Gonzalez, however, says that she and her queer female friends didn’t always feel that downtown TJ was for them. The crowd is a mix of bachelorettes and their “bride tribes,” whole families out for a few hours of dancing, and groups of young people-queer and not-who come late to retire an evening of drinking elsewhere in the area. Latinos Bar across the street, meanwhile, can get downright raucous. Drag performers cosplaying as Amy Winehouse and Mexican pop star Gloria Trevi own the night at Coyote Bar, home of what is likely the world’s best tequila soda (extra lime and Tajín, please). On the other side of the plaza, Avenida Revolución, the gay artery of downtown, pulses to life with electro beats from the dance floors of Premier Men’s Club and Rubiks. Upstairs is a stripper pole that I imagine gets put to good use on busier nights tonight, though, a lone pair of young men pull each other around the floor to sultry bachata rhythms.Ī night of black-lit revelry at one of the many clubs along downtown Tijuana's Avenida Revolución. At El Ranchero, miniature cow skulls with lethal-looking horns keep watch over the bar as shy queens in pink and purple gowns lip sync to slow, syrupy hits from decades gone by. There are all-male bathhouses and strip clubs, some within a few blocks of the plaza. The scene today reflects gay Tijuana’s male-centric history. “I feel like the culture there is maybe, like, 10 years behind what’s going on here in San Diego,” she says. She attributes this to the culture of machismo that persists throughout Mexico-orienting public life, including the queer milieu, toward men. But with metro San Diego and its flourishing queer life less than a half-hour to the north-the Hillcrest neighborhood, which is the city's thriving gay district, is home to two lesbian bars-Tijuana can still feel like it’s lagging behind. Laura Gonzalez, who moved to San Diego from Tijuana five years ago, says that nowadays, this slice of downtown is relatively progressive compared with the rest of Mexico. Woven into gay Tijuana, on the razor’s edge of the red-light district to the north, is a wariness of that threat and others, and an entrenched desire to forget them. Threat looms over the city: of heartbreak, of violence, of petty crime and pickpockets. Many will die trying to cross, or be separated from loved ones, or be disillusioned by a lack of opportunity. But for many, of course, what lies on the other side of the border is far from a promised land. Tijuana-based urban planner Gibram Sanchez, 29, calls his city a “melting pot” of influences migrants from Haiti and El Salvador and China have all wound up here, at the doorstep of the United States, many of them hoping to complete the very last leg of the arduous journey to their American dream. The population is an amalgam while official surveys count around 1.6 million residents, the many binationals who travel back and forth daily spike the number closer to 2 million. They have an easy way about them, their shoulders relaxed, their face muscles smooth.īeing so close to the border, Tijuana is a swirling site of transience and transformation. Behind buckets of Tecate, they sing and sway along with Mexican love ballads from the 1980s.
At the bars that line the plaza, under black lights and in the dark, men perform in drag and hold each other tenderly in narrow smoke-filled halls. In the shadow of Tijuana’s iconic arch, which marks the northern edge of downtown and the southern edge of the red-light district, a technicolored banner announces La Marcha del Orgullo, the Pride March. On Plaza Santa Cecilia in late May, rainbows reign supreme.