Tijuana Quotes

When I was a little boy in Tijuana, it was wonderland. We left when I was probably four - I was dying of tuberculosis.

Tijuana is a baby compared to pre-Hispanic cities like Puebla or Oaxaca, the birthplace of mole.

When I was small, my parents came back from Tijuana, and my dad bought me a very small acoustic guitar. I loved it. I started making up my own songs right away.

Growing up, I didn't realize how unique it was to live on the border of the United States and Mexico. It wasn't until I started doing interviews with the press that I actually began to appreciate just how cool it was that I would cross the international border every single day from Tijuana into San Diego to go to school.

It fills my heart with pride and joy that international food writers and press have taken an interest in Tijuana.

What has happened in the last generation is that Tijuana has become a new Third World capital - much to the chagrin of Mexico City, which is more and more aware of how little it controls Tijuana politically and culturally. In addition to whorehouses and discos, Tijuana now has Korean factories and Japanese industrialists and Central American refugees, and a new Mexican bourgeoisie that takes its lessons from cable television.

I decided that there is really some sort of entity that I call Imperial, and I decided to extend it all the way along the California-Mexico border and into Tijuana and then to the Pacific because it all has a similar feeling.

I had no regret to the 'cuchi-cuchi' show. It showed me the way to the bank. It's a gimmick. It's fun. It has nothing to do with sex... it's energy and fun... If it wasn't for 'cuchi-cuchi,' I would be selling tomatoes in Tijuana.

San Diego, in fact, is one of the hardest places to sell Mexican food. You just cross the border into Tijuana and they have better food that's more authentic and for half the price.

When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy.

It's the most absurd story. I grew up in the dirt streets of Tijuana, dying of all kinds of diseases - tuberculosis, fevers, all that - and it somehow turned into this charmed life. I don't know exactly how.