The Coyote's Bicycle (19 page)

Indio had indicated this path to the clients, and he'd begun to describe the benefits of the route, when they noticed a white Ford pickup approaching from the city center on the International Road. A man drove, but the passenger-side window framed the face of a woman—the slender aspect of whom immediately drew the eye. Both the driver and the woman appeared to contemplate the smugglers' small group. But the truck continued on. Indio resumed his instruction. Moments later, however, the truck passed by in the opposite direction. A concrete meridian separated them from the traffic. Later, the Ford again dipped into the saddle of the canyon road. This time, it came to a stop in the turnout. A man in a light-colored Stetson stepped out and approached Indio's group.

12

At the foot of Avenida Revolución is a five-way intersection, the odd-numbered tail of which is a broad footpath that leads through to downtown Tijuana. Anchored at two of the intersection's opposing corners, a monumental silvery crescent—something like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri—loops into the sky overhead. Steel suspension cables rise from the corners to meet the curvature at intervals, giving anyone appraising the monument from the highlands an impression of a spoked aluminum wheel. At ground level, the arch is surprisingly easy to miss. Its action is too lofty. It is said to be the gateway to Latin America, but a pedestrian could slip underneath without noticing any distinct change; Latin America really begins hundreds of miles north in Los Angeles—the arch is just a formality.

At the southeast corner of the same intersection stands another set of arches made of aged brick and tile, a flourish reminiscent of an early California mission. About fifteen feet tall, these arches don't appear to have a function either—their patina leading one to suspect that they were purchased from some decaying hacienda and stationed here to support a foundation myth for Tijuana. Both monuments—one to an idealized Mexican future and one to the country's past—stand at the intersection of Avenida Revolución and Benito Juárez.

And yet, this is one of my favorite places in the city because of the noisy third element: all of the troubadours, mariachis, and whole bands for hire that blow their horns in and around the ruined arches. They play into the traffic and into the noise, their suits bristling with ruffles, epaulets, and medallions, their arms cradling the shapely wood bodies of guitars, fiddles, and string basses. Horn players carry their glinting brass low, like sidearms ever ready to be raised and blasted into the street. I admired the whole idea of artists pacing, preening, and charming clients. But passing the intersection at Avenida Revolución again, and laying eyes on the city's congregation of professional mariachis, what I liked most was the idea, despite the violence and loss of the region's tourist economy, that all over the hills and valleys of Tijuana, fiestas and weddings and
quinceañeras
needed real mariachis, and there they were, leaning against the arches, just waiting.

I met Dan Watman at the big yellow
farmacia
where tourists used to buy their Viagra and recreational pain pills. We walked through the colorful, empty commercial maze that funnels visitors to the footbridge over the concrete Tijuana River and toward Avenida Revolución. We passed the arches while a mariachi group choked in ruffles played “Por Ti”—“For You”—and we kept on walking through to downtown.

At a street corner that reminded me of 1970s suburbia—the mom-and-pop stores with their faded corrugated paneling and bright but brittle plastic lettering—a honey vendor sold gooey chunks of honeycomb from a blue plastic bin. The man fought off bees still at work while, with the flourish of a magician, he stuffed the golden combs into black plastic bags. Two pesos each. There were stands selling leather belts and wallets stamped with the names of Mexican states and emblems that glorified professional truck drivers. Taco-cart workers assembled a great variety of dishes for people
who stood around as if at a wine tasting, plates elevated, looks of inward discerning on their faces. Intersections held crosswalks in the form of Xs painted right through the center. And on a red light, they brimmed with pedestrians. The city appeared to be bursting at the seams with kids, teenagers, guys and girls in their early twenties—on buses, in school uniforms, hanging out the doors of minivan taxis.

