Brightly colored piñatas, poorly molded figurines of various types of animals, mountains of heavy blankets balanced on tan shoulders, miniature Mexican flags, portable racks of candy, and boxes of puzzles displaying rainbow colored pieces all made for a continuous stream of distractions that would keep my young, thirsty eyes temporarily quenched as I waited to cross the border back into San Diego. Depending on the day of the week or time of day, crossing the Mexican - American border via a car could take anywhere from thirty minutes to three hours. No matter how long it took, I always found that I was provided with plenty of time to inadvertently become a keen observer of the people and objects that weaved in and out of the endless current of vehicles all trying to cross back into the United States. As the years passed, I found my observations of the Tijuana border shifting in ways that were slightly disturbing to my impressionable teenage self. The amusement I had once felt as a young girl when peering over the sea of multi – colored objects and boisterous vendors was irreversibly replaced with a sense of trepidation and sadness, as though, in that stretch of road leading up to the borderline, I was forcibly being confronted with the massive weight of all the world’s tragedies. The vibrant colors surrounding me ceased to be tantalizing and instead seemed somber and misplaced in gray, polluted Tijuana. The children who tapped on car windows and held their battered boxes of packaged gum up to your line of sight tugged at my heartstrings with such ferocity that there were times when I couldn’t help but resent their presence. With nothing but a sliver of window separating us I would firmly shake my head and watch as the practiced smile plastered on their face receded back to a frown. Their smiles would only return upon the arrival of another potential costumer who triumphantly would roll down their window and hold out a hand full of coins, probably allowing them to feel like Jesus Christ himself. As I observed these fleeting interactions, I couldn’t help but come to the dismal conclusion that there would never be enough saviors in this world to buy all the packages of gum needed to support these children and their impoverished families. I can’t say how long my mind lingered on this realization, but I can, without a trace of humility, express that I was secretly finding peace in the fact that I was born into a certain lifestyle that did not ever demand I wander the streets of a third world country in search of what my life was lacking. Unlike so many, when my family and I reached the checkpoint and the border patrol officer asked his question, we would respond with the phrase “US Citizens” so that with a show of identification and a wave of a hand we would be ushered back into the misleading, though comforting, idea that we were living out the American dream.

I can’t recall exactly when it all began. There were whispers of it, but the rumors weren’t enough to validate the voices in my parent’s minds that cruelly warned of more difficult times to come. My father, born and raised in the south, accepted my mother’s Hispanic origins but was not as fond as she was of seeing his two daughters spend school breaks in Mexico. Still, I especially, more so than my younger sister, loved spending weeks in Tijuana with my grandmother and a plethora of cousins, aunts, and uncles.  My Spanish was at its best then and I thrived on the attention and adoration constantly paid to me while there. Unfortunately, the drug wars among the various cartels in Tijuana had erupted and the care - free days spent running down the dusty streets of my grandmother’s neighborhood were about to be nothing more than distant memories. My father, with stern conviction, informed my mother that the three of us were no longer to travel across the border. With a heavy heart, my mother spent many nights on the phone with various family members explaining that it was simply too dangerous and we would have to regrettably miss yet another birthday party, wedding, or holiday celebration. I began high school shortly after and much of the joy I had experienced during my time in Tijuana slowly lost its color until I no longer was able to remember the name of the street my grandmother lived on. 

During this time, we’d awake in the mornings and turn on our TVs only to be overwhelmed with the seemingly never-ending reports of murders committed by the drug cartels and then proceed to fall asleep to interviews with so – called experts who claimed to know how the Mexican government could regain a sense of control. I grew weary with the knowledge that there was an international border fifteen minutes from my house and on the opposite side innocent people, young and old, were being killed on a daily basis. I worried about the family members who lived there, despite their adamant protests that things were simply not as bad in Tijuana as our American media was making it out to be. I also felt uneasy, reflecting on the vast amount of friends I had who, without much thought, bought and consumed various drugs. Where exactly were those small packages coming from? I thought it safe to assume that when they took a hit they weren’t wondering if the drugs they were doing had been the catalyst for a string of crimes and even murder in a country so close to us. 

 It was hard to know who or what to believe. Despite that, the violence became strikingly real to me on a clear fall afternoon when my mother walked through our front door looking pale and distraught. My mother, a kindergarten teacher, went to work that day only to hear that her co – worker’s two teenage children had, like so many of my friends, went down to Tijuana for a night of clubbing. They never made it back across the border. For reasons we would probably never know they were found stripped of all possessions and dead in a van in the middle of nowhere. Acts of violence such as these reinforced my parent’s belief that we could no longer cross the border, therefore solidifying the physical and emotional separation we were soon to experience with my Mexican side of the family across the border.

