The landscapes of Southern Alta & Northern Baja California are nearly indistinguishable from each other. Thanks to plenty of rain this winter, the hills and mountains are lush with greenery. I imagine that summertime things are as sepia dry on the Mexican coast as they are on the Californian. But south of “the border,” I couldn’t help but feel a certain alienness in the air. Not least because my ignorance of Spanish marks me out as a gringo, y un pendejo.
Of course, I wasn’t the only Yankee enjoying their President’s Day in Baja. I’d say about a third of the cars I saw had California plates, and several others repped Arizona and Nevada. Typical Americans. It’s not enough to live the Dream in what before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was Mexico, we have to prance around during one of our many patriotic holidays in the parts we didn’t seize by force. There were so many Patagonia puffies and craft-brewery flatbrims, to say nothing of the skinny blonde chicks in suede floppy hats, you’d’ve thought I was back in Ojai.
At Fauna, one of the upscale restaurants in Valle de Guadalupe specializing in “Baja Med,” a hybrid cuisine blending Mexican, Mediterranean and Asian elements, there are long communal, rather than individual, dining tables. Across from us were sat a couple from Laguna Beach—an enclave deep behind the Orange Curtain. Nixon Country. They were all too impressed to learn we live in Ventura. Ventura is cute, but not impressive. They, well, he, asked way too many questions about it. Her “background is in real estate,” in Tuscon, until she moved to California to support her mom’s third-wave coffee company, which she assured us we could find in Whole Foods. I don’t shop at Whole Foods, but we did happen to stop in on our drive home because we needed coffee for the next day. We did not find her coffee. He, an Australian, “works for the UN.” Started there in 2005, doing humanitarian work in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Syria, and other conflict zones. After a few of the wine pairings, he told stories about texting with a leader of Boko Haram, and meeting a Taliban official at a coffee shop in Thousand Oaks, CA, the very boring LA suburb where I grew up. His LinkedIn profile tells me he’s consulted with the WHO and the Gates Foundation….
The food at Fauna was good. The wine was not.
Last August in several cities along the US-Mexico border, cartels effectively shut down public activities in a show of force that required the Mexican government to call both Army and National Guard reinforcements. Cartel violence has long plagued Mexico’s northern deserts, deserts where outlaws of another kind often die of thirst, fleeing state violence in Chiapas, or in Guatemala, all for a chance to slip into the gilded barbed wire of the United States. It is only if refugees reach a FEMA detention facility that liberals think to cry “fascist!,” never reflecting that obviously, the killing floor of the American nightmare is in the streets of Ciudad Juarez, in Tijuana, in Chiapas, places where drug violence and wanton government repression, overseen by the American intelligence community on behalf of international capital, does all the work of a death camp without any need for trains and ID laws. But drug trafficking is only an additional means for accumulation, a financialization of the gun-for-hire racketeering necessary to protect the real business: petroleum extraction. Mexico is ranked second on the list of countries importing oil to the US: more than Russia, more than Saudi Arabia.
Crossing the border from Mexico into the US is a dispiriting ordeal, and much more arduous than going the other way. Vendors take up one of three highway lanes leading to the US Customs checkpoint, selling snacks, tacky art, cowboy hats, piggie banks in the shape of President AMLO, and even a few puppies doomed to end up among Mexico’s considerable street dog population. Cripples beg for pesos. I watched a man with both hands blown off at midforearm struggle to pull his pants back up after they’d slid to the ground. No one is spared their dignity.
Speaking of banks shaped like AMLO, Mexico is one of the few countries whose currency actually remained strong against the US dollar in 2022. The leftish president is making the most of the economic success by instituting a raft of reforms aimed at bolstering Mexico’s internal markets while paving the way for stronger labor protections. Despite the usual cries from the international business press, AMLO’s anti-neoliberal reforms have not scared off foreign investors in the slightest. In fact, the US, both amidst its Cold War 2.0 Sinophobia and due to just good business sense, has shifted a lot of investments that would have gone to China towards Mexican industries. Why the US would choose months long shipment times across the Pacific over weeks long freights through the southern border I don’t know. But with this infusion of cash from the US comes further dependence on Yankee excellence, a situation with a grim forecast.
One lesson I ought to learn: if I’m going to write, I need to focus, and take better notes. Trying not to idly use the internet helps, but it is foolish to continue believing I can recall details after the fact. Instead of thinking first and filling in later, I should note details first and think later. Naturally I write only what fragments I can dredge out later: if I don’t catch the fragments as they appear, there’s no hope of crafting something larger out of them.
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