Trying to Say Good Buy : Souvenir Sellers Find Captive Clients at Border

“U-TURN TO THE USA,” says the last-gasp sign before you cross the international border at San Ysidro. On this particular Saturday morning, there are an awful lot of blue and gold and white California plates disappearing into Mexico.

After hesitating for Mexican customs officers, they fairly lurch off the leash toward their foreign adventure.

They don’t even cast a glance to the wide street to their left, to the car lanes leading back to the United States. But they will be there sooner or later, after they’ve been and done.

The collection of little stalls in the merchandise island situated amid the northbound lanes are just waking in the morning sun. Later, the scene will be one of chaotic gridlock as Mexican vendors ply the pavement with their armloads of plaster of Paris bulls, Day-Glo Elvis serapes, Grecian urns and glass ships, persistently trying to get the weary tourists to make one last buy before they return to El Norte.

Genteel Little Fiefdom

All that is yet to come. Right now, inside the collection of shops on The Island, it’s surprisingly peaceful. It looks almost like a Mexican town. Actually it is a genteel little fiefdom of tightly held businesses passed down from generation to generation by businessmen who have been here as long as 40 years.

There’s a dry fountain in the middle of the square, and seats around it where elderly men sit, drink coffee and talk. On all four sides, shopkeepers are hanging up such items as baskets from Tequisquiapan (near Mexico City), strings of colorful papier-mache fruit and tinkling onyx wind chimes. There are rows of gold-hooded snakes and black panthers with glowing red eyes, all crouching in unison, ready to leap on the first unsuspecting customer.

Beside them rage lines of pawing gold and brown lions, toothy apes on surfboards, sheriff piggies, yellow giraffes, angry cats, puzzled ducks, shocked fat men in pink boxer shorts, 3-foot-tall statues of Jesus and Mary, and 4-foot sylphs with gold hair holding high an urn topped by a birdbath.

Mixed in with these old standbys there are newer, classier items like hand-blown and blue-tinted glasses from Mazatlan, blankets and serapes, and hand-stitched linen tablecloths. Near the cash register on The Island is a case containing silver jewelry.

It’s about 10:30 in the morning and the temperature is a cool 70 degrees when Alejandro Gomez arrives. He’s in his early 20s, with the face of a revolutionary poet. He shakes hands with an owner, and starts setting up.

Over the shoulder go the blankets--the manta s , the serapes, the saltillo s , the coverturas. Under the left arm go the exquisite lace tablecloths, leather purses, a pair of ceramic pelicans and a Nazi-helmeted death skull on a motorcycle.

Into the hands go a couple of wood and wicker baby chairs, back to back; a clutch of maracas, and a grotesquely oversized ceramic Corona mug with a slot in the top, a sort of beer drinker’s piggy bank.

And, onto his head, go half a dozen sombreros, each 4 feet in diameter and

beaded in scarlet blue and gold.

It’s a very heavy load.

Alejandro lifts his eyebrows in lieu of nodding his head and shuffles off toward work, toward business, toward la linea. An early starter among a troop of heavy-laden clothes horses working on commission for this outpost of Latin American commerce.

A Family Business

In shop No. 22, Sandra Mateos is in charge. It’s her father’s store, but she can look after it pretty much like anyone else in her family.

“Let me show you around,” she says in good English. She’s 17, and spends weekdays at school. She’s almost ready for college and a business course. “The families that own these shops stay with them. They send their own relatives out to la linea-- and employ others, too. It’s an important part of our business. A lot of my relatives own businesses here.”

It turns out most of Sandra’s extended family is involved in this island village--uncles, aunts (one runs the cafe where the street sellers eat), cousins. One cousin, Victor Nunez, inherited his shop from his father, along with a fruit trolley. Victor’s mother, Francisca, helps him run the business, cutting up mangoes and papayas and other fruit in a sideline business. It’s probably the one business around here that is not for the tourists.

