Street Life

It is stark. The active street life of Tijuana exists in profound contrast to the emptiness of its immediate northern neighbor San Ysidro and by extension, San Diego. Home life spills out, extending the domestic into the public sphere. And these New Year fireworks don't explode in a grand display singularly located but rather engulf you with proximate sounds and sulphur...and the occasional bullet. Those Tijuana hills. The roads which traverse them, the houses perched on them. They have a vibrant coherence. Theirs is an architecture integrated with the logic of geography and use. Then how to read the neighboring lots left half-empty by abandoned structures or jammed full with objects held tight by slats of wood? When to understand small as quaint and when to ascribe it to poverty? Perhaps housing here is used, rather than displayed like in the U.S. The reality built by real estate in the U.S. trades on the logic of a clean surface; like preferring poison over pathogens in our water. The superficial attains value. To what else do the sterile homes of American suburbia attest? They appear un-lived in. Abandoned, emptied. At least the Tijuana lot has a trace of lived reality. On the other side of town, developers continue to build a condo complex just moments away from the San Ysidro crossing for Americans. Will it fail like the resort, built by an ugly American, in 2006? (December 31, 2017)