Making Nice on Vice

Outside the El Burro Bar, Monica and Juana saw the seedy landscape of this border city’s red-light district gradually take on a new look with swaying palm trees, pastel-painted hotels and fancy lampposts.

Then city inspectors ordered Monica and Juana and all the other prostitutes off the streets and inside the smoky bars and hotels. The new sidewalks, the inspectors said, were for tourists, not the dozens of hookers who crowd the doorways and sidewalks of Callejon Coahuila.

The women -- called las paraditas, or “the little ones who stand” -- rebelled, triggering a classic only-in-Tijuana civic battle that pitted community leaders against the city’s storied and stubborn tradition of vice.

In September, their faces covered with blue handkerchiefs, about 200 prostitutes gathered in La Coahuila, as the red-light district is known, and twice marched across the city in a show of civil disobedience that culminated with a threat to strip on the steps of City Hall. City officials backed down and offered a compromise.

It was a fittingly raucous standoff for a city trying to impose order in the area that helped give birth to its unruly reputation. Try as it might, Tijuana’s efforts to create a new image reflecting its transformation into a thriving arts center and Mexico’s land of opportunity inevitably collide with its colorful, often seedy past.

The drama “had all the elements: sex, hookers, police, La Coahuila, johns,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, director of Tijuana’s Binational Center for Human Rights.

Today, the paraditas remain outside the El Burro Bar, the Eduardo Hotel and the Miami Bar, a streetwalking tradition that has drawn American men south of the border for generations.

“I want to stay standing where I’ve always been,” said red-haired, 44-year-old Monica, smoking a cigarette outside the El Burro, “so I can keep providing for my children.”

Monica, who favors plunging necklines and spaghetti-strap high heels that lace her calves in red, is well aware of her place in society.

“Yo soy una mujer pecadora,” she said. I am a woman who sins.

But her earnings from hundreds of $20 sessions at the Najera Hotel, she said, helped build her home: a shack made of garage doors discarded from suburban American houses.

She keeps her earnings locked in a jewelry box under her bed.

Monica’s forceful defense of her way of life helped her emerge as one of the uprising’s leaders, and she became a familiar voice on local talk radio.

Prostitution is legal in Tijuana, but it is largely confined to the three-block red-light district that locals also call the “zone of tolerance.”

Prostitution is permitted in most of Mexico, though a few states may have passed legislation against it, according to University of San Diego law professor Jorge Vargas. (Tijuana sex workers are required to have monthly medical checkups. If they don’t, they can be fined.)

About 1,200 prostitutes from all over Mexico work in La Coahuila, making it a sex tourist destination that ranks in popularity with Amsterdam and Bangkok, said Melissa Farley, a researcher with Prostitution Research and Education, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization.

Masseuses, dance girls and high-priced strippers work inside dozens of clubs. Outside, paraditas lean against the grimy tile walls of bars and restaurants. Callejon Coahuila, or Coahuila Alley, is paradita central, the pulse of this Mexican sin city.

The 150-yard stretch of strip clubs, taco stands and beauty-supply stores is an outdoor bazaar filled with loudmouthed barkers, whistling drug dealers and bell-ringing ice cream vendors. The hookers wear schoolgirl outfits, shimmering mini-dresses, see-through jumpsuits. A wink and a whispered exchange with a prospective customer seals the deal.

Most of the paraditas are single mothers who say they can’t support their families with factory jobs that, while plentiful in booming Tijuana, pay only $1.50 per hour.

Outside the El Burro Bar, Juana, a 42-year-old with shiny black hair, said she ended up here eight years ago after unsuccessfully trying to cross into the U.S. with her three children.

Marta, a tall, brown-haired 42-year-old mother of six, starts working at 5 a.m. She said business is good at that hour because drunk men come stumbling out of bars looking for sex.

Susanna, a 26-year-old former mortician’s assistant, leads men up a narrow staircase to a tidy room above the El Burro, where she points with pride to a collection of stuffed monkey dolls piled on a chair.

They are gifts from her 5-year-old son. He doesn’t know his mother is a prostitute who meets as many as six men a day in this room, where a blue blanket neatly covers the bed.

Susanna also was among those who marched in protest, along with Juana, Marta and hundreds of others.

The history of vice here goes back to the turn of the last century, when Tijuana was still a dusty outpost of ranches and cantinas. Later, during the 1940s, the red-light district was moved from Avenida Revolucion, now the main tourist destination, to its current site a few blocks west.

