Once you know life here, going back there would just be so boring to me. I don't know why.
I do know why, but it would just be so boring. I couldn't do it.
Though I was born and raised some 2,000 miles northeast of Tijuana, and that would be 3,551 kilometers,
I call this city mine because here, among her people, her pockmarked streets, her anarchy,
her gritty technicolor, her humble innovation, and an exhaustible persistence to grow and thrive against all odds,
I feel more alive than I have anywhere else in the world.
My name is Derek Chin, and I live in Tijuana, Mexico.
So this is my home, my Mexican paradise, my own private Mexico.
How I came to live in Tijuana was originally for love.
I was seeing someone who was from here, was spending most of my week here, and paying $1,000 rent to live in North Park.
And after six months, I said, what's the point of paying $1,000 to live somewhere where I could be spending $200 to live?
And I'm here every night anyway.
So that was the fiscal part of it all, but there was more to it than that.
The name of this piece is Algo Nopales de Cera in the Pinchillo Trulado,
and is inspired by one of my favorite things when I was living in Centro is whenever there would be a Mexican national holiday,
or Mexico would win a soccer tournament, big soccer tournament,
the people would be in the streets in their pickup trucks, and they'd jam the streets,
pouring out the back of the beds of these pickup trucks with these huge Mexican flags,
just showing pure, innocent patriotism, just pure love of your country.
And the thing is, it's illegal to do this in the United States.
That's the whole, that's what the United States is all about, trying to save you from yourself.
And that's what Mexico isn't.
If you fall in a hole, nobody to sue, you should have been watching where you're going.
And I've fallen in holes in Mexico, and I should have been looking where I was going.
My name is Michael Corbett, and I live in Tijuana.
This is the door of the Cortonano.
It's my home now, my studio.
It's my spaceship.
This is the midget room, Cortonano.
If you notice, the sink's kind of low, and the reason why that is,
is I sit when I eat dishes or cook, so I don't have to be hunched over.
But this is like my vision of Tijuana.
It's, you know, a return to an environment of color.
My name is Jenny Donovan, and I live in Tijuana.
This is my house.
I came to Tijuana because I've been working with artists and writers in Tijuana
for several years in collaborative projects, before I actually moved here.
I came to San Diego to do my masters in visual arts,
and figured that there would be a lot of dialogue between the school and Mexico
just because of how close San Diego and Tijuana were on the map, being from Philly.
I looked very close, and I was astounded that there really wasn't any when I was in school.
We just started making meetings with different collectives and meeting different artists
and trying to find ways that would make sense for us to work with them.
And through that process, you know, I developed a community here,
and when I finally had to leave my wonderful house in San Diego with my great roommate,
it just didn't really make sense to live in San Diego.
My new cats.
My name is Jody Silly, and I live in Tijuana.
This is my house.
Another reason that I moved down here was actually that was the year that George W. Bush got re-elected,
and there was this huge, you know, I'm going to move out of the country.
People are going to move to Canada, people are going to move here and there.
It was one of the people who left and moved down here.
This is the space where the tunnel was.
Of course, it's now cemented up, and we covered it over.
But what we plan to do is to, even though it's a workshop space,
they have some kind of exhibit on this wall giving the history of the tunnel,
and we have the actual ladder that they use to go down into the tunnel,
and it's in our rooftop cafe.
So now the ladder is reaching up to the sky to possibilities as opposed to going down into a tunnel.
My name is Gerda Gauvin, and I live in Tijuana.
This is my house, Mikasa Shukasa, and it's around the corner from the center,
so it's very convenient for us.
And we're in the process of making some repairs to the house.
Really nice.
Yeah.
I met my husband, Louise, at the Chetto Wine Festival,
and I came with some friends from LA, and he knew one of my friends,
and we all ended up staying at the same ranch.
Eventually, he called me.
I don't remember who he was, but anyway, he called me,
and then we went out, and went out a couple of times,
and was having a great time, and invited me to come to Tijuana.
And I said, no, I'm not ever coming to Tijuana.
It's too much going on there.
I photographed myself sitting on each of the burrows in Revolution,
and then I'm redrawing them with myself in the burrow,
and then whatever's in the picture plane of the cart,
but I'm leaving out the cart in the city,
and just extending the theme that's in the cart
out throughout the landscape of the drawing.
My name is Yana Quinnell, and I live in Tijuana.
This is my house.
The first time I came here, the energy was just so amazing.
It reminded me kind of like New York, but shorter,
and the energy is much different than San Diego,
so I was attracted to the city.
What I saved in rent the first couple of months,
I ended up spending on cell phone bills
until I figured out how I could get a cell signal
here without having to pay international rates.