In the quick-hit coverage of Tijuana's troubles, this emerging population bubble was rarely reported on. The
Los Angeles Times
did publish one story about a massacre in a private home, after which the first people on the scene were school kids let out of class down the street. In navy uniforms and knee-high socks, they tiptoed through the battered house full of gory crime-scene curiosities and the recently deceased. Yet it was never outright acknowledged that many firsthand witnesses of the war for America's drug corridors were children. They'd known no other city, no other reality. That an entire population was coming of age during a conflict with no real fronts, no political identity, ever-shifting alliances, and no end date was a hard reality to wrap the mind around. But their youth could also help explain the resilience. New art, music, ideas, and businesses sprouted in Tijuana during every period of relative peace. The young people's desire to push their city forward even took them into the streets. On one occasion, a group threw a birthday party for a giant pothole. They brought cake and a piñata. “Tijuana: where our potholes age in years,” they sang. Within an hour, a city truck arrived to fill the cavity. If the violence was to have any lasting opposition, the kids were it.

Watman and I found a diner whose walls were painted the same light green color as the
chilaquiles
it served. Otherwise, it looked like any similar place in small-town California—deep booths, cash register up front, big street window. I'd contacted Watman for the same reason I'd tracked down ecologist Greg Abbott, farmer Jesse Gomez,
and reporter Janine Zúñiga: I was looking for witnesses. Without any idea of where the bicycles had originated, or who had arranged their crossing, I sought individuals who, I hoped, might each produce some new piece of the story—maybe without even considering its significance.

Like photographer Maria Teresa Fernandez, Watman was a creature of the marginal space along the fence line. As a young man he'd become enthralled with foreign languages, especially Spanish, which lured him from California's Central Valley south to a university in San Diego. Afterward, he taught Spanish at community colleges and made frequent trips to the closest place he could engage in his passion, which eventually pulled him across the line to live.

Around that time Watman began to take his Spanish students to Friendship Park—a binational space surrounding the 1851 border monument, and a stone's throw from where the security fence meets the Pacific Ocean. The paperwork he'd need to fill out to actually take his students into Tijuana was daunting; some colleges even prohibited students from traveling there. So these meetings at the fence seemed the best go-around. He invited people he knew from the other side as well—a group of volunteer lifeguards who worked the stretch of beach at Las Playas were the first. The idea was simply to have his students communicate with someone
en el otro lado
. For the students, however, the sensation of meeting another's eyes through the pylons was more than a novelty. The fence offered both the security of dark sunglasses and the intimacy of face-to-face conversation. There was butchered Spanish and battered English, and a lot of hand gestures.

The encounters were meant to be a school exercise, but Watman saw something else during the encounters that compelled him: people from different worlds, who likely would never have passed a sentence between them, making each other's acquaintance across the divide. Whatever it was that charmed him, Watman soon
dropped the college students entirely. He wanted anybody and everybody, as dissimilar as possible, to come to the fence and stumble through a conversation. He came up with ideas to lure disparate parties. There were bilingual salsa dance lessons attended by people on either side. There were concerts, yoga classes, poetry readings, and sign-language meet-ups. The event that drew my attention was a binational trash pickup. Watman arranged for a kite maker to teach attendees how to make kites from their trash. The images of a blue sky filled with the bright metallic colors of junk food bags and candy wrappers was transformative. I didn't know what it was blotting out the iron border fence with all of that color, but I liked it.

“There was a place that was designated for cross-border communication [Friendship Park], so I honestly didn't think it was a big deal,” Watman said. Still, he did believe his work to be activist in nature. And he called these meet-ups “actions.”

The events that hardened Watman's resolve began in 2006, when the Department of Homeland Security began building the “triple fence.” The initial development occurred in violation of the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act, among others, as the contractors began grading the mesa east of Smuggler's Gulch. Because the construction would eventually wall off Friendship Park with an eighteen-foot-tall fence, from perches in the county and state parks, Watman began to film work he thought to be unlawful. This sparked one in a series of incidents in which Border Patrol agents detained him.

