Border Beast

The Tijuana Zebra is an excessively bizarre creature, born not of the imagination of any Heavenly Creator, but a human invention sprung up from the strangeness of borderlands, a humble donkey adorned with pigment and costume. Legend has it that they first gained their stripes in the middle of the twentieth century; clever Tijuana entrepreneurs painted up the animals to prevent them from looking like ghostly apparitions in tourist photos. Every Alta Californian that I know has a snapshot or two featuring these absurd burros; my own had been stuck in comfortable permanence on our refrigerator for years, at least until I made the last-minute decision to bring it with me to Mexico. Since then, it’s remained tucked into a now-filled travel journal, infused with a myriad of stories and memories.  

I brought it as a sentimental memento, a reminder of home, and also a reminder of what Mexico has meant, to me and to my fellow countrymen. That summer, I had enrolled in a Border Studies seminar at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Tijuana, Mexico. It was supposed to be a bi-national program and, well, I suppose it was, but only because of my participation. Upon arrival, I discovered that I was the only American student who had signed up, that everyone else in the course was a native Tijuanese, and that I was not going to be living in a dormitory, but instead with a professor and her husband. Even though I could see the San Diego city lights from my bedroom window, I had never felt so far from home.

But, having no escape plan, I settled in and spent the next five weeks exploring the city, going to class, and attempting to understand the complexities of border life – the collision of cultures, the vitality, the abuse. I also began to learn what it means to be a Californian, an American, a human, and to realize what complicity, what responsibility goes along with those roles.  

During one of our last class meetings, our professor asked us to write about an image that represented the U.S.-Mexico border and, with some hesitation, I pulled out my worn photograph and wrote, then in clumsy Spanish and now in a more familiar language. I have since lost that particular piece of prose, but I still hold the conversation it elicited in my memory and of course, the photograph which it described in my tattered leather journal.  

The picture is almost as old as I am and so the girl in the photo is barely a child, not much more than an infant. I am dressed in white, smiling and squinting into the sun, my hand resting on the ridiculous sombrero atop that Tijuana Zebra’s head. The Zebra – or, if we’re being honest, the Donkey – stares blandly at the camera, seemingly unaware of the silliness of his situation – the black painted stripes, the colorful saddle blanket, the sign reading “Tijuana” above his head, the little gringita sitting behind him. That is his life, and he is complacent. Now, thinking of this picture, I feel bad for him, and maybe for his owner, too.  

Part of the significance of this image lies exactly in this complacence, in this ridiculousness. There is nothing real about the Tijuana Zebra, and everyone knows that, but the act continues. This is what Tijuana, what Baja California, what Mexico can often be for Americans. It is a playground, an imaginary place, where tourists go to relax and feel foreign and laugh at the colors and noises or, worse, where they go to do the things they wouldn’t dare do at home. It is a farce that creates destruction on both sides of the border.  

But some of this photo’s importance, the more intimate meaning, has little to do with the donkey or the white girl and more with the third figure, unnoticed and unmentioned until recently. In the background, partly hidden by the absurd props associated with this little play, stands Eva Moreno, a woman who cared for me lovingly for the first years of my childhood. She is happy because I am happy, and she smiles warmly despite the awkwardness of her position – in the back, posing as a tourist in her home country, treated as part of our family but inherently separate from it. I wonder what she was thinking as the flash went off. 

 She played an incredibly important role in my personal formation but this photo communicates none of that. She is a Mexican woman, I am a white child, and that is a donkey, pretending to be something else. Together, we are a family portrait, a sketch of that bizarre place called California, Alta and Baja.  

Drawing a line across a stretch of land, cutting into its flesh with a fence, does strange things to a region and its people. It creates arbitrary divisions – between here and there, between foods and musics and arts, between individuals. It disrupts the balance and casts people into inflexible roles. It creates fantastic new animals – a Zebra, a first-world oppressor, an impoverished neighbor - ones that live on in a certain little piece of glossy paper and all along that absurd frontier – the border beasts.