Things only worsened when, right before I graduated high school, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. When your mother is facing aggressive, unforgiving cancer that is, with every month, spreading through her body at a more rapid pace you start to lose the ability to entertain the notion of a happy ending. Before you are aware it is happening, your mind begins to envision and predict a future you want no part of. Suddenly, it is not so much what you currently have, but what may soon be absent from your existence that matters. In the bitterness of these dark moments, too personal to possibly describe in words, you experience what could only be concluded to be the deep, unflinching ache of living. When faced with such upsetting circumstances, I found myself wondering if there was anything more sweet and more bitter than the knowledge that I was alive.  Such thoughts and contemplations weighed heavily on my mind, as did the knowledge that with my mother sick and bedridden, I was now the connection to our family across the border. My younger sister, always so selfish and insecure, had lost interest and chosen to study French in high school, eventually losing her grasp of the Spanish my mother had so proudly instilled in her. Whenever I was home from college my timid grandmother clung to me like a leech. She crossed the border frequently, angered at my father’s reluctance to allow my mother to be taken across the borderline into Mexico so that everyone could spend time with her. Her brown eyes would fill with tears,  and she would ask me the same question she always did before I dropped her off to cross that dangerous border yet again. In rapid Spanish she would give me the same list of instructions as to how to take care of my mother then proceed to ask if I thought my mother was going to be alright and beat this cancer. For quite a long time, I told her confidently that she would be fine. As the months passed and the chemo, radiation, and numerous surgeries took such an obvious toll on my mother’s small frame, I found it more and more difficult to tell my grandmother that everything would be alright. With a heaviness I could never fully translate into written language, I began responding with an “I don’t know”.

Watching someone so close to me become confronted with her own mortality drained me and led me on a sort of quest to understand her life more so than I ever had before. No matter how much I tried to learn, it was clear that the key to understanding the first two decades of my mother’s life was the city she had grown up in – Tijuana. No longer able to cross the border, my only option was to delve into the memories of Tijuana from my own childhood that I had thrust into the back of my mind so many years ago. Reliving these weeks in my mind made me feel significantly closer to her during a time in which she was almost unrecognizable as a result of the so – called “treatments”.

Looking back, I imagined myself to be my mother reincarnated. I had walked down the same street she did to the same store on the same corner to run the same errands my grandmother, her mother, had asked of us. The Mexican drug cartel wars had robbed us both of an intricate place in our upbringing. Our childhoods had both been spent in those dirty streets, and now that the murders were hourly and the corruption was at an unbearable high level, neither mother nor daughter dared to cross that international border dividing San Diego, America’s finest city, and Tijuana, the new capital of drugs and violence in this decaying world. We both slept somewhat better, grasping the idea that we were on the safer side of the border. At what cost, though? I wondered how my mother, with her body consumed with cancer, could feel any more slighted. She was being robbed of not only a future, but also a past and the realization of that caused a pain in my chest that was a significant step above any teenage heartbreak or disappointment I had experienced so far in my few years on this earth.

So many years ago, I had felt resentful when I looked into the eyes of those dark – skinned children who had so politely tapped on my car window, hoping I would buy some gum off them before I crossed the border. They had made me feel hopeless. In fact, they had made the entire world feel hopeless. I recall silently thanking whatever higher power had allowed me to be born into a seemingly “superior” position in the world. Now, though, I wonder how different I am from those children of poverty. Are we not both struggling to find a place in an unforgiving world? I imagine, unfortunately, that many of those children will grow to be cold and bitter at the cards that they have been dealt in this life. I, too, am bitter. I had never expected to lose an older sister to cancer. I had never expected that five years after that traumatic loss I would once again be facing the possibility of losing someone in my immediate family to the same goddamned disease. On top of it all, the drug cartels were changing the structure of our lives. They were making it impossible for my mother to return to the place she had grown up in. Besides dealing with poverty, these children had to be constantly looking over their shoulder praying they could elude any violence. I am forced to conclude that when I looked into the eyes of those begging children, the resentment I experienced had not been a result of the fact that they made me feel the weight of the world’s problems. No, if I am choosing to be honest, I am forced to understand that I was upset by their presence simply because peering into their faces was like looking into a mirror.