Morning comes. I park my car on Santa Fe and walk down El Paso. I make a note to myself that next time I will buy Mexican car insurance and take my own car across the border. Better yet, I think to myself, I’ll rent a hot rod and go looking for adventures and romance. I’m sure my car will be searched on the way back into the USA, sniffed by dogs, etc. but that is a sad fact of life in a world of billions.

Not everybody plays by the Man’s rules so he checks and interrogates us.

 

Crossing into Juarez is awesome. It is cheap. It is easy. You walk over a big bridge, shoulder to shoulder with Brown people, and get to see Che colorfully painted on the concrete bank of the Rio Grande.

 

 

                                                                                                                                        Bardel

 

Feeling alive as you bound past the checkpoint, the Mexican police barely look at you skipping onto the main calle.

 

I’m a gringo. I don’t know shit. I’m thrilled with the faint sense of danger implanted into my mind by the American media.

Where are the cannibals chopping off heads?

Where are the wild gun fights in the streets?

 

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

 

Desperadoes hang out underneath the bridge. Some are fat. Some are muscular and trim. They’re all plying the passersby on the bridge for coins. They dance. They burp. They beat their chests. They slap their gross bellies. They paint their faces colors. They’ll do anything for a coin. Then when one comes falling from the sky, the gleam of it shining in the hot El Paso sun, they run after it, scramble in the light brown dust. They wrestle for the little round piece of metal. This happens over and over. It is sad, hilarious.

 

I think of joining this theater of the oppressed and becoming a desperado myself, but I got to keep it moving.

 

I have a whole city to see.

 

            Old Cathouse District                                                                                                                          Bardel

 

Nowadays the old cat house district, just down the road from the bridge, is being torn down. Luckily I witnessed it in its decadent glory seven years ago but today it is a series of empty, dusty lots. The anachronistic old cars have vanished too and the streets have become grittier, desolate.

 

For a good time it is necessary to go deeper into the once thriving city.

 

Today it is Benito Juarez day, 2009.

 

On Avenue Juarez I meet Jorge the taxi driver; he is standing in front of a notorious Mexican pharmacy where you can get any kind of drug without much of a prescription, kind of like the way it is with pot up in LA.

 

“Do you speak English?”

 

“So far so good,” he says.

 

Smelling like talc, he looks like Cesar Romero. His tour fee is low - $27.50. We jump in his green taxi and we put around the city. I ride shotgun.

 

I trust him right away. I could've gotten a better rate but I like to keep service people happy.

He's a spry old goose, a gentleman in the old sense of the word, not only kind but suave. He sports cowboy boots, sunglasses. He's tall. He claims he’s the oldest driver in the city, been doing it since the fifties. He says he’s seen the city change a lot. Back in the day movie stars would cross the border as easily as taking a Sunday drive up the California coast.

 

The border wasn’t the ominous thing it is now.

 

I want to see Mexican graffiti. Plus, the different barrios, especially the ones so downtrodden as to awake me from my middle class American stupor. I want to see the bullring. The marketplace. The Brown people’s way of life. To taste the food, to sample the night, to smell the air and shake some hands. Kiss some people on their lips. Look people eye to eye. Perhaps get in to a fight.

 

Aye carumba!

 

 

I have no interest in the famous Mexican whores, who Jorge claims have the hottest, tightest vaginas in the world. But a couple of cute ones walking down the sidewalk catch my eye. (I can still see them today, looking at me, the gringo. Even as I  pass them by in the car, they look at me, with evil, mischievous stares. I imagine under their panties and garter belts are many wild tales of gringo nights and stories of cholos in the desert deep.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

Scenes from Juarez: graffiti, a quiet street, and a statue of Tin Tan, an originator of the Pachuco style

 

 

I’m a virgin to the world. I’m a gringo. I know it, at least. My imagination takes me to so many far away and wicked places, better to dream of the whores or read Kerouac’s On the Road for a good description of a Mexican brothel.

 

The green trucks loaded with soldiers ride the city. They call them federales. Mostly Indio kids; they pack heavy duty firearms. They stare at you hard. I guess they mean business. I wasn’t trying to find out.

 

Machine guns, brother! That is what I’m talking about. A week earlier, Jorge informs me, they shot down a few armed gangsters in the street.

 

Is this a harbinger of things to come in LA?

 

As we penetrate deep into the city, I stick my head out the window with my finger on the cam and snap away.

 

   

 Scenes from the bullring                                                                                                         Bardel

 

Jorge is good. He knows shortcuts and drives down a few alleys to avoid traffic.

 

Driving through the street market I spy, among other foreign delicacies, a chicharrones stand, tacos de buche and burritos, jalapenos (14 pesos per kilo), tomatoes, and onions sold on the street corners.

 

 

Mixed in among the veggies there are people selling stuffed animals and other bullshit. Anything for money.

   

El Mercado de Juarez                                                                                                                                            Bardel

 

We head to a fine restaurant; I dine on tacos, cheese and Tamarindo. Jorge eats a dish of sausage and fine Mexican cheese. The lemonade I order is fresh squeezed. The restaurant Jorge and I eat at is family run. The cheese tastes phenomenal.

 

Delish.

 

The empty streets haunt our conversation. Why the hollow, empty sound on some avenues where you can hear the echo of your footsteps so loudly? The gringos, ahem, the Americans have stopped coming in 2009. For a city based on tourism, a lack of gringos necessarily means death. A drug war doesn’t help.

 

We travel down old roads, quaint alleys, through sections of town I would've never seen on foot. The trucks full of young federales are everywhere. I think of Iraq.

 

 

"The American press makes Juarez sound really bad," I tell Jorge.

"The press," he says, "we call them the, how you say, satanic...uh...satan..."

"The devil," I say and finish the sentence.

"Yeah, yeah, that's right. They're trying to keep the people over there in El Paso and not spend money in Juarez."

I contemplate the alleged conspiracy.

The one and only warning Jorge gives me is not to take pics of the federales.

"If you do you put us both at risk," he says.

 

We stop at Juarez park, a public square where people are lazing away the day. These parks are common to see in Mexico. In the center of the park stands a fifty foot monument and at the top is a statue of the republic’s first president, Benito Juarez. Across the street stands a wall covered in murals, one of which looks like an Indian version of Barrack Obama in a suit and tie.

 

 

 

Jorge drives by opulent houses that have seen better days. He talks about Juarez’s golden era in the fifties.

 

The destruction of old Juarez continues across the city, demolition by neglect or otherwise.

 

 

 

Back at the border: I haven't gotten one nasty comment yet. I haven't felt in danger once. The worst part is waiting on line to get past customs and the dumb ass, suspicious agents who have become a motif as I travel the regions of the world. (Next time I go on a day that isn’t a federal holiday.)

 

Question: Is it the same dumbass working the customs counter as the one I saw in Tangier, and New York, and Barcelona?

 

But check it: BIG BAD JUAREZ is not so bad at all.