Around the corner, Sandra’s 17-year-old cousin, Paola Gonzalez, is looking after her father’s business--same variety of nice glasses, beautiful baskets, and ceramic kitsch--with her sister-in-law Lorena.

“But there’s more of us out on the street,” says Paola. “My brothers Martin and Santiago are there. And three employees: Alejandro, and Carlos and Enrique. They’re not selling much now, but wait until about 3 this afternoon . . . when it’s hot and crowded.”

It is 3 o’clock and chaos reigns. The line is stalled, the island is packed. Horns are honking. Exhausts are fuming, and so are most drivers.

“Hey man! Here. Amigo! I have something for you!”

This comes from a T-shirted, crew cut, Orange County kid in a pickup truck jammed with kids. He’s yelling at Paola’s brother, Santiago, and at Mario, who is a clinking, walking stack of ceramics. The crew-cut kid is holding up a flashlight

“I’ll trade you this flash for a pitcher, or a T-shirt,” the crew cut kid says. “Yeah, the ‘Corona Club’ one!”

Mario has some T-shirts. He walks over to the truck as the crew-cut kid keeps yelling.

“Yeah man, we’re trading. I got these boots. This jacket. This flashlight. This radio. Come on guys. Habla Ingles? Let’s do business!”

The column starts inching along and Mario moves with it. The vendedora looks at the turista’s flashlight. The crew-cut kid keeps the patter going.

‘Bring Out the Jack’

“Hey, Pat! Bring out the jack! OK. OK. We’re trading here. We got no money. No dinero! But we’re trading. Hey man, we need these things to sell on the other side, to get gas, to get home, man! C’mon!”

Mario has looked over the flashlight and sees that it is not junk. He hands over the Corona T-shirt.

“All right! Now what else, you guys? Hey, this car jack. I’ll trade it for that china horse you got there . . . !”

There are now about four of these barefoot gringos dancing and yelling around their pickup, each one brandishing some barter.

“Hey partner!” yells one guy from inside the truck’s cab to Alejandro as he unscrews something from his right ear. “Look, look at this!--14 karat! True. It’s yours. See the blood! I want that Snoopy for my little boy! Yeah. C’mon, for my little boy. He’s back in America. C’mon, this is real solid 14-karat man! I’ll add a dollar. My last dollar . . . . “

A guy in a bigger pickup next door holds a plastic chicken’s head out the window. He pulls on a string and it clucks loud and clear. He looks at the guys and laughs, then pulls the string again.

The line is inching ever nearer to the U. S. Customs inspectors at the border.

“Hey, come on guys! We’re running out of time. This is solid gold . . . . “

One of the sellers points to his watch.

“My watch? Noooooooo! Now just a minute. No watch. No way!”

A Mexican policeman is looking toward the group.

‘Hey Man, We’re Broke’

“Hey man, we’re broke,” says one of the guys. “They finked me out of $100 down south. I’m trying to fink ‘em back. Hey guys, how about this 5-gallon fuel can. Genuine plastic! Gold dust if you’re in the Mojave.”

One of his friends has hauled out a barbecue, black on rusty silver legs. Time is getting short. The circus has already traveled a quarter of a mile together.

“Hey, OK, OK. I’ll take the chimp on the surfboard. OK? OK?”

Mario and Alejandro aren’t impressed. Here on the border they’ve seen it all. Still, in the end, one of the guys in the truck does manage to trade the barbecue for a poncho. The seller disappears, just as the policeman comes up and starts arguing with the other sellers about causing trouble in the middle of la linea .

Despite all the action, Paola’s brothers Martin and Santiago, along with Alejandro, have now spent five hours wandering the line, holding out their tablecloths and ceramic horses--mostly with no results. The traffic, as gridlocked as it seemed to the drivers, had been too thin, and thus too fast, for good business. No time to persuade, no time for the customers to have second thoughts. No time for the kids to work over their parents, for mom to imagine that linen on her table and telling her friends, “Yes, I got it down in Mexico.”

