La Migra
To first see the U.S.-Tijuana border is somewhat akin to stepping into the pages of Dante’s Inferno. It is a hellscape, a sort of desolate and eerie substratum between the third-world purgatory below and the city of angels above. Silver-tipped cholla cacti loom everywhere, ready to insert their fanged tubercles into any flesh that brushes past. Barrel cacti also lurk underfoot, and their steel ribs and fierce spines will slice right through a combat boot to skewer a whole foot. The night air is ripe and wretched; Mexican tire fires and wild anise ferment in the damp briny ocean air. The landing strip that separates the countries stands ready to snag a ringed finger and strip it to the bone, or take fingers off hands entirely. By day, it’s an open-air tacos-and-tennies for sale fiesta; by night, it’s an Olympic sprint, from the fence to the pavement, where shadowy groups that can number over 100, drop as silently as goats into the canyons beyond the highway, out of the reach of the border patrol, into waiting taxies, bound for Los Angeles, Denver, New York, and back again to la patria.
