagues and mentors published this book in 1995, and in 2013 I picked it up and hoped to follow in the footsteps of those courageous business women before me. 

In the very beginning of the text, the authors describe the target of their study: high-level professional women in Japan working in fields besides teaching (English instructors are by far the largest group of western foreigners in Japan). At that time, professional Western women in Tokyo were very few, with the study estimating that there were only around 200 professional (non-Englih-teaching) women in Tokyo in the early 1990s. These women were composed of company transfers (very few), trailing spouses who found jobs after relocating to Japan for their husband's position, and a substantial group of women who moved to Japan on their own, and begun searching for employment. 

For me, I could see a lot of myself in the latter category of women. They were the go-getters. The ones who risked moving to Japan and with no job security and somehow they managed to make a life for themselves there. Although I have a gig lined up in Japan, I am hoping to make a successful career change while I am there, and I will likely be working in the field of international HR. I want to be one of these "'globalists' – people who 'think across borders' in their task of marketing, producing, or managing resources. Such global thinking demands that firms have people able to act as 'chameleons,' casually and comfortably adjusting to and thriving in multiple cultures and settings" (4).

Although much has changed in the last two decades since the book was published, I still gained a lot of insight into the journey I am about to embrace. 

To that end, I have compiled a list of the skills I am hoping to acquire though my experience overseas this year:

• Improving my language ability

I'm far from fluent in Japanese, but I hope to at least become proficient in a professional setting this year. Language skills are important because "the greater a woman’s ability to communicate verbally, the more she perceives her acceptance as a professional as positive" (91).

• Forming relationships with coworkers despite a linguistic barrier

While we are on the topic of language, one advantage to increasing my Japanese ability is that it will allow me to bond with my coworkers. I have never actually had the chance to form professional relationships with people who were not at least conversant in English, so this is an exciting new challenge. "A clear and strong connection between their job and work adjustment and the quality of the relationships they have with their Japanese colleagues and other with whom they work (105)

• Increasing my tolerance of ambiguity

I need to increase my ability to thrive in situations with minimal (or no) guidance and instruction. Management styles in the west involve giving clear guidance and expectations, but that is not the case in Japan (or much of Asia) .

• Learning how to adjust my expectations

I talked a bit about this when I first learned my placement. Its almost impossible to enter into a new situation with no expectations, so I at least need to learn to adjust them accordingly as new information becomes available. 

• Learning how to quickly and affectingly adapt to new situations

"A key to living and working in successfully  a foreign culture is the ability to adjust to new ways of doing things" (103). Along with adjusting my expectations, adaptation is critical to succeeding abroad. 

•  Learning to work with and without autonomy

Autonomy was one of the things I loved about my last job, but in reality, I cannot expect to always work in positions in which I am granted the same level of autonomy. There may come a time I  have to deal with micromanaging bosses, nosey colleagues, and inefficient or less-than-competent teammates. Because Japan is such a collectivist society, it is unlikely that I will find a position which gives me the kind of autonomy that I had in the West, so I will need to learn how to better thrive in a team. 

• Reading the air 

The Japanese expression for this is 空気を読む (kuki wo yomu),  which literally means, "reading the air." This skill refers to one's ability to decipher  the  unspoken thoughts or feelings of a group of individual. Japanese society is such that people are unlikely to feel comfortable expressing their feelings directly, so one cannot expect direct feedback and instead must try to sense others' thoughts. 

• Knowing how to choose my battles

This is an important one. I know it seems pessimistic to anticipate the negative elements of a job before it has begin, but I certainly cannot expect or assume that everything will go my way. Learning which elements of my new role I should challenge and which I should accept will make life a lot easier:

 "Women gained flexibility from dealing with Japanese attitudes toward woman professionals in general. As they experienced sexual bias and harassment, they cultivated the ability to recognize and understand another cultural perspective. By grasping that perspective, the woman also said they learned to concentrate on the important aspects of their jobs and to avoid being pulled into peripheral frustrations….Learning to sort out the unimportant ones(letting Japanese men precede her onto the elevators)  had taught her to focus on the essentials of relationships rather than on surface behavior" (125). 

• Building up emotional resilience

I once took an intercultural competency assessment which rates how prepared an individual is for dealing with intercultural contexts. With all my traveling and experience, I thought I would nail it....and it did...except for one area: Emotional Resilience. This means that when I fuck up, I practically beat myself over the head with a dictionary, and it takes me days to recover. In fact, I was so upset at having failed the Emotional Resilience section, I brooded about it for weeks....hence, proving the point of the assessment. Inevitably, when I am in a new environment, I'm going to screw up a lot, and I have got to learn how to bounce back quickly and learn from the experience, instead of scolding myself and crying in the bathroom from embarrassment. 
Makes sense.