The New Border Aesthetic

It’s midnight in Tijuana, and inside the Nuevo Ferrari junkyard on the deserted boulevard Diaz Ordaz, dancers in matching red-and-yellow mechanics’ uniforms balance on rusting steel railings. Sound artists blast cavernous mixes from a hollowed-out Volkswagen van. Spray paint stencils of wrenches and demolished cars cover four stories of towering cement walls. There are TV screens to watch, T-shirts to buy and, outside, DJs spin icy house music in front of balletic makeshift auto sculptures.

On the junkyard roof, beneath the burnt-out Ferrari sign and in front of stacks of crushed car frames, an audience of bundled-up young Tijuanenses sit in upholstered car seats salvaged from Ford Rangers and watch a local indie film, which ends with a kid telling his father that he wants to be a rapper, not a mariachi singer. Off in the distance, Tijuana looks like the most beautiful city on earth, a swelling ocean of flickering hillside lights that spill out in endless waves.

The junkyard’s makeover was the conceptual centerpiece of “Yonke Life,” a multimedia art event that, in September 2002, put Tijuana filmmakers, VJs, dancers, DJs and visual artists in conversation with co-conspirators from nearby San Diego. The gathering at the yonke--gringofied borderspeak for “junkyard”--was the perfect setting for a public window into the bustling Tijuana art scene of the new millennium: an unsuspecting cathedral of low-maintenance cultural recycling where vehicles crushed into scrap are given new life as parts for new creations. Between the invited performers and the paying audience, “Yonke Life” was a who’s who of the Tijuana pop art scene--writers mingled with rave kids, painters chatted with DJs. It only took a few days for the Yonke Web site to be updated with commentary that weighed in on the event’s cultural significance as a hallmark of the new Tijuana art boom.

But the boom can’t be called a renaissance because nothing is being reborn. For the first time in the city’s short century-plus history, Tijuana is witnessing a sweeping artistic birth--the development of a diverse and multifaceted artistic tradition. Which is not to say that Tijuana has never produced its own writers, painters or musicians, or that it hasn’t been the subject of artistic attention. In the 1980s, Tijuana was a key subject of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, a pioneering binational collective that included artists from Tijuana, San Diego and Mexico City.

Nor is it to discount the roles of Baja’s leading cultural institute, the Centro Cultural Tijuana, founded in 1982, and inSITE, a border art exhibition that has been attracting experimental artists from around the world since 1992. But Tijuana has never experienced what has been happening since the late ‘90s: a generation-based cultural flowering that is, little by little, transforming the city once best known as a Third World amusement park of devastating poverty, strip shows and quickie divorces into a major cutting-edge hub of Mexican art and a globally recognized pop cultural capital.

Visual artists such as Marcos Ramirez (who goes by “Erre”), Tania Candiani and Raul Cardenas exhibit at the Whitney Biennial and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Salvador Ricalde, Julio Orozco, Giancarlo Ruiz and Ana Machado have helped galvanize an indie video scene that didn’t exist until the ‘90s. Veteran novelists and poets such as Rosina Conde, Luis Humberto Crosthwaite and Roberto Castillo, along with acclaimed newcomers Carlos Adolfo Gutierrez Vidal and Heriberto Yepez, are seeing their work included in English-language literary anthologies north of the border.

The scene has even spawned its own design-heavy culture magazine (Sube Baja), its own record labels (Static, Mil), its own upstart TV network (BulboTV) and a hipster cadre of Internet bloggers who offer instant diaries of their daily lives, from manifestos of boredom to tales of losing a passport and not being able to cross to San Diego to see the premiere of “The Matrix Reloaded.” “This city fascinates me,” reads one recent Web entry. “It nourishes me with multiple forms. But it also cages me. It limits me. . . . I need to reinvent my experience. Reinvent myself so I’ll have something new to offer.”

