It may not be "really Mexico", but it sure isn't the USA.

kw: travel notes, Mexico, impressions

I've lived in Southern California three times, including my birth in Pasadena. Here I am pushing sixty, living on the East Coast, and in all that time, I've never crossed the border to visit Mexico.

A visit to see my Brother in a little town south of San Diego afforded the opportunity, so we took along our passports and spent half a day in Tijuana. The first thing my brother warned me was that there is no tort law in Mexico. Half an hour later, in "the Cecut", a museum operated by Centro Cultural, he showed me an example, a concrete ramp that swept to the next floor, with nothing preventing me from a skull-cracking if I wasn't looking after turning from an exhibit nearby.

The museum is great, and all the taxi drivers at the border know how to get you there. The fee was US$5 (55 pesos, or MX$55, if you bothered to change currency). After a couple of hours there, we got lunch--a great lunch--and walked a mile back to the border.

I'd been told to expect a lot of beggars, and to have a pocket full of dimes. I did so. I gave most of them to children. At first, I thought the kids were four or five, until I caught sight of their mothers hovering nearby. Most of these women were scarcely five feet tall, and these kids were about ten. Anybody twelve and older has a job.

The kids don't really beg. They have some little thing to sell, chiclets, cheap necklaces, little cloth hankies. The kids come up to you with a handful or little box full of such items. Few are actually sold; most gringos give them a dime and a smile and pass on. The mother, nearby, has their supplies when they do sell a few. There were a few wheelchair-bound amputees. When I ran out of dimes, I gave one of them a quarter, and my last quarter to a nurse just at the border crossing, who was holding a can I didn't bother to read.

A very strange mall sits just inside San Ysidro, CA, a quarter mile or less from the border. It is a lot like an outlet mall near Lancaster, PA or Buellton, CA; but it is for Mexicans who want American goods. Are you bilingual? Easy to get a job there. As we were leaving, we found ourselves at the end of a very long line (we were on foot; we left the car in San Ysidro, in a $5 lot). It took 90 minutes to get to the border, have our passports blinked at by an INS clerk, and return to the US. The wait would have been much longer, in both directions, had we driven.

It was my first visit to a third world country, though I got scarcely a mile beyond the border. A friend later said I hadn't really been to Mexico. Well, it sure wasn't California!

I have had great sympathy for the Mexican people, and now I have more. They number 110 million, somewhat less than Japan, about one-third of the US total. Yet their economy is less than $200 billion, while ours is close to $100 trillion; 400-500 times as large.

The trickle of cash earned by "illegal immigrants" is as much as a quarter of the entire Mexican economy. Perhaps we ought to just annex the place and be done with it!