Days of Obligation

Days of Obligation An Argument with My Mexican Father Richard Rodriguez VIKING CHAPTER FOUR ln.Athens Once Palm Sunday. In the parking lot there is only silence and the scent of suntan lotion. There is a turnstile. Through which American tourists enter Mexico as at a state fair. Mexicans pass with the cardboard boxes they are using as suitcases. Some men are putting up palm trees. An old woman proffers sno-cones that look like bulbs of blood. She is wearing Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and jogging shoes. I pass through the turnstile. Already the sun feels older. Indian women sit on the pavement, their crafts spread out before them. There are wristbands of woven yarn, dolls made of ribbon, vibrant bushes of nodding paper poppies. Hands and voices, beseeching eyes and rattling cups gather to surround me as I tread the gauntlet of pathetic enterprise. CHICLETS. CHICLETOS. Little girls not four years old sell Chiclets. Blind old women in blankets hawk Chiclets. Why? Why these little tiles of sugar 80 .In Athens Once jade? In Tijuana as in Bombay. A woman holding her baby with one arm will rattle a gross of Chiclets with her free hand. Five cents. Tijuana, downtown. Taxi, mister? Taxi? Chiclets, Taxi, are urgent questions in Tijuana, questions that soonest teach the visitor the custody of his eyes. A boy sits on a ledge above the bay of taxis. He wears a cap -like a stage-urchin's cap. His face is wan and wolfen. His muzzle parts over sharpish teeth; his nostrils dilate to savor the crowd. Slowly he turns his face from side to side, as he would do if he were ravishing himself with a shaving brush. He is surveying; his eyes are slits, appraising, rejecting; his eyes .slide like searchlights, but do not rest on me. The point of the United States is distinguishing yourself from the crowd. The point of Mexico is the crowd. Whatever happens in Tijuana, I caution myself, do not imagine you have been singled out. You have entered into the million. Tijuana has a million, perhaps two million people. Tijuana will double in twelve years. Tijuana is the new Pacific city, larger than San Francisco or Seattle or Vancouver. Tijuana is larger than San Diego. In its last advertised census, the Mexican government entered Tijuana's population as three-quarters of a million. Mexico City might have chosen to bid modestly as a way of dissuading attention from the swell along its northern border. What intrigues us is that we cannot know. There is an un countable poblaci6n .flotante. How can one number fluid shadows passing back and forth over the border, shadows whose business it is to elude any count? Tijuana is several million lifetimes posing as one street, a metropolis crouched behind a hootchy-kootch curtain. Most Americans head for the tourist street called A venida Revoluci6n. 81 Days of Obligation From the border you can share a cab for five bucks a head or you can walk along the Tijuana River, where you will see broken bottles and young men asleep on the grass. It is more fun, perhaps, to approach Revoluci6n with adolescent preconceptions of lurid possibility. Marrakesh. Bangkok. For this you will need a cab. In the first place, where is he taking me? In the second place, cab drivers still offer male passengers cualquier cosa as a matter of form. For all that, you are deposited safely when the cab driver announces, with a distracted wave of the hand, "El Main Street." El Main Street is what you'd expect of the region's fifth tourist attraction, after the San Diego Zoo, Sea World, some others. A Mexico ride. A quick shot of the foreign. Unmetered taxis. Ul tramontane tongue. Disney Calcutta. I am thinking of my first trip across: the late 1950s. We were on our way to visit relatives in Ensenada. We had driven all day from Sacramento in the blue DeSoto and we reached the border around midnight. I remember waking in the back seat. A fat Mexican in a brown uniform was making beckoning gestures in the light from our headlamps. This isn't Mexico, this isn't Mexico, my mother kept saying, clucking, smoothing. Tijuana is just a border town; you see the worst here. You'll see. I remember my father hunched forward at the wheel. The DeSoto was acting up. It was too late to drive any more. I remember a Saturday night, a big street full of scuffle and shadow: naked lights, persons stum bling, jeering. We found a motel by the bus station. We all slept on a double bed with a green velvet cover. We kept our clothes on. The air was heavy. Wet. I listened to faraway music. American mus£c. Mexico! Most tourists come for the afternoon. Most tourists stay