The post-World War II military buildup in San Diego ensured a steady supply of customers, who now include college students, cigar-smoking businessmen, youths with gang tattoos, and retirees in shorts. La Coahuila has long been a popular nightspot for local men as well.

But the crowds dwindled for a time beginning in the late 1970s, when the area decayed into a smelly, dangerous warren of broken sidewalks and dark alleyways.

The city redevelopment project, started in 1990 but not significantly underway until recently, was the latest and most ambitious attempt to reinvent the area as a sanitized sex emporium along the lines of Las Vegas or Amsterdam.

“We know that prostitution will likely never disappear ... but we are trying to, little by little, change the image of the area, and also Tijuana,” said former Deputy Mayor Luis Alonso Morlett.

Everything was going as planned until city inspectors showed up one day and told the paraditas that they didn’t fit into the streetscape’s new image. Monica and the others remember being shocked when told that they would be fined $100 for standing in front of the El Burro.

The women knew next to nothing about politics. Most have grade-school educations. But Monica and Marta, both grandmothers, said they had a lifetime of experience in negotiating with hard-headed men.

“We weren’t going to stay silent,” said Marta.

Their first effort to get help fizzled when the prostitutes marched across the city to meet with what were supposed to be attorneys. The men turned out to be pimps, they said.

Later, a real attorney, Ricardo Montoya Obeso, helped them band together with a plan of action. He suggested the women call themselves the “Marilyn Monroes.”

“She was the most beautiful whore in the world,” said Montoya. “And I say that with all due respect.”

Susanna liked the idea: “She symbolizes sexual beauty, like us.”

Each leader took a nom de guerre -- naming themselves after famous Mexican actresses. One called herself Niurka, after a popular soap opera star. Monica wanted a more intimidating name; she called herself La Tigresa.

Offering help were the Mary Magdalenes -- a group of prostitutes from a neighboring street who had organized years earlier to protest police harassment.

Las Magdalenas had experienced success in dealing with City Hall. A few years ago, when police ordered them off the streets, the women threatened to go public with a list of community leaders who frequent the district. The leaders backed off.

The Mary Magdalenes and Marilyn Monroes marched out of the red-light district and two miles across town to City Hall.

“I felt like I was in Spain, except instead of the ‘running of the bulls,’ ” it was the running of the hookers, a man who witnessed the protest wrote on a prostitution website. “This is not a sight that you get to see very often -- a sex workers’ street demonstration.”

The next day, the women locked arms and formed a human chain, blocking both entrances to Coahuila Alley. No one was allowed to cross.

The protests escalated two days later when the women marched back to see the mayor. After he refused to see them, they threatened to disrobe on the steps of City Hall.

“Let them come up, we don’t need a show,” then-Mayor Jesus Gonzalez Reyes told police, according to receptionist Imelda Echevarria.

The protests won sympathy from much of Tijuana.

La Tigresa and others made the rounds on talk radio shows. Some bystanders applauded during their marches. Taxi drivers honked their approval. And many johns and revelers refused to cross their blockade.

Even while voicing their anger, the women respected the city’s tolerant-to-a-point attitude toward prostitution. Instead of parading in miniskirts and tight blouses, they wore jeans and buttoned-up shirts. The threat to strip, Monica says now, was a bluff.

Afterward, city leaders acknowledged their mistake in assuming that the women would prefer to do business indoors, an attempt to “dignify” their working conditions.

Though keeping the hookers off the street remains the goal, bar owners and political leaders have come up with a new plan: creating sitting areas in hotel lobbies where the women can meet clients in comfort. There will be cushy couches, television sets, tea and coffee service.

The person embodying the new, gentlemanly approach is Antonio Escobedo, a nightclub owner spearheading the redevelopment project.

A short, soft-spoken man called “Papi” by the strippers in his bar, Escobedo said no one will force the paraditas into the hotels, and those who remain standing won’t be fined.

“For the paraditas to stand is part of the history of Tijuana,” said Escobedo. “Kicking them off the streets lacked tact.

“When the hotels are ready,” said Escobedo with a courtly sweep of his arm, “we will invite the girls inside.”

Whether the plan works, the battle over Coahuila Alley has been an important lesson for city leaders, said Clark, the human rights activist, who arranged for officials to hold meetings with the paraditas.

“It was a way of showing the authorities who the women really are,” Clark said. “That they have concerns, that they have a different way of viewing prostitution than [the officials] do.”