Emergence of a Hybrid Culture

Eliot Garcia, 23, says he learned English from “Batman” reruns. Now he sings Spanglish rock anthems about police brutality, drug-related violence and the O.J. media circus. His Tijuana band, Nessie, has already cracked Los Angeles’ Whisky nightclub and MTV Latino.

Jose Hugo Sanchez is a performero--performance artist. His ranting monologues, as littered with U.S. pop images as Tijuana is with Coca-Cola and Guess jeans ads, describe how poor U.S.-bound peasants trade family and roots for a traumatic journey into American consumer society.

Claudia Sandoval, 21, edits the Dream of Venus, one of dozens of underground ‘zines, small low-budget publications that fuse kaleidoscopic graphics, modernist poetry and provocative essays on everything from the drug culture movie “Trainspotting” to border identity issues.

Their generation of rockers, poets, artists and writers are the youthful heralds of Tijuana’s collision with the future, the privileged and articulate bohemians of Baja California fronterizos, or borderlanders.

They are the vanguard of what Mexico City-based sociologist Nestor Garcia Canclini has dubbed one of the world’s “hybrid cultures.”

Members of an unusually well-educated, middle-class society, these fronterizos have grown up in the cauterizing glare of U.S. popular culture. They have come of age far from the gravitational pull of the institutions and traditions of central Mexico, in a region steeped in the free-wheeling history of the individualistic norteno border culture.

As permanent spectators to the great hemispheric exodus from the impoverished south to the prosperous north, they draw from a ceaseless caravan of human dreams and tragedy. Captive audience to the bloody machinations of Tijuana’s famed drug godfathers, their vision--like the city itself--has a gritty film noir aesthetic, flavored by dark comedy.

“This is where U.S. and Mexican culture collide,” says Roberto Mendoza, 27, the leader of a techno-electronico-industrial group, Artefakto. “You take a right and you’re in the First World. Take a left and you’re in the Third World.”

That description might apply equally to Mendoza, with his black leather coat, heavy industrial boots, long black bob and the aquiline features of a pre-Colombian heritage. He likes to say he learned English as a child from “The Price is Right,” during an era when Tijuana could tune in to 10 American TV stations but only one Mexican channel.

Academics say the Tijuana counterculture scene gets its ironic urban edge from its unique position as the only border city anchored to one of America’s most culturally potent urban corridors.

Perhaps that is why the look of Tijuana’s neighborhoods and strip malls owes more to suburban Los Angeles than Mexico City. And why punk rock and heavy metal coexists with the Baja rodeo season, drug pistoleros and border balladeers.

Says Alfredo Alvarez Cardenas, director of the city’s cultural center: “Tijuana is definitely postmodern.”

“That area is electrified with creativity,” says Maria Sobek, a Chicano studies professor at UC Santa Barbara and an expert on border culture. “Because of the contact between the two cultures, there’s this tremendous production of new modes of behavior, new ways of speaking, new ways of seeing. It’s becoming a great center of production of literature and arts.”

While the size of youth movements is hard to quantify, Alfredo Alvarez Cardenas says the Tijuana scene is big enough to support a thriving music milieu and put the city on the map of global youth culture.

Local alternative bands play to thousands at concerts and festivals. There is a broad enough consumer base to draw European artists like Miguel Bose, an ethereal progressive rock artist from Spain. Mexico City bands like Maldita Vecindad have packed 12,000 fans into Tijuana’s downtown bullring. And Tijuana bands such as Nessie, Tijuana No and Mexican Jumping Frijoles are among the city’s most important cultural exports to Mexico City, Los Angeles and border cities like Monterrey, experts say.

Young adults from as far north as Los Angeles drive to Tijuana for rock concerts publicized on Spanish-language radio, according to Enrique Ojeda, the art director of MORE-FM (98.9), a rock-en-espanol station heard from Ensenada to Oceanside. San Diego poets read at Tijuana cultural centers such as El Lugar del Nopal.

