Spring Break in Hip San Felipe : This Year’s Easter Weekend Party Moves From the Palm Springs Desert to Mexico’s Swinging Seaside Resort

For 40 slow miles, a Mexican Federal patrolman paces a milelong string of four-wheel drives, RVs and packed family four-doors until they reach the concrete arches of this fishing community 230 miles southeast of San Diego.

Two young men stop each car and ask for $10 donations to help the town deal with the influx. And although many opt to give a few dollars, the city can’t deal with the influx.

Visitors who ask innocently about possible hotel vacancies are laughed at. Even the town’s numerous park-and-camp seaside lots are overloaded, filled with the small orange tents and green sleeping bags of Mexicans on holiday and students from UC Irvine and San Diego State.

Along the entrance road, blacktop turns to dust and gridlock maddens even the most callous L.A. driver. Three-wheeled all-terrain vehicles, topped by topless young men and scantily clad young women, buzz through the molasses of traffic. Sidewalks are clogged with whistling gawkers, forcing human locomotion into the traffic.

This town is packed.

“There’s more Americans this year than in the past,” explains Carol Pena owner of the 40-space seaside San Felipe RV Park. “We’ve been full for three weeks.”

This is Spring Break 1992 in San Felipe, where, as is not the case in Palm Springs, mayhem is tolerated and even popular Los Angeles “raves”--dance parties where drugs often flow--are welcome.

This tolerant attitude may be what makes San Felipe a hip destination this spring. Its population for Easter weekend was estimated at 50,000--several thousand more than last year and more than double its year-round population, according to police chief Jose I. Espinosa.

Officials say a majority of the tourists are Mexicans from other parts of Baja, enjoying a major holiday weekend. But observers also say that students on Spring Break, many here to enjoy 80-degree-plus weather and avoid the crackdown on public partying in Palm Springs, have expanded the San Felipe crowd by several thousand.

Espinosa makes it clear that the rowdies are more than welcome: “You tell people that everything went well,” he tells a reporter, noting that by Friday there had been no arrests and only three auto accidents.

Police are extremely patient, standing by as cans of red Tecate beer go bottoms up in the streets; as two young women in cutoff jeans lounge on the hood of a slow-moving Ford Bronco; as all-terrain vehicles and off-road motorcycles weave dangerously down the town’s bright-beige strip of beach, which is littered to the tidemark with campers.

At one point, police in riot gear break up a bottle-throwing fight between revelers but make no arrests. But by early Saturday morning, police are compelled to arrest three people on charges of fighting, drunk driving and causing a wreck.

They have to draw the line somewhere.

This weekend, a new party tradition is dawning in San Felipe.

“Donde esta el rave?”-- where is the rave--a visitor asks a group of well-dressed Mexican youths on their way to a carnival whose lighted Ferris wheel dominates the town’s skyline.

Weighed heavily with a rolled “r,” “Rave???” is the reply. The local crowd--though well-versed in American methods of celebration--isn’t ready for this yet.

This is a 20,000-square-foot circus tent at the town baseball field that ripples with the bass of 48 loudspeakers emitting hypnotic European dance music as Intellibeam disco lights inside sway robotically to the beat. This is “Spring Breakdown 1992,” a three-day rave.

“I want Palm Springs to feel the effect of not letting the kids have any fun,” says the event’s co-promoter, Momar Ka-jet-ski. “Anything I can do to give the kids a place to let it go. . . . “

Ka-jet-ski, 37, reportedly spent more than $100,000 to bring deejays from Los Angeles and top-flight “underground” music groups in his attempt to bring Woodstock-inspired raves to San Felipe’s anarchic Spring Break crowd. He also cut a deal with the local government to keep the police at bay, “which wasn’t hard,” he says.

But the turnout for the event, heavily promoted in Southern California, is far below the several thousand needed for promoters to recoup their investment. “We would have liked to see more people,” said one event organizer.

Ka-jet-ski, a former Los Angeles nightclub owner, wants to attract college kids (called New Jacks) to his parties to pump new life into a scene hurt by the March deaths of three young rave patrons from laughing gas--a popular drug at raves--and by the recent cancellation of an April 11 rave in Los Angeles that left 4,000 people holding useless $20 tickets.

“If this rave gets a lot of New Jacks, it’s going to benefit the whole scene,” says Ka-jet-ski. “Plus, the New Jacks need to find out about other things besides fraternities.”

Bryan Corbett, 20, a student at UC Irvine, is not exactly a New Jack. Like most of the 700-plus others who either spent $75 for bus fare and admittance or who drove down and paid a $20 cover charge, Corbett is a rave regular who knew exactly why he came.

“For the music,” explains the tall, goateed blond. “You can have a religious experience with this music.”

Others, frankly, came to do drugs in a police-free environment.

At the tent’s entrance, a youth sporting a white “X” baseball cap and carrying a backpack paces in the dirt with the high-profile gaze of an ecstasy dealer looking to make sales.

Promoters admit that drugs are an unofficial part of the event and say they cannot keep out small, concealed capsules of ecstasy--a pulse-quickening drug popular at raves.

At the party’s “smart bar,” where vitamin drinks that supposedly benefit the brain are sold for $3.50 and up, revelers can buy “The Ecstasy Elevator,” a “mega-nutritional supplement” that is supposed to enhance the influence of the drug.

At the door, a young man with short, dark hair who sports a pin-striped baseball shirt asks a ticket vendor if he can bring in a tank of laughing gas and sell it in balloons to revelers.

She shrugs, telling another visitor, “We have had some trouble,” turns to the man and says no.

They have to draw the line somewhere.