Most agree that the turning point came in 1999 with the birth of the Nortec Collective, a group of local electronic musicians who, at packed parties throughout the city, started mixing traditional Mexican music with glistening techno and house sounds. The music gave Tijuana’s twentysomething generation its first organic soundtrack--a direct reflection of Mexican border life at the turn of a new century. It also earned Tijuana its best international PR in years: Major newspapers and magazines were writing about something other than lost tequila weekends, narcotraficantes and migrant border deaths.

None of the new Tijuana art looks or reads or sounds alike. There is no single school or aesthetic. What the new Tijuana artists have in common is age (mostly in their 30s), experience (a life spent in the shadow of the wealthiest nation in the world and far from the art traditions of Mexico City), ethos (fiercely Do-It-Yourself) and a goal: to show their much maligned and misunderstood city through their eyes and create their own traditions from scratch.

Perhaps, most of all, they share timing--coming of age at the moment that Tijuana has come of age as a metropolis. When most of these artists grew up in the ‘70s, Tijuana’s population was less than 400,000. Now, after a decade of NAFTA and three decades of maquiladoras luring Mexicans north, the city’s population has exploded into a sprawling mass approaching 2 million.

The more that people come north to work or cross the border, the more the city’s reputation for chaos and its manic cultural mixture grows. Extreme contrasts abound. There are luxury gyms and Internet cafes, and there are waste dumps teeming with kids scavenging for food. While gated middle-class developments crowd the Tijuana coast, hillsides and riverbeds continue to breed shantytown colonias--lacking fresh water or electricity--built from fallen billboards and old garage doors.

As a result, economists see Tijuana as typical of the new global city in the era of free trade. Cultural critics have gone so far as to call it a laboratory for the postmodern condition, a place where pastiche and hybridity are not theories but long-standing ways of life born of economic necessity. In the recent collection from USC’s Michael Dear and Gustavo LeClerc, “Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California” (Routledge), Tijuana is positioned as the capital of a “postborder megalopolis” that fuses Southern California to northern Mexico in the name of globalization.

The city’s new crop of artists are the first children of this global Tijuana, the first artistic products of Tijuana’s key role in the global economy. “It feels like we’re all on a mission,” says photographer Yvonne Venegas, who participated in the 2002 Bienal de Fotografia, organized by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. “A mission to decipher the city, to say something about it, put it into words, put it into images. We all want to make some sort of response to it.”

The cluttered studio shed of 33-year-old Gerardo “Acamonchi” Yepiz may be just north of downtown San Diego, but in spirit it’s pure Tijuana. The color-splashed walls are covered with Yepiz’s spray-paint stencils of familiar Tijuana icons: Afro-haired rock critic Octavio Hernandez Diaz, Nortec musician Ramon “Bostich” Amezcua, writer Rafa Saavedra (dressed as a swami) and onetime PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio (famously slain in Tijuana’s Lomas Taurinas suburb), whom Yepiz depicts in an astronaut suit. There are stencils of border patrol agents beating Mexican migrants, advertisements from Tijuana muffler shops and taquerias, images of TV host Raul Velasco--the Mexican Bob Barker--in S&M; biker drag, and leaning against one wall is a reward poster for the legendary Arellano Felix narco kingpins that used to hang at the border checkpoint before Yepiz’s studio partner swiped it.

“For more than 20 years, there’s been art and music going on in TJ, and now finally people on the U.S. side are paying attention,” says Yepiz as he files through a pile of his recent paintings. “Part of the problem was that the TJ scene wasn’t so active in getting their stuff out. There was art going on, but you really couldn’t get ahold of anybody. And then, gradually, we all had a product to sell, so there were music videos, CDs, art shows, record labels with actual people to talk to. There were Web sites. It just became easier.”

Yepiz was born in Ensenada but lived in Tijuana during the ‘90s before relocating to San Diego. Though neither native son nor resident, he remains committed to creating representations of Tijuana that are more balanced than what gets covered on CNN. “Border cities have always been blamed for everything that’s wrong in the U.S.,” he says. “I’m not gonna deny that TJ is messed up. The city is not pretty. The city is whack. But it has a lot of charm.”