“They’re still down on the beaches at Rosarita,” Alejandro says. “Our people, the holiday-makers. They won’t be back until Sunday night.”

Santiago Gonzalez, Paola’s brother, is weighted down under the hot blankets. He must be baking.

“You get used to it,” he says. He may sell each one for about $15. On a good day, he may sell as many as 10 of them. Santiago is part of the family, but employees--like his friend Alejandro--say they earn maybe $20 a day. If they sell enough.

“But people have changed,” says Sandra’s Uncle Luis. “Before, they came down on special trips and bought a lot. But now they come more often and they buy less. And there is far more competition all around. Look at the shops going up towards the river!”

Who are the people they employ to sell on the line?

“They must be clean and honest,” said cousin Victor, “but a lot of them are on the way through.”

Through?

“To the U.S.”

Still a lot seem to stay for a long time. Jose Maria Lopez, who’s 40, has been selling nine years on the line now.

Plenty of Competition

“It was better before. There’s 80% fewer sales now than when I started. Before I sold 100 items a day. Now it’s 20-30. Why? Because most of the competition is in Tijuana and Ensenada, before they get to us. I work seven days a week--every day. From 4 ‘till 11 p.m. Or when the traffic stops. Maybe 2 a.m. I have to.”

The biggest problems?

“Drunk people who break things before they buy them.”

And the best customers?

Americans from faraway places like Hawaii and New York.

The worst?

“The Japanese tourist groups,” says Lorena Gonzalez, as other sellers nod in agreement. “They bargain you down to bare bones, after making you demonstrate everything. Half the time I sell to them at cost just to be through with it.”

“We have 140 licensed sellers in the line,” says Sandra’s father, Emeterio Mateos, who is secretario for the syndicate of shopkeepers on The Island. “There is no need for more. Not with the competition we have now.”

Down below, at Eva Mateos’ restaurant, the tall stools around her counter are lined with sellers in from four hours of walking under the clutter of their blankets and sombreros and ceramics. They eat quietly away at today’s dish, pollo and arroz. These are the regular workers who can afford a good lunch.

As the traffic and its resultant fumes get thick and the afternoon passes, others join in the circus, walking the lines between the cars. A 40-year-old man wearing black trousers, white shirt and an “Ejercito de Salvacion” cap turns out to be the Tijuana Salvation Army’s one-man fund-raiser. Every Saturday, Julio Urizar shakes a tin at car windows for about six hours and collects, if he’s lucky, up to $50--an amount equal to the Army outpost’s weekly budget. At the moment, they are feeding 60 orphans and poor Mixtec Indian children, he says. Mention San Diego Salvation Army’s million-dollar budget and Senor Urizar just smiles.

In an eddy of the traffic flow, Juan Marmoleto Moran comes by calling “Pumpkin seeds! Pumpkin seeds! Roasted. Salted.” He navigates his way with a long white cane. The guys from the line negotiate out from midstream to buy a little brown paper packet of the seeds from the blind man. As a steady stream of them come up to buy, he takes piles of seeds into his hand and pours them into little brown paper bags.

“I earn enough extra to support my wife and five children, the ones still with me,” he says. Juan is 69 years old and has been going blind for 16 years, ever since he came up from Jalisco. “Here they all know me,” he says, and then excuses himself to go back to walking, calling out “Pumpkin seeds!,” working.

Bargaining Begins

But now the traffic is at zero. The windows are down for air circulation. People are bored silly. Somebody’s selling leather seat pads meant to cushion drivers’ tired bottoms. His business is beginning to perk up as the day ages. Santiago has just sold a giant ceramic Corona mug for about $10. Martin is negotiating a sailing ship through a small car window. The bargaining for that started at $30 seller, $10 buyer. Then it was $17 seller, $10 buyer. Finally, the ship sailed into the buyer’s lap for $15.

A pig follows, down from $10 to $6. A crystal ship is a harder sale. It clinks the rounds of the cars, inspiring glints in owners’ wives eyes--women are the major buyers--but with a price too solid and a construction too fragile to risk the trip back to the mantelpiece.

