Tijuana Offers a Friendly Lesson to L.A. : Society: Human kindness goes a long way to make the Mexican community feel safer than the riot-torn city to the north.

I came around the corner in the industrial area, and there were 15 or 20 dark-skinned young men in the middle of the street milling about, and I thought, “Oh, God--now I’m done for.” They eyed me, and one of the biggest and meanest-looking men started to move in my direction. I said a tiny prayer to the great god of industrial areas, hoping that I would luck out of this one.

I edged ahead, and the big one smiled and waved me on. There was some good-natured laughter, calling out to me things like “Ya, gabacho!” and “Pasa, gringo, pasa!”

I wasn’t in South Los Angeles but, rather, northeast Tijuana, and I had just interrupted an army of young Mexicans at their noon soccer game behind the Matsushita maquiladora plant.

Obviously I had been listening to too many news stories from up north on my car radio. I was fretful every time I went outside my safe neighborhood. I feared getting pulled out of my car and pummeled, or at the least, insulted and spat on for merely being light-skinned and being where I shouldn’t be.

It started me to thinking about the difference between Los Angeles and Tijuana. I have lived in and visited Tijuana on and off for 20 years. I consider it one of the great cities of the world, where a thousand cultures come together with amazing peace. It is dusty and noisy and overcrowded, but there is a street life, a variety and a kindness that I find rare north of the border.

I often travel to the poorer parts of Tijuana to deliver clothes and food and necessities to families that we in the United States would describe as hideously destitute.

They live in a part of town named Cinco y Diez (Five & Ten), up dusty canyons in squatters’ shacks with no electricity or plumbing. Those few who have TVs power their sets with old automobile batteries, which they haul to the local body shop for recharging. When the spring rains are at their heaviest, I don’t get to visit my friends because the main access road reverts to what it was before people came on the scene--a river.

I have driven alone through Cinco y Diez hundreds of times, and I can’t think of any time I have felt afraid or, for that matter, worried about closing the windows and locking the doors.

Part of it is the design of the Tijuana slums. The neighborhoods are built, not through the directives of some ninny in the planning or building department, but according to happenstance and real life.

People take over a canyon, bring in scrap lumber and tar paper, build hovels, dig holes for outhouses. Streets are constructed by chance, so they are naturally narrow, following the contours of the hills. How could you riot on such tiny, winding roads?

The people, and their neighborhoods and visitors, are protected by what urban affairs author Jane Jacobs called “the eyes of the city:” men, women and children, sitting outside in the shade, doing the laundry, selling tacos, playing, talking. How could I be robbed or beaten when there are so many friends all around me watching?

Cynics might say that it has to do with the Tijuana police officers, whose reputation reminds me of some cops I knew when I was growing up in the southern United States--bloated, mean-looking cops, seemingly unencumbered by anything as frivolous as “the rights of suspects.” They use their guns and nightsticks with impunity, and no one in his right mind would cross them.

But I don’t think the presence of unfettered police is the major reason for such tranquillity. In Los Angeles, in fact, one might argue that unfettered police had just the opposite effect.

Rather, Tijuana’s relative peace has more to do with the people themselves, people who are unwilling--as it says in the Acts of the Apostles--”to kick against the pricks.”

They enjoy a gift of kindness that we don’t see often in Southern California. Not a few times, my 1967 van has gotten stuck going up or down one of the hills. Help is always forthcoming to get me moving again, unlike the many times this has happened to me on this side of the border.

I find myself feeling protective of my Mexican friends. We have erected what must be the ugliest edifice since the Berlin Wall (which is exactly what the Mexicans call the sheet metal fence--”La Pared Berlin”). Its intention is to keep some of my friends from working, from “invading” the vast lands they once owned.

But we have it backward. The wall should be erected at the border to keep out the gringos who spill over every weekend in their quest for cheap drinks and cheap thrills that often turn ugly. If you have any doubts about this, spend a Saturday night in Tijuana or Ensenada or San Felipe watching the drunken American kids insulting their hosts.

The denizens of Tijuana have much to teach us about peace. Recently, I was talking to one of the families that I visit at Cinco Y Diez. I asked them if there was much crime in the neighborhood.

“Crime?”

“Yes,” I explained, “beatings, robberies, stick-ups, muggings.”

There was much shaking of heads and wonderment. No, no--they said. Crime, shooting, violence? Hardly any at all.

Except, they said, for what they saw on television, on programs coming across the border from faraway places like Los Angeles and San Diego.