A New Life for Castoff Americana

If Southern California ever is truly engulfed in an apocalyptic lava flow, archeologists of the future might be able to reconstruct the millennium from the piles of unwanted Americana headed south of the border on Carlos Corona’s truck.

His white Ford pickup is swallowed by a towering load of used stuff. Sofas bulge four feet over the rear. Chair legs bristle like porcupine quills atop stacked mattresses. People laugh, point, snap photos and shout that Corona will “never make it to Ensenada.” The impenetrably charming Corona smiles and waves, as if he were Julio Iglesias in an impromptu appearance.

Corona, 25, is one of legions of hard-working road warriors who make their living hauling away mountains of secondhand stuff cast off by the world’s most conspicuous consumer society. Each week, he and other proprietors of Baja California’s segundas--secondhand stores--gather up the urban debris of the Southland and truck it off to new incarnations in Mexico.

From this avalanche of kaleidoscopic kitsch--Lion King games, framed photos of prize heifers, decoupage inspirational plaques, Rod McKuen records--the segundas somehow excavate an ecologically sound industry that employs tens of thousands of Mexicans, and empowers many times more.

The segundas and their worn castoffs are a lifesaver for the huge numbers of poor migrants who resettle in the growing colonias of cities like Tijuana and Ensenada. Deep in Baja’s shantytowns, segundas mask the poverty of children whose parents cannot afford new school clothes. They shatter the isolation of slum dwellers for whom the price of a new radio or television is a mockery. And they improve the nutrition of migrants who otherwise could not buy refrigerators for milk, eggs and meat.

“The segundas are the boutique of the poor,” said Jose Manuel Valenzuela Arce, a respected researcher at a Baja think tank. “Segundas do not abolish poverty or racism, but they do camouflage the poor in the social landscape. They are a tremendous facilitator of upward mobility.”

Every day, buyers from the Baja segundas scour Southern California for rejected treasures. There are the weekend flea markets in Los Angeles, the auctions of abandoned storage lockers sold sight unseen in San Bernardino, the estate sales in Riverside, the mountains of discarded mattresses at hotels.

For the segunda empire of Carlos Corona’s 60-member clan, ground zero is the sunbaked concrete lot of a Goodwill Industries store in a Santa Ana neighborhood that looks like a piece of Latin America that broke off and drifted north.

This is the last-chance lot for Goodwill merchandise rejected by bargain shoppers, Goodwill directors say. Were it not for the segundas, much of what Corona’s clan buys here would be sold as rags or end up as landfill, they say.

Each Friday morning, Corona and a dozen or so other family members slog through this intimidating assemblage of American cultural detritus. On display is every consumer fad to hit Southern California since the Atomic Age.

Most the stuff is packed for sale in wood-framed bins priced at $80-$300. There are bins of battered computers--jumbled with plastic Halloween pumpkins and ‘50s housewares--and bins of vacuum cleaners with the odd antique sewing machine with gold lettering.

NordicTracks and fleets of exercise bikes silently reproach abandoned resolutions. Mystery novels with cracked spines betray sleepless nights. Hundreds of teddy bears--pink, coffee-splashed, classic taffy brown--wait for a new nose and a child to love them off again. Lonely golf clubs and skis rest alongside crutches.

Before the weekly auction begins, Corona’s clan has picked the best of these obscure objects of desire. They bid on each bin as a family, and flip coins to divide up the loot afterward.

Their fellow shoppers--the competition--are a jumble of nationalities and intentions. A buyer from the multimillion-dollar international used clothes trade who sends clothes for sale to India. Central American immigrants buying housewares. A feverishly competitive vintage clothes businessman with punk hair and earrings. The only other white shopper is Santa Ana native Charles Bright, 81, who stares incredulously as Carlos Corona’s pickup truck sways out of the lot.

“Vaya con Dios!” Bright yells, shaking his head. Then he mutters: “He’ll never make it.”