Yepiz--whose “Acamonchi” alias refers to the Mexican name for a piggy-back ride--has exhibited his work in the U.S., Europe and Japan, and he remains active in the underground art scenes in both Tijuana and San Diego. A longtime member of Baja’s punk and skate community, he grew up believing that art should be public, political and cheap--an instant response to shifts in social reality. His stencil sprays are so ubiquitous on the streets of Tijuana that they have become part of the city’s visual landscape. “I do it whenever there’s a good spot, whenever there’s material available,” he says. “It’s like stealing--you do it when the moment is right.”

Yepiz spends less time in Tijuana these days (the lines to cross back north to his wife and baby keep getting longer), but the city and its border checkpoint remain among his primary inspirations, especially what he sees as the city’s primary colors: garish reds and yellows. “I use reject colors,” he says. “Nobody wants them, so they’re cheap, and you can still make things from them. I give them a second life. That’s pretty much what TJ is about--America’s dirty backyard. Whatever they don’t want, they just throw it down to us. We make art out of it. It’s payback.”

Tijuana’s “backyard” relationship to the U.S. has been a central feature of its identity ever since it was split from the Port of San Diego in 1848, when the U.S.-Mexico border was created. Though officially founded in 1889, Tijuana didn’t truly begin to prosper until Prohibition laws in the U.S. went into effect in 1919. Soon Tijuana became the preferred, and most convenient, tourist suburb of Southern California, with its racetrack, gentlemen’s club and Agua Caliente casino enticing gringos with money to spend and vices to quench. Prohibition ended in 1933, but the precedent was set and, ever since, American tourism has been a primary source of Tijuana’s prosperity.

For many north of the border, Tijuana remains a fiction of this tourist imagination, a metropolis whose only identity is found in the bars and souvenir shops that line its main tourist drag, La Avenida Revolucion. Whether it’s in TV shows such as “The OC,” Hollywood films such as “Seabiscuit,” “Traffic” or “Losin’ It,” or popular books such as Lilla and Nora Zuckerman’s recent teen travel adventure, “Tangle in Tijuana,” the city is still thought of as a dangerous drug-infested playground that will either land you in jail or leave you with a hangover and a photograph of your friends in sombreros on the backs of donkeys painted to look like zebras.

Artist Hugo Crosthwaite grew up in the heart of this Tijuana. His family runs one of the many curio shops that line the main drag of Rosarito, the tourist-heavy beach town just south of Tijuana. When the 31-year-old Crosthwaite was young, he watched his parents sell home furnishings and souvenirs to tourists from the front of their home. Over time, the store grew, and so did their home out back; Crosthwaite still lives there, in a small bedroom just yards from the front of the shop.

“I learned English among the curios,” Crosthwaite says. “I’ve spoken it since I was young because I had to in order to communicate with the clients who would come here. When I told my father I wanted to be an artist, he told me, ‘Be what you want, just don’t be a curiosero.’ ” After leaving Rosarito to study graphic design in San Diego, Crosthwaite fell in love with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, and he began to dedicate himself to classical drawing. Using mostly graphite and charcoal on wood, Crosthwaite works in an intensely precise Romantic style, bringing 19th century techniques of drawing figures and landscapes to bear on contemporary themes.

His most recent large-scale piece, “Linea (Tijuana Cityscape),” eschews his usual fleshy nudes and focuses on the body of Tijuana itself, spread out into a 24-foot-long panorama of unidentifiable cement buildings. “I wanted to create a general impression of an improvised city, where windows, doors, buildings have just been put up out of necessity,” he explains from the breezy, tiled foyer of his family’s home. “Just like with this very house. The home grew farther back from the road simply out of our needs. That’s what I want to capture in my drawings of Tijuana--that sense of improvised construction.”

