LA in the 80s: From Hollywood to Baja and back
A quick car trip into Mexico meant an immediate dip in the look and feel of civilization -- and lots of clues for why immigrants enter America illegally.
By Bill Steigerwald
A weekend drive into the Baja does a lot to explain why so many Mexicans risk so much to sneak into America to work for peanuts in car washes and fruit orchards.
We entered Mexico at Mexicali, waved across the invisible border as part of the heavy Friday afternoon traffic flowing out of Calexico, Calif., a town so wind-blown that its palm trees are permanently bent and turned inside out.
We strained our eyes for a Route 5 sign and the way to San Felipe, a fishing village-embryonic resort 125 miles south on the Baja's east coast, where we hoped to find a motel room.
Our gear included cutoffs, 48 hours worth of car insurance and a plastic bottle of Sparklett’s water we bought in Hollywood that noon.
Although Calexico and Mexicali are mirror images of each other at the border, on the Mexicali side there began an immediate dip in the look and feel of civilization. (The same kind of change is noticeable when you go by train from Switzerland to Italy, or from France to Spain.)
The standard of living declined almost block by block. The chaos content of life--not necessarily a bad thing--increased.
The traffic was nervous, the streets crowded and busy and a little crazy. Mexicali's curbs were an endless bus stop of people waiting for some unseen mass transit. Stores and shops and factories were jumbled in a disorder that would make a zoning commissioner weep.
We soon left behind the pedestrians, however, and the few plants with their rude industrial smells, and Mexicali gradually thinned out to an occasional adobe house or sheet-metal shack squatting in the dust along Route 5.
We cruised at 65 mph.
The last Pemex gas station disappeared in the rearview mirror. The bermless, two-lane highway—much smoother than expected--and a random roadside trash site were the only hints of civilization. There were no rest stops, no billboards; Lady Bird Johnson would have been pleased.
Salt flats, mud flats or sandy desert stretched east to the horizon and west to the Sierra de San Pedro Martir, serrated cinders that ran south with us toward the Gulf of California’s warm, broad empty beaches and the cheap seafood of San Felipe.
A tall moving van tilted its way north, tacking into the relentless crosswind that frequently shot low streams of sand over the road or bounced tumbleweeds across our path.
We overtook a few cars and trucks. We sped past carcasses of 1960s-vintage gas-guzzlers littering the desert floor. Rustless, frame-naked hulks, they were picked clean of every usable fender and tire and piece of upholstery.
A blue car was parked up ahead.
As we approached at a mile-a-minute, listening to European jazzmen on the tape deck of our 4,000-mile-old Japanese subcompact, a short, solid Mexican man waved a hubcap at us. We stopped and backed up to a 1966 four-door Chevrolet and a man, a woman and three children.
"Vaque Yaque jacking” or something like that, the father said, making motions with his strong, dirty hands. He had more Indian blood than Spanish and he pointed at a threadbare, lopsided hunk of smooth rubber hardly suited for a backyard swing. It was flat, alright.
We got out my shiny new jack, the screw-up, expanding kind designed for cute gas-sipping imports. The man quickly slid under his crippled wreck, set the jack in place, and, with a screwdriver, began twisting the car upward in minute jerks.
He twisted and grunted while his six-year-old son competently spun the nuts from the wheel with a tire iron. Suddenly, the jack slipped.
The Chevvy's front end fell sickeningly, stopping an inch or two from the man's brown face. He seemed undisturbed and repositioned the fragile jack in the tar and stones and began again.
While we worried about him being crushed to death, his wife lugged small boulders up from the sandy desert. The kids jammed them under the rising car and took curious peeks at their dad by sticking their little shoulders inside the wheel-well.
Finally, the father crawled out and lifted the spare tire—a sad, bad rubber joke already worn flat in places--onto the wheel. But it didn't fit. The holes and bolts wouldn't line up.
Without any agonizing, he scrambled under his car, let my jack down and handed it back to me with a simple "Gracias."
We offered to ride them somewhere, but he shook his head and spoke in Spanish while jerking his thumb in the universal hitchhiking sign.
We again repeated the offer, but he smiled and jerked his thumb toward San Felipe.
We shook hands, waved goodbye and left the Mexican family stranded in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Mexicali and San Felipe.
We hit San Felipe at sunset. It was jumping with campers from Arizona and $15,000 imports from California. Its new motels already were stuffed with tourists and Yankee dollars flowed freely in the neon-flashing carryouts and restaurants.
We rejected the only unreserved motel room we could find and slept, rather uncomfortably, on a lonely, moonlit beach in the car.
The next afternoon we crossed the Baja on Route 3 to Ensenada, finding gorgeous high and low deserts, lush green mountains, cowboys, dirt-bikers, rich range land, hawks and even an eagle where we had imagined only desolation and lousy roads.
About 36 hours and 700 miles after we left downtown Hollywood we were back home.
My future wife and I were taken by surprise by the Baja's rich storehouse of natural beauty, but we were much more startled to find such a low standard of living and abject poverty existing so close to our superabundance.
After seeing how tough life is in parts of the Baja, the reason for our immigration "problem" becomes pretty obvious.
But poverty, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The Mexican with the flat tire was relatively well off. At least he had a car and a job.
Millions of his countrymen struggle hard each day just to stay alive. For them, Thomas Hobbes' 350-year-old description of life as "nasty, brutish and short" still applies.
To those souls we passed along Route 5 living in houses made of old signs and crates, an overcrowded apartment in Los Angeles might be an improvement. A job washing dishes, whether as an illegal or legal alien, might not be exploitation. It might be their first chance for a better life.