three or four hours, just between meals. After the shops, after the 82 In Athens Once scolding sighs, after the bottled drinks, there is nothing to do but head back. Another Sunday, 1961. I was spending a week with the Fahertys at Laguna Beach. Ernest Hemingway had shot himself in the mouth. (I was Hemingway's widow./ had read all his novels.) We were in Tijuana for the afternoon. We went to the new bullring by the sea. We sat in the expensive shade. On the opposite side were dark men in white shirts. Kim Novak was sitting a few rows in front of us. Pellets of blood struck the dust all afternoon. The Mexicans cheered the bull because the brave bull took so many thrusts of the matador's blade and yet refused to die. But the bull did die. The Mexicans cheered the matador. The matador passed a buzzing sachet-the ears of the bull-to Kim Novak while the band played a comic gavotte. Before it got dark, we drove back. Mr. Faherty had my birth certificate in his wallet, just in case. When an immigration officer questioned me over Mrs. Faherty's shoulder, I answered in a~ e_a_ccep_tJ:d_aslw.v.ing_no accflll!; we were flagged forward. We stopped at Old Town in San Diego for a Mexican dinner. Consider TijuiJ.na from Mexico's point of view. Tijuana is farther aw~ Mexico City than any other city in Mexico. Tijuana is where Mexico comes to an end. In Mexico City you will waste an afternoon if you go to book stores looking for books about Tijuana. The clerk will scarcely conceal his amusement. (And what would be in a book about Tijuana?) People in Mexico City will tell you, if they have anything at all to say about Tijuana, that Tijuana is.a city without history, a city without architecture, an American city. San Diego may worry about Mexican hordes crawling over the border. Mexico City worries about a cultural spill from the United States. From prehistory, the North has been the problem. Mexico City (la capital) has been the platform from which all provincialism 83 Days of Obligation is gauged. From the North came marauding tribes, iconoclasts, destroyers of high Indian civilization. During the Spanish colonial era, the North was settled, even garrisoned, but scarcely civilized. In the nineteenth century, Mexico's northernmost territories were too far from the center to be defended against America's westward expansion. In after-decades, the North spawned revolutionaries and bandits, or these fled into the North and the North hid them well. Beyond all the ribbon-cutting palaver about good neighbors, there remains an awesome distance of time. Tijuana and San Diego are not in the same historical time zone. Tijuana is poised at the beginning of an industrial age, a Dickensian city with palm trees. San Diego is a postindustrial city of high-impact plastic and despair diets. And palm trees. San Diego faces west, looks resolutely out to sea. Tijuana stares north, as toward the future. San Diego is the future-secular, soulless. San Diego is the past, guarding its quality of life. Tijuana is the future. On the Mexican side there is flux, a vast migration, a camp of siege. On the Mexican side is youth, with bad skin or bad teeth, but with a naive optimism appropriate to youth. On the American side are petitions to declare English the official language of the United States; the Ku Klux Klan; nativists posing as environmentalists, blaming illegal immigration for free way congestion. And late at night, on the radio call-in shows, hysterical, reasonable American voices say they have had enough. Of this or that. Of trampled flower beds. Of waiting in line or crowded buses, of real or imagined rudeness, of welfare. In San Diego people speak of "the border" as meaning a clean break, the end of us, the beginning of them. In Mexican Spanish, the legality takes on distance, even pathos, as lafrontera, meaning something less fixed, something more akin to the American "fron- 84 In Athens Once tier." Whereas San Diego remains provincial and retmng, the intrusion of the United States has galvanized Tijuana to cosmo politanism. There are seven newspapers in Tijuana; there is Amer ican television-everything we see they see. Central American refugees and southern California turistas cross paths in Tijuana. There are new ideas. Most worrisome to Mexico City has been the emergence of a right-wing idea, a pro-American politics to challenge the one-party system that has governed Mexico for most of this century. Because the United States is the richer country, the more powerful broadcaster, Mexicans know more about us than we care to know about them.

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