While “Linea” is a tribute to Tijuana improvisation, it also is a tribute to the way the U.S.-Mexico border, known colloquially as “la linea” or “the line,” has impacted the development of Tijuana as a place. As most residents will tell you, improvisation and the chaos it brings are the city’s two key aesthetic elements. People migrating north to cross the border to the U.S. end up staying in Tijuana. They build homes out of what they can (discarded refrigerator doors and tires) and where they can (on hillsides, behind stores), which has led Raul Cardenas, founder of the design collective Torolab, to call the city’s dominant style “emergency architecture,” where “the ephemeral becomes permanent.” With each wave of new arrivals, the city is reborn. And since people have not stopped coming since the ‘70s, Tijuana is a city that never settles into itself. It is a city in constant motion.

“This chaos is beautiful to me,” Crosthwaite says. “All of its broken sidewalks, then the sidewalks that just end and suddenly there is nothing. I’ve lived in San Diego, in a suburb where all the houses looked the same. There wasn’t this visual variation, this visual beauty that chaos brings. San Diego was so planned, so organized, that I had to come back to Tijuana every weekend.”

Crosthwaite had a solo show in Los Angeles’ Tropico de Nopal gallery last spring. For most of Tijuana’s new crop of visual artists, exhibiting abroad is a familiar story. With only two exhibition spaces that regularly show local work (the Centro Cultural and the gallery at the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California), and virtually no local community of art collectors, Tijuana artists have had to head elsewhere. Marcos Ramirez also exhibited in L.A. last spring, at the Iturralde Gallery, and Yvonne Venegas had a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

“There are very few people here with money and an artistic consciousness,” Venegas says. “Buyers still have to be trained that Tijuana artists are actually making art that they can buy.”

Venegas left Tijuana in the mid-’90s for Mexico City, full of dreams of becoming “the Annie Leibovitz of Mexico.” After a few years of doing photography for record labels, she headed for New York and did work for Spin magazine and the New York Times. But Venegas couldn’t shake Tijuana. She began putting together “The Most Beautiful Brides of Baja,” a candid but nonjudgmental photo essay about the wealthy women she grew up seeing in Tijuana.

Her photos are as much about her relationship to these thirtysomething wives and mothers as they are about Venegas’ relationship to her father, Jose Luis Venegas, Tijuana’s leading wedding photographer. (Studio portraits of Venegas and her twin sister, the acclaimed singer-songwriter Julieta Venegas, still hang in his studio’s front window.) Her subjects are the upper-class women whose weddings he shot. “My father was employed by these people,” she says. “He wasn’t one of them. He wanted us to be one of them. He worked hard so that we could go to expensive schools and get close to that life. Yet he also wanted us to work and be independent. So now the position I’m in is actually appropriate. I’m an observer and I’m participating.”

Venegas, who moved back to Tijuana briefly before settling in San Ysidro, is slowly feeling as if she is part of something bigger than her own work--a community of artists her age who rely on Tijuana to help ground and inspire them. “Tijuana is a think tank,” she says. “It’s the right place to produce from, because it never seems calm. To go from Tijuana to San Diego, to constantly live this contrast--you can’t verbalize it. It’s so unconscious the way it works on you. You go from one extreme to another of realities. I’m comfortable, then I’m uncomfortable. It never stays quiet.”

To get to Pepe Mogt’s imposing mini-castle of a home in Playas de Tijuana, you have to navigate a dramatically jagged, partially paved road that seems engineered to throw car frames out of alignment. Beyond a steel security gate is Mogt’s recording studio, where keyboards and vintage synthesizers are stacked atop audio gear and computers.

Most of these spoils are thanks to the international success of the Nortec Collective, which Mogt spearheaded in 1999. At the time, he and several friends used the name, a fusion of “norteno” and “techno,” for a self-produced compilation of cutting-edge electronica. It was built on samples from traditional music from northern Mexico, principally the accordion- and bajo sexto-driven norteno and the brassy oom-pah-pah march of banda Sinaloense. The music and the name caught on, and what resulted was not only a new musical style, but an entire tech-Mex border aesthetic that inspired local graphic designers and video and conceptual artists to explore their own fusions of North and South, past and future, popular and avant-garde. Most active have been the Nortec VJs, who accompany their musician colleagues with deft video collages of Tijuana street life, border checkpoints and maquiladoras.