So once I figured that out, everything was cool.
Okay, I'm Jason Fritz, and I live in Tijuana.
So welcome to Melrose Place, Mexico.
This is my home, and this is what 250 US dollars
would get you in Tijuana.
This is the kitchen.
This is the wine cabinet. There's only one great Mexican wine.
Several years ago, I had heard that there was
an amazing art scene happening in Tijuana,
and that there was a lot of things going on,
and I really didn't know much more about it than that,
and I came down here basically trying to find that.
They're surprised. People ask,
why do you live down there?
And I always go straight for the rent,
because that's the easiest answer.
Most people were asked,
it's like you're going where and why you're going to Tijuana.
It's dangerous and so on and so forth.
When I told people in San Diego that I really wanted to move down here,
people thought I was crazy.
San Diego's are really, really, I guess,
almost knee-jerk racist reaction
with about anything having to do with Tijuana.
They would call it a shithole.
That's the common phrase.
Why do you want to live in that shithole?
People are surprised.
They're like, wow, why?
And then I'll tell them and they'll just kind of
bow their heads and they just don't get it.
They don't get what I see here and what I feel.
Usually when I tell people I live in Tijuana,
they get a look of shock on their face
and say immediately, why?
Why do you live in Tijuana?
They ask if I feel safe.
They ask if it's dangerous.
They ask if I'm crazy sometimes.
They, regardless of the person,
usually are completely surprised
that someone like me would live in Tijuana.
What kind of U.S. citizen would live in Tijuana right now?
I imagine the U.S. citizens who live there
are the naturalized U.S. citizens,
like probably Mexicans who have U.S. citizenship.
First of all, maybe like people who like to party.
I don't think Americans from here,
born or raised in the States,
they go live in Tijuana.
Why would you do that?
I don't think any U.S. citizen would want to live there
because it would be the benefit.
My name is Jacob Sapochnik
and I'm a U.S. immigration attorney.
The recent numbers I heard is
it's anywhere from 45 to 50 something thousand
citizens who actually live there.
Americans who want to live there long term,
they would apply for what is called an FM2 visa,
which allows you to kind of, it's like a permanent residency,
allows you to stay there for two or three years.
But I just think that the reason I stopped doing these visas
in the past year or so is because there was no demand, actually.
We have less and less citizens who want to move there.
Things about life in Tijuana that are really,
you know, that really affect my life.
A water main will break at least once or twice a month
and I won't have water for a couple days.
So, showering is an issue.
The house next door to me is abandoned.
It's not abandoned, no one lives there.
And so these really mean street cats
have kind of taken it over and they have a lot of sex.
Loud sex in the middle of the night.
The potholes have destroyed my tires,
which are less than a year old.
And everything smells like carne asada.
Those are the things that affect my life,
not shootouts and not drugs.
I think a lot of people get this horrible image
that Tijuana is this place where you're going to get shot,
you're going to get mugged, your car's going to get stolen,
someone's going to kidnap you.
My family is from Vermont.
Even in Vermont, they get a ton of news about Tijuana.
For some reason, they'll call me and say,
hey, we heard that these kids got shot in Tijuana somewhere.
And that's all they know, that's all they ever see.
No one ever sees the real cultural, real interesting,
real exciting part of Tijuana.
Really, it's people living in a city.
People are fascinating, people create culture,
they create art, they create a vibrant community.
People don't necessarily see that unless they go out there
and find it.
And most people aren't going to go find it
because they're scared of it.
Well, it's obvious that the violence didn't affect my decision
to live here because here I am.
I've lived in Baltimore, I've lived in St. Louis,
both of which have higher murder rates than Tijuana.
So I think that although there is problems in this city,
it's on par with other urban communities in the United States.
Los Angeles and San Diego, I believe, are far more
potentially dangerous places than Tijuana is.
The violence that's happening in terms of the narco-trafficking
is very present, but it's really hard to, like,
in my mind to discern it from violence that you find
in other cities.
You can live here, live here, but if you can't, you can't.
It's not for everybody.
But I would definitely recommend it to anyone
because it is a change.
You know, you do have to adapt and the city changes you.
You know, it's amazing how our countries
are literally shoved up against each other
and the majority of Americans who live along the border
would just rather forget that that even exists.
So I don't know, does that make sense?
My name is Derek Chen and I live in Tijuana.
My name is Michael Corbin and I live in Tijuana.
My name is Jenny Dahlman and I live in Tijuana.
My name is Jody Simi and I live in Tijuana.
My name is Gerda Govey and I live in Tijuana.
My name is Yann C. Brown and I live in Tijuana.
Jason Fritz and I live in Tijuana.