At sundown, Corona’s bionic pickup pulls into the Mexican customs station on the border at Otay Mesa, dragging his brother-in-law’s van that broke down along the way.

Here is where the shifting sands of global economic policy drift into the world of the segundas.

Once, the segundas were so unregulated that their owners would even haul small American houses across the border. When they got to the border, segunda proprietors simply peeled off $25 and a Mexican customs agent pocketed it.

In the late 1980s, the Mexican government banned the importation of used clothes, citing health concerns, though most officials say it was to protect local industry.

Then, to prepare for the gradual implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexican officials began to phase out the lower duties for imports to the border region--to bring it in line with the rest of Mexico--and to crack down on lax, corrupt border customs operations.

But the many mom-and-pop segundas are ill-prepared to handle the mountainous paperwork and invoices that would make them eligible for the lowest tariffs, said private customs agent Aram Hodoyan, who represents Corona and other Ensenada segunda owners.

“For the segundas to make itemized inventories each time is unfeasible,” Hodoyan said. “They don’t have hours to wait at the border. A lot of these people are illiterate, or only went to grammar school. They are distrustful of the government.”

Instead, most segunda operators pay a steep 30% of their load’s value--in tariffs and value added tax--in exchange for being waved quickly into Mexico, Hodoyan said.

Under that system, Carlos Corona declares the value of his mountainous load at $220, pays $80 in fees--and drives on to Ensenada.

Many segundas admit to undervaluing their loads. Others take notorious rural border back roads and bypass customs completely. And many sneak in illegal used clothes.

Even with the ban, used clothing makes up half the segundas’ sales, says Julio Rodriguez, a spokesman for the Baja Department of Economic Development.

“Making it illegal does not change the laws of supply and demand,” said Raymundo Arnaiz, co-chairman of the San Diego-Tijuana Planning for Prosperity Fund, a binational business group.

Turning a blind eye to the federal restrictions is practically a Baja tradition, because of the segundas’ long history and popularity.

Francisco Verduzco, an advisor to import-export companies for the Baja Department of Economic Development, said most of the 5 million residents of the two Baja California states own something bought from a segunda. He himself got three years of good use from a $50 segunda washing machine.

“Mexico has industries that are not yet strong, and we want them to succeed,” Verduzco said. “The trick is giving them a chance without causing problems for the poor.”

Segunda owners say their consumer base is too poor to be relevant to manufacturers.

“If there were no segundas, the poor would be left naked and barefoot,” said Carlos Corona’s cousin, Laura Rodriguez, 45, the softhearted proprietor of Segunda Laura, whose low prices make her a magnet for poor shoppers in Ensenada.

Nowhere is the huge segunda market bigger than in the Baja colonias, shanty-towns where vast neighborhoods are carved out of raw hillsides by newly arrived immigrants from impoverished areas of Mexico.

Here, vendors of new consumer goods are very rare, and shirts and pants start at about $1.20 at many segundas, freeing all but the most destitute from the tyranny of having to look poor.

Families pool savings for segunda home furnishings. The distinctive retro-electric look that results is closer to John Waters than Pottery Barn.

Entering the three-room shack of Inez Meza’s family gives a visitor the uncanny feeling of walking into an American living room, frozen in time somewhere between 1955 and 1972. There is the palette-knife galleon painting. The earth-brown shag rug. The faux wood-paneled television. The only thing missing is wild geese coasters.

The entire kitchen--from the beige and white Formica counters to the oak veneer cabinets, the refrigerator, sink, fan, water cooler, stainless steel table and chairs--cost about $130.

“Everything in this house is from segundas,” said Meza, 23, the smiling wife of a beer distributorship worker, clutching an 11-month-old son, Juan Alejandro, who beams under a “Rambo” headband. “People can’t afford to buy new things here.”

On the next dirt hill over lives a Zapotec Indian clan that relocated en masse from Oaxaca to Ensenada.

