I don’t know if this happens to you, but for a little while now, I’ve had this feeling that everything is spilling over and has become excessive here in Baja California. It is as if 2022 had multiplied the human race in Tijuana, Rosarito, and Ensenada. As if one day a million people had suddenly appeared in this land. What used to take minutes, now takes more than an hour. Wherever you go there is a crowd. Any random weekend, you take the Scenic Road and at the Playas toll booth you find a kilometer-long line, sometimes in both directions. You can come back through the International Avenue and, at any time, there is constant flow that never stops. You take the Vía Rápida Poniente (West Expressway) and you find yourself in a slow way where you are now part of a race between snails and turtles. Going from Playas to La Mesa now takes an hour. Let’s not even bring up Vía Rápida Oriente (East Expressway): this has been completely overridden by the kilometers-long line to the Ready Lane international border crossing, which often reaches all the way behind 20 de Noviembre. The Via Rápida Oriente is completely useless, you can’t even rely on it in your own city. If you get to Tecate through the paid highway, it will take you more than an hour to cross the Industrial Boulevard. It takes you the same time to get to the toll booth in Mexicali to the one in Playas de Tijuana. For all of this to end up with me running the risk of going through Boulevard 2000 when night falls, it means this is serious.

But I am not only talking about traffic. Any day you go to Costco, the lines to pay go through the entire warehouse all the way to the frozen vegetable room. It takes you 20 minutes to fill up your cart and more than an hour and a half to pay. You go to Otaku festival at Museo del Trompo or CECUT and you will see rivers of people. Finding parking is more than a quest, if everything goes well, you might get a spot in the third floor of Plaza Río. Not to mention the line that it takes you to pay for a ticket and the time it takes you to get out of the parking lot. The calafias (small buses) and route taxis are always crammed. You go to eat to Caesar’s any random afternoon and the waiting time is more than a hour long. The Wine Route at El Valle is a hive and it is impossible to go to a restaurant without reservation. At Ensenada hotels like Coral and Marina, occupancy is filled up from today to September. At Dandy del Sur, there is no crack in the bar and at Hussongs you will drink away on foot, with only barely space to raise your glass of beer. You walk through Tijuana and wherever you look at you will see construction: foundations, scaffoldings, gray skeletons of colossal buildings. Offices, condos, thousands and thousands of construction workers. Yesterday at OXXO, I waited in line for over 20 minutes. Beer and ice were completely gone. Mobs of gringos and Mexican Americans rocking their Tecate sixpacks as if they were babies. At the neighborhood’s grill, a crowd waits impatiently for their kilos of meat. A complete troop of the National Guard grills their meat and eats tacos in the parking lot without every letting go of their R-15s while gringos all ready to party due to the Fourth of July toast to being alive and I read the autobiography of Johnny Ramone, waiting my turn to have my ribs grilled. Real estate companies build houses and people buy them, the housing costs rise to the heavens, and more and more Americans decide to live on this side of the border (our community has been bilingual for a while now). The economy seems to be boiling, people open their wallets and spend, the money flows, but at the same time, streets and median strips are bursting with deported immigrants, homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks, Central Americans waiting for the miracle of a humanitarian visa, fleeing Ukrainians looking for a home. In any parking lot, people directing your car (viene-viene), people helping you carry your things, or people doing anything to get a tip of cinco pesos. At any hillside or empty land, first there’s a clothesline, then a house made out of tires and cardboard, and a month later, it is already a small settlement (consider the El Soler ramp or the border of Los Laureles). At the edge of the highway, you see a bunch of people walking adrift in the middle of the night, drug addicts and schizophrenics in furious dialogue with their internal demons. The sun sharpens its fangs, the summer announces itself rough, and everything in the environment seems to go crazy. The World is on Fire. An omen bothers my light sleep: something is going to happen, something is going to explode.

The first thing to say is that, even with all of its pronounced chaos, Baja California is, from my point of view, the best place to live in Mexico. At least, I wouldn’t change it for any other state.

I have traveled all over Mexico and in 22 different countries, I have lived in other cities and I can claim objectively and fully aware, that I choose Baja California above any other place in Mexico.

Everything has spilled over and has become excessive in Baja California and that is true. It creates downsides and inconvenience, yes, but think that if there is a kilometer-long line from the Capufe toll booth to Playas de Tijuana, it is because we are being visited by dozens of thousands of tourists. If you see hundreds of constructions all over the city and a bunch of expensive restaurants about to burst, it is because the economy, despite everything, flows and money is moving. If mobs of people from the south keep coming here, it is because, regardless of what they say, one lives here much better than in central or southern Mexico. Though more bad than good, we are the heart of the biggest binational macroeconomic corridor of America.

Of course, there are many risks, since the region is spilling over and it can collapse. An organized plan must be promoted medium and long-term. One must stop taking aspirins and temporary remedies and join efforts in order to help the cities that we will leave for our grandchildren in 2050. The program Respira, that the current state administration is promoting, awakens my hope.

Baja California is unsafe and, unfortunately, it will continue to be, because due to our geographic condition we are condemned to be the gem of the crown of almost any illegal business, but, though statistics are worrying, especially when it comes to homicides, I think that as a citizen I think you are much more unsafe and fearful in states such as Guerrero, Tamaulipas, Michoacan, Morelos, and the State of Mexico.

Baja California is diversity.
Baja California is innovation.
Baja California is magic.
Baja California is inspiration.
Of course, we are all a damn chaos, but this is my favorite chaos.

AUTHOR: Daniel Salinas Basave