There’s a pickup with a swarm of sellers around it. The women and children in the back of the truck have bought a couple of ships, a ceramic Snoopy and a guitar. The two guys up front are negotiating for an elephant and a 3-foot crucifix. Martin is trying to poke a serape through. Alejandro has a miniature violin he wants one of the kids to buy.

Now too, as the dark comes, the chewing gum kids are beginning to show up.

“Chiclets?,” says Josefina Guadalupe Gomez, 13, and Sylvia, 10. They sell them in the afternoons, after school, averaging 3 cents each. To make any money they have to work late into the nights. Does Mamma know?

“Mamma doesn’t know,” says Josefina, giggling.

“My mamma sells here, too,” says Sylvia.

“I don’t want to do this like these people when I grow up,” says Josefina, “I want to make dresses.”

“And I want to work in a maquiladora ,” says her friend, Martha, “where they work 9 to 5.”

An older woman in a gray dress with a lined, burnished gold face dips into the next rubbish bin in a regular slow procession up to the border and back. A mother begging with a baby in her shawl shuffles past, not looking at anyone. Just the hand passing in the side windows. She sometimes pauses near a car’s engine. As the night cools, she pauses to enjoy the heat that comes up.

‘No, No, No!’

“No, no, no!,” screams a muffled voice from behind a windshield as the last light of day fades behind a sign heralding the Mexican government’s “Revolutionary Youth Front.” But 10 - year - old Carlos lifts up the windshield wipers and keeps wiping.

“Jeezzus Christ!! I said no!”

“You’ve got to keep going once you’ve started,” Carlos says. “Otherwise, they’ll never pay. Unless they get violent. Fact is, they’re trapped. They can’t drive off.”

Carlos expects to get 5 to 50 cents for each windshield he gets to do all the way.

“For Chrissakes,” yells this irritated driver, “it’s dirtier than before you started! Look at the grease!”

The driver squirts his windshield washers in a vain attempt to chase Carlos off. Then, he leaps out of his car, with widow cleaner and a towel and cleans it himself.

Carlos stands there, looking up at the guy. He holds his hand out.

“Geeze, this kid doesn’t know when to quit!,” he says, then breaks out laughing. He digs into his pocket, and hands Carlos a dime. “Next time clean your rag before you clean my window!”

Back on The Island, all the old men are playing dominoes at the shop of Sandra’s Uncle Luis. There are a few walking tourists looking through. They have made a special detour to come so they are good customers. Sandra is still there jumping down from her high stool in shop No. 22, to interest the tourists in some blankets. There is an ever-present hum of the few thousand idling engines.

Paola’s sister is guarding the Gonzalez family shop. Alejandro has quit for the day, but Mario and Martin are still out there, plugging the best part of day. The part when it’s cooler to carry all those blankets, and some real returnees from the beaches are starting to trickle back. Looking at the river of traffic from the side, you see sailing ships literally passing in the night above the roofs of cars, as the trabajadores-- the workers on the line--carry them up and down the rows. Along with the night sellers of goat-milk sweets and packets of spices, and more daring T-shirts like “Marijuana Pickers” with the spiky weed growing green front and back.

Sounds fill the night air. Drifting across the cars the sounds of squeaky miniature violins mix with someone playing a penny whistle he wants to sell.

“ Yai , Yai Yai Yai !,”yells a tuneless little Mixtec kid sitting on some pavement with a tin for the turistas ‘ leftover money. One of the line boys breaks out a rhythm on his half a dozen maracas. Julio Iglesias’ voice wafts out from someone’s car radio, and behind that, the evening’s border show.

Nearby, a chorus of U. S. Border Patrol helicopters enact their nightly chase ritual over the barren hills, whirring low and pin-pointing illegal aliens with spotlights, then barking orders down to them through loudspeakers. From this side, it seems like a movie being shot on location.

It will be 2 a.m. before Carlos and Alejandro and Paola’s brothers can call it a day.