Maria Gallegos, 50, speaks little Spanish, and knows nothing of her daughter’s computer programming studies. But her dirt-floor kitchen is full of vintage American appliances--a Frigidaire, Singer sewing machine, blender, old Panasonic television--from segundas. The youngest of her seven children, Carlos, 11, wears segunda Gap jeans and Reeboks.

“We came here searching for new horizons,” explained her cousin, Rufino Molina, 48, ceremoniously. “Money doesn’t stretch far and families are big. Supporting everyone is hard. Segundas help all of us get along.”

When the family left Oaxaca three years ago there were no segundas there, Molina said. Now he and others haul secondhand clothes back for sale in their Oaxaca hometowns.

Industry leaders say segundas have popped up in Guadalajara, too, an example of “borderization”--the expansion of border culture into the heartlands of Mexico and the United States along immigrant pathways. And segunda goods are run from Southern California to the end of Baja California Sur via a Pony Express-style relay system in which drivers relieve each other along the way. Those who are afraid that the spread of used wares cuts into the markets for new goods point to the Saturday segunda mall, Los Globos, in downtown Ensenada.

The blocks of shops are a mecca for buyers of all social classes.

There are the low-income buyers, like Haydee Manriquez. Recently relocated from Sinaloa, she shops for tennis shoes for her first-grader, Alberto. She eyes the Jurassic Park and Little Mermaid lunch boxes, marked at $2. Pee Wee Herman’s Playhouse is slashed to $1.

“Even those of us with economic hardships can buy a wedding dress or a formal dance dress, for a tenth of the price we would pay in a store,” said Alicia Gonzalez, whose husband supports her and three children as a factory worker at a plant that makes air bags for U.S. cars.

They mingle with the decidedly middle-class Samantha Garcia, 13, who cruises the segundas with four friends. With their bell-bottoms, knit tops and clunky platforms, they epitomize segunda chic. Garcia buys a $3 polyester shirt that is as trendy and new-looking as anything in an American mall, musing: “People must get tired of things quickly in California.”

Another upscale buyer is a San Diego woman who came to buy stair-steppers for a new health club she opened across the border in Tijuana. They cost $50--about a tenth of the new U.S. price.

Like other Americans retired in Baja, Dan Loya, 61, a former Redlands truck driver, and his wife look for antiques such as quality silver, carnival glass and Fiesta ware. “We’ve bought treasures here for pennies,” said Loya, who hails from an Indian-Spanish Californio family.

Competing businesses at Los Globos keep prices low, and many things--fans, phones, coffee makers, blenders--can be had for under $10. Businesses profit most from brisk turnover of cheaply obtained U.S. used goods.

To some, the Baja segundas illustrate the long-standing tug-of-war between the economic interests of central Mexico and the emerging border region. “Ultimately, if more merchandise comes through, it will cost Mexico jobs in the interior,” said Aram Hodoyan, the border customs broker. “The economy--and the poor--will be worse off, and more of them will move here.”

Segunda proprietors say the tariffs and the ban on imports of used clothing are shortsighted, thwarting an industry that allows Baja to absorb the economic refugees fleeing Mexico’s severe economic crisis and cope with their needs--without state assistance or immigration to the United States.

“A Mexican who earns 300 pesos a week is not going to pay for rent, electricity and food for his family, and then go out and buy a 300-peso American sweater,” said Jesus Rodriguez, 67, the patriarch of the Corona-Rodriguez segunda clan. “The government refuses to acknowledge that many families are shod and dressed because of the segundas. They are entirely separate markets, and nobody should be allowed to deprive Mexicans of their freedom of choice.”

His nephew, Carlos Corona, says state officials understand this all too well to put the screws to the segundas. Other segundas merchants might complain that regulation is putting them out of business, but it’s hard to shake Corona’s sunny confidence.

Holding court in his open-air sales lot, Corona cheerfully flips a coin with a woman in hot pants over the price of a sewing machine (he wins), unconcerned about some ominous dark clouds that are moving down from the mountains.

What happens if it rains?

He smiles broadly. “Everything gets wet.”