“The Tijuana rock scene is extremely important,” said Emilio Morales, the Los Angeles-based publisher of a rock-en-espanol bible, La Banda Elastica, or The Rubber Band. “Since the ‘60s, some of Mexico’s most important rock bands have come from Tijuana. It is the influence of the border. [Growing up listening to] American radio gives them a fresher ear.”

Where Cultures Meet and Merge

Tijuana student Cynthia Ramirez, 26, says the local vanguardia is an expression of the surreal experience of straddling two cultures. Its totems are a New World collage in which American artist Andy Warhol and writer William Burroughs rub shoulders with Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and the Zapatista rebels. Ramirez’s ‘zine, la pecera, calls her generation “mutants.”

“Fronterizos don’t belong to Mexican culture, but to border culture,” says Ramirez, co-author of a senior thesis on the Tijuana rock scene for the communications department of the Tijuana campus of the Universidad Iberoamericana Noroeste. She also edits one of the ‘zines, which in Tijuana are called fanzines. They are anything but the fawning celebrity press their name might imply.

Fanzine writers sift through Mexican icons with irreverence, nurtured by a childhood in which traditional Day of the Dead festivities competed with trick or treats and Casper the Ghost. Their cult of kitsch mocks the idiosyncrasies of both cultures, from former O.J. Simpson house guest Brian “Kato” Kaelin to the Mexican penchant for putting the Virgen of Guadalupe on everything from key chains to refrigerator magnets.

“Nothing is sacred,” says Daniel Rivera, a popular deejay known by his one-word pseudonym, Tolo. “Every day, new people come to Tijuana with new traditions, languages and religion. All the icons arrive. If you don’t like one, you discard it for another.

“There is no nationalist pressure,” Rivera says. “You don’t know where your Mexican authenticity ends and your gringo influence begins.”

That pluralism--demographic, cultural, religious and, to the chagrin of some, moral--is at the heart of the Tijuana youth scene and the history of the city itself, some say. While some conservative elders may disapprove of the scene, others view it as a passing phase. Some of the fronterizos’ parents and grandparents were themselves club owners or musicians during Tijuana’s long era as a party town for Navy men or Prohibition refugees.

“The simple fact of having been born in Tijuana confers upon you a very important distinction: diversity of viewpoints,” says Javier Hernandez, 24, the editor of a popular fanzine, Aleph.

Disdain for American commercialism is a staple fanzine theme. A recent essay in Aleph rejects the idea that border bohemians are wannabes of America’s Generation X or the so-called MTV generation.

“One must ask how much of this supposedly uniform generation is a myth, and how much of it is a publicity stunt to sell more Coca-Cola, and movies like ‘Reality Bites,’ ” the Aleph essay says. “Those who could assume the MTV lifestyle in this country are a minority, a minority who parrot cliches.”

The border bohemians celebrate so-called trash cultura, a declaration of independence from the tyranny of conspicuous consumption and hypocritical moralism. “Enough already of car ads and mineral water. We don’t want to smell good! We don’t want to lose weight!” says Alex de la Iglesia in la pecera.

But if they criticize aspects of American culture, their embrace of American trends and styles is unapologetic. With their black leather, proletarian chic boots, grunge wear and polyester, many of los hard-core of Tijuana would blend in well with the youth of Seattle, Austin, Texas, or Athens, Ga.

Tijuana rocker Cesar Hernandez, 21, says the U.S. influence is partly the legacy of decades of American partiers who have flocked to the city since Prohibition. Hernandez himself is the grandson of a musician who played the famed Agua Caliente Casino in its heyday, when luminaries such as Clark Gable, the Marx Brothers, Bing Crosby and Al Capone put in appearances. His peers, he says, are simply victims--or beneficiaries--of cultural geography.

“We are a border people, and these are our roots,” he said.

Martin Hernandez is the son and grandson of nightclub owners. A member of the rock band Mercado Negro, or Black Market, he says he grew up influenced by U.S. punk rock, surfer and skater culture, along with Tijuana nightclub culture and the Latin jazz explosion. “It’s a collage,” Hernandez says.

