Opera takes to the street

The last time before Saturday that Umberta Olivera had heard an opera was 17 years ago, and she never forgot it.

Friends invited her to a performance in Mexico City. The music had enchanted her, but she’d never been to a concert since.

Olivera now lives in a poor neighborhood of Tijuana. She is a school janitor, earns $100 a week and supports herself and her 7-year-old son, Natanael.

“I really like opera, they’re just very expensive to attend,” she said. “This is the first time they’ve given a concert like this, free to the public.”

It was for people like Umberta Olivera that Tijuana on Saturday held its first Opera in the Street festival, in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods.

For 10 hours, 150 musicians performed for free on stage for an estimated 3,000 people, who packed a closed street transformed into the Spanish town in “The Barber of Seville.”

Ignoring car alarms and airplanes taking off overhead, a cross-section of the city, including workers, wealthy housewives and artists, listened to arias and scenes from operas by Verdi, Puccini and Bizet, 200 yards from the brown steel wall dividing Mexico from the U.S.

“We want people who’ve never gone to the opera to see it and grow close to it,” said Teresa Rique, one of the event organizers.

Olivera had heard about the event on television the night before. With no car, she and Natanael boarded a bus to downtown Tijuana, then walked up a steep hill to the Libertad neighborhood, a place better known for its immigrant smugglers than its artists.

“I want to show him that there are other types of music. It’s another way of cultivating his education,” Olivera said, as her son played with empty soda cans at her feet.

Opera in the Street was the idea of Enrique Fuentes, who wanted to celebrate the third anniversary of the opening of his Cafe de la Opera, the only opera cafe in Tijuana.

Fuentes, a schoolteacher in San Diego and opera lover, for several years showed videos of operas at his Tijuana home for friends. This grew so popular that he opened a cafe.

Thrift store-decorated with old records, lamps, antique furniture -- even a plastic Viking helmet -- his cafe opened on July 10, 2001, on Fifth Street in Libertad, where he grew up.

Since then, the Cafe de la Opera has held recitals, shown opera videos, offered music classes and has become a meeting point for Tijuana opera fans and a place where young musicians can perform.

At the cafe’s anniversary last year, too many people attended to fit inside the building. “That’s when we said, ‘Next year we’ll do it in the street,’ ” Fuentes said Saturday, walking the streets dressed in the garb of a Renaissance courtesan.

Fuentes and Rique organized neighbors, pulled together sponsors and persuaded the city government to pitch in with police, portable bathrooms and potted trees.

Many restaurants and businesses, however, declined to participate, said Fuentes. “They couldn’t imagine the magnitude of the event,” he said.

However, Fifth Street residents, most of whom had never heard an opera, spent a week painting their houses and picking up trash. A stage was erected on the street in front of Cine Libertad, which was painted for the first time since it closed almost 40 years ago.

“This is something positive,” said Eduardo Gomez, a construction worker, Fifth Street resident and volunteer for Saturday’s event. “For years, the only time Libertad ever appeared in the papers was in the crime section.”

Libertad is in fact an unlikely place for opera. The neighborhood abutting the United States is a lopsided wedding cake of houses and shacks jammed onto steep hills just east of the San Ysidro border crossing.

Tijuana’s first neighborhood, Libertad was where the city’s poor new arrivals found cheap housing. It bred Tijuana’s first street gangs, drug addicts and boxers. The first artisans to make plaster bulls and Mickey Mouse figures for sale to tourists lived here. Proximity to the border turned Libertad into a daily staging area for immigrants waiting until nightfall to cross the border illegally into the U.S.

“People asked why would we hold this in Libertad,” Rique said. “Why not hold it here? We want to get opera out of the traditional places in which it’s presented.”

Yet the development of opera here is one barometer of how far Tijuana has come from its origins as an outpost of vice and chintzy tourism.

The city is a manufacturing center now, and its economy, robust by Mexican standards, has one of the country’s lowest unemployment rates. A sizable middle class has formed, and with it a thriving arts scene. Tijuana now has a music conservatory, a chamber orchestra and numerous choruses.

Opera began to emerge here about five years ago with some exploratory productions that were enthusiastically received.

Based on their success, La Opera de Tijuana, the city’s first opera company, formed two years ago. Its season ends with a major production every August. This year’s opera is “Don Pasquale,” with performances Aug. 20 and 22 at the Tijuana Cultural Center.

Yet despite its development, Tijuana remains a working-class city, and for opera here to grow, it must appeal to the working classes.

“We have to get rid of this elitism with which people view opera,” said Manuel Laborin, host of Tijuana’s only opera radio show, standing amid the throngs of people. “Opera has its beginning with the people. It was entertainment, like movies are today, and Italians would throw tomatoes at the singers they didn’t like.”

No one threw tomatoes Saturday. Instead, singers were greeted with wild applause. Vendors did brisk business selling pozole, soft drinks, beer and popsicles.

To avoid losing their place, many people didn’t leave their seats for hours.

“We need more of this,” said Umberta Olivera. “There are lots of kinds of music and young people need to know what they are.”