When Mogt started playing electronica in the late ‘80s, he could barely fill a room with Tijuana locals. Now, Nortec parties fill the historic Jai Alai palace with thousands, and their music is heard on MTV, in television commercials for Volvo and in the new wave of Mexican cinema. The scene has become so formidable that, last month, the celebrated Canadian electronic music festival known as Mutek relocated to Tijuana (after stops in Mexico City and Guadalajara) for three days of parties, panels and screenings.

“In the beginning, there were no offices, no organizations, no business. Just a community of friends. But it just kept growing,” Mogt says. “People were skeptical of Nortec at first. Our music was risky because we mixed what is too popular, music that is considered naco [lower class] with electronica, what people considered the music of the future. But it was precisely this mix that got us noticed and that caught the eye of other artists who realized that they too could play with these mixtures. So suddenly, we had all these people working together.”

For Mogt, Nortec is a perfect example of art that could only come from Tijuana. He would never have learned about Depeche Mode, Kraftwerk or Roxy Music if it weren’t for San Diego radio stations in the ‘80s. When new albums came out, he didn’t have to wait for them to be released in Mexico; he could head straight to San Diego, then stop at a museum or a library, shop for a keyboard and even grab a new pair of Nikes. This is typical for Tijuanenses, whose fates have long been more connected to Chula Vista and San Diego than to Mexico City or Guadalajara. (The “territory” of Baja California wasn’t a state in the Mexican Republic until 1952.)

“We’re a very Europeanized and Americanized generation,” Mogt says. “Living here in 1981 meant being in the middle of what was happening in England, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. To be from Tijuana is to have access to the First World just a few steps away. You have everything at your disposal here. The question is what you do with it.”

What the Nortec Collective has done is make music that reflects this dichotomy-filled border consciousness without choosing one side over the other: Depeche Mode and narco boss Ramon Arellano Felix; minimal techno and working-class couples slow dancing at local bars. “I’m proud of Tijuana, and I want to show the Tijuana that I see,” beams Mogt, who also records under the name Latinsizer. “I would never deny that there is violence or drug traffic here, or that when I was a teenager I used to go to La Coahuila to look at all the prostitutes. But that’s not all there is. I want to show the positive side of Tijuana without trying to negate the reality of what we have and what we are.”

That Mogt is part of a generational movement makes sense to him. When he used to work in a video store, painter Gerardo Yepiz was a regular customer and visual artist Tania Candiani was one of the few locals at his early electronica parties. They were all kids with art on the brain, in a city that didn’t know how to help them. So they did it themselves.

“Tijuana has grown so fast with virtually no cultural infrastructure,” Mogt explains. “I grew up without a single cultural institution. Artists had no way of getting grants or getting their work seen. So what happened was a generation of us grew up believing in the DIY ethos. We’ve all had to fight the same battles to get established on our own terms. Now, of course, there are more spaces, more opportunities, and we are all being rediscovered!”

For all of Nortec’s success, Mogt is most proud of the collective’s role in helping to build the infrastructure that he lacked. Nortec parties frequently include exhibition spaces for local dance troupes and local artists, and members give annual software workshops for aspiring musicians and designers. The Nortec musicians also are in frequent collaboration with Torolab’s Cardenas, Naco T-shirt designer Eduardo Chavarin, Sube Baja editor and Static label chief Ejival, and graphic designers Angeles Moreno and Gaby Nunez.

“I’m starting to see the influence of my generation on younger artists,” Mogt says. “There are teenagers using stencils like Acamonchi, T-shirts that look like Naco, people who are working on projects like Torolab. Every time I stop to think about it, I’m like, ‘Wow, Tijuana is changing.’ They say we’re the new generation of artists, but actually we’re the old one. The new one has already been born.”