Watman was most famously detained in 2009, when he aided fellow activist Reverend John Fanestil in giving Sunday Communion to Mexicans through the fence. The passing of wafers that signified Christ's flesh through the pylons was considered a customs violation. Though warned, Fanestil continued to give Communion at the fence. One Saturday, 120 worshipers, students, and human rights activists gathered on the American side. On the Tijuana side were churchgoers and Opera de Tijuana members, who planned to sing
through the service. Sheriff's deputies and an anti-immigration group called the Minutemen arrived; the latter engaged the group with emotional protests of their own. The Border Patrol literally drew a line in the sand before the wall. There was pushing and shoving. Agents readied tear gas and guns loaded with rubber bullets. Fanestil and Watman linked arms with forty others and marched toward the fence. The Opera de Tijuana members began a requiem mass. The Minutemen blasted counterprotests through bullhorns. The marchers advanced on the line in the sand. Fanestil was ordered to drop the Communion items, wafers and all, and place his hands behind his back. Authorities seized the reverend. Watman and the others marched on—until a sheriff's deputy grabbed Watman and dragged him off.

During this period of heightened tensions, as Watman regularly hiked the fence line along the canyons and out to the beach and Friendship Park, he began to notice the abandoned bicycles alongside trails. Like Maria Teresa Fernandez, he could only note their number and consistency. Other than the bicycles' presence and their tracks, nothing was left behind that might explain the situation.

My interest in Watman had to do with the fact that he was on the ground. Maybe he'd seen something he didn't know was important. He was also a cyclist, didn't own a car, and rode his beater everywhere he went. Maybe he pedaled alongside migrants on these roads. Importantly, Watman lived in Tijuana. He knew its bike culture. So when he agreed to meet and visit some bike shops in the city, I thought I saw a crack in the wall.

The first shop happened to be in the Zona Norte, a short walk from downtown. The late San Diego novelist Oakley Hall described Tijuana as being “suffused with a feverish neon glow.” These few blocks along Coahuila are the source of all that light—bars, brothels, hostess clubs, and hotels that rent by the hour. Billboards announce just about anything you'd desire: better teeth, a straighter
nose, companionship, legal counsel—as Edward Abbey once wrote of another desert town, these blocks are “a throbbing dynamo of commerce and pleasure.” An evening around Christmas is a particularly rich time for a visit. The streets and medians are decorated like the Rose Parade while prostitutes smile and wave from the sidewalks. People in cars travel through, but here, the city is the pageant.

During the day, and up close, the reason for the Zona's fish tank atmosphere of neon and darkness becomes clear. Crumbling curbs, cracked pavements, municipal projects halted midway through. Opportunists loiter. The homeless slump against walls. The Zona is corralled by both the international border and the river, and the people who haunt both margins linger among the populace.

We turned onto a sunny street that hosted a permanent rummage sale, crossed a wide, empty intersection, and stopped at a concrete-and-cinder-block cubby. There was no door. Inside was a pile of greasy bike parts. On the sidewalk, a guy with a hip haircut and ear piercings leaned back in a chair. An old man wrenched on a ten-speed a few feet away. This was the bike shop.

Watman happened to need a part for his mountain bike—the nut to a headset—and his query offered a mild opening to our investigation into illegal migration.

“No,” said the clerk, “I don't think we have that part. We only have what you see here.” He nodded at the pile inside the doorway. The structure was about six feet square. There was nothing on the block walls. The parts pile looked like an art installation. A cyclist rolled up and the old man hopped to greet him. The young clerk just leaned. There seemed to be nowhere to start but the beginning.

“My friend here is looking into the people who cross the border by bicycle,” Watman said. “Do you know anything about it?”

“Oh, at
la línea
?” the clerk said. “I don't think they do that anymore.”

He was talking about a short period of time when entrepreneurs had manipulated a loophole in Customs and Border Protection rules by renting kids' bikes to those who waited to enter the United States on foot. That line can take two to three hours, or more. But by parting with five bucks, pedestrians could saddle a bike, split the lanes into vehicle traffic, and coast right up to the customs booths meant for cars and motorcycles. After presenting their documents to the agent and passing through, the riders delivered the kids' bikes to couriers on the US side, who wheeled them back into Mexico. Per mile traveled, this might have been one of the most lucrative rental agreements going. The business boomed. It even generated a feature in San Diego's weekly—this is how annoying the inexplicable lines were. Eventually, however,
CBP
officials were able to close the loophole. But the far-traveled fun and fame of this bike rental business really muddied the waters for me. When I asked about crossing the border via bike, the most likely answer was, “Ah, yes, five dollars. Ha, ha, ha.” Everyone enjoyed getting away with something.