So is the hybrid language, Spanglish, a linguistic pingpong employed even by those perfectly capable of using both languages properly. The fronterizos’ Spanglish is not a language of ineptitude, but a slang of youth identity which, in their case, is bicultural.

Some Spanglish terms are universal, like the self-explanatory taco shop, instead of taqueria. New uses constantly radiate out of youth subculture. Small-time drug thugs are los low-lifes. Penniless Mexican immigrants are los Outsiders. Un Hollywood is a grandstander; un rockstar a conceited person. And there are Spanglish band names, like the Mexican Jumping Frijoles.

Yet many Tijuana bohemians deny the suggestion that they are agringados--co-opted by gringo culture. “People keep talking about the search for identity, but I think Tijuana already has an identity that is neither Mexican or American--or even Mexican American--but something else entirely,” said RDD, a rock fanzine.

Giving Rise to New Views

That “something else” filters into the artistic compassion for the stream of desperately poor, northward-bound immigrants. Mercado Negro recorded an entire album about it, “Cruzando la Frontera,” or “Crossing the Border.”

Artist Jose Hugo Sanchez writes of immigrants who jettison impoverished Mexican lives to become “technopagans” in a bewildering and xenophobic America:

“You will leave your father, you will leave your mother, you will leave your pregnant wife/ You will cross the border on your knees . . . To the north of the future. Braving death at the border . . . Ads, slogans, McDonald’s, cars and more cars . . . Citizen of the millennium: Listen to me! Where is your woman, your soul? In what language will you dream? In what language will you die? Goodbye, goodbye . . . he who left and never returned/ Mother one day I will return with my pockets full of virtual dollars . . .”

There is also the sense of belonging to a region that is set apart from central Mexico by geographical remoteness and a unique modern history of political independence.

Baja California broke with six decades of ruling party domination when it elected Mexico’s first opposition party governor, of the National Action Party, in 1989. The party vowed to clean up institutionalized corruption. But drug corruption is more evident in Tijuana today than ever.

“They have a tremendous sense of existential disenchantment,” says Jose Manuel Valenzuela, an expert on Tijuana youth movements at the Baja Colegio de la Frontera Norte. “It is not nihilism, but profound disappointment with authority figures, with discredited leaders who ought to be their moral compass.”

Whatever their frustrations, the Tijuana bohemians are also relatively privileged, enjoying a general level of economic opportunity and education denied to most Mexicans.

Baja California’s high school education rate is the highest in the country; university education second only to Mexico City. Between Tijuana and Ensenada are 20 university campuses, think tanks, professional schools or research centers. There are 21 public library branches in Tijuana, art and dance schools, and a cavernous cultural center with galleries, cultural organizations and computers. No wonder so many Tijuana rock bands and fanzines have their own World Wide Web pages, and their partisans are so e-mail adept.

While shantytowns of impoverished newcomers ring the city of 1.2 million, Tijuana boasts a storied unemployment rate--1%--that is the envy of a nation. It is the only Mexican border city with more middle-income residents than low-wage earners, according to studies. Its residents benefit from the foreign manufacturing industry and a web of businesses and services fueled by its strategic position as close neighbor to a major California city and host of the world’s busiest land border crossing.

Working women are common in Tijuana and face fewer prejudices than elsewhere in Mexico. There are 24-hour grocery stores, nightclubs, pharmacies. Cash registers ring up dollars and pesos.

So in many ways, young adults like MTV veteran Eliot Garcia, who chose a futuristic present over a tradition-bound one, are typical children of the Tijuana middle class.

He knows his native city has a mixed reputation, as the scene of the assassination of the presidential heir apparent in 1994, as the home of the Tijuana drug cartel. But also as a brash exciting mecca for the ambitious, hard-working and forward-minded.

“It’s seen as a city of progress, that is becoming one of Mexico’s most important cities, if it’s not already. People come here from all over,” Garcia says.

“We are still creating Tijuana.”