Well, I am back in the U.S.A., just barely. The border is really quite weird, in many ways. It is indeed a mixture, a culture of its own.
Yesterday I took the bus from Chihuahua City 5 hours north to Juarez. It was, in a way, the worst touchdown in a new place that I've had for my whole trip, probably, I realized, because I let my guard down. I thought to myself, subconcioiusly at least, 'oh, hey, i'm almost back to the States, it'll be easy.' So I didn't plan my arrival that well. I knew I wanted to stay on the U.S. side, because I had read hotels and food in El Paso are a better value than the ones in Juarez, but I wanted to be close to the border crossings, so i could go back and forth easily.
(I'm reminded of a story Subcommandante Marcos told, of talking to a migrant from Guatemala headed through Chiapas on his way to Gringolandia. Marcos asked, why don't you just stay here in Mexico, why go to the U.S.? The Guatemalteco said are you kidding? Mexico is the worst of both worlds: pay as bad as in Guatemala, but prices as high as in the U.S. For the North of Mexico, especially the border region, this is pretty true, I think. )
Anyway, so I didn't think too much, plus my guidebook has no map of Juarez, just a rough description of how to get into el centro from the bus terminal. So I got on the first city bus I saw headed for el centro, but where it dropped me off was not that close to the border, and i had no idea where to go exactly. I asked around, bought a map, and eventually slogged my way to the bridge - keep in mind, with my 70 pounds or so of stuff (I started with about 50 but with souvenirs and stuff my cargo has grown) on my back. I wish I had a photo of what I looked like when I finally found my way to a hotel in El Paso - dripping with sweat and disheveled as hell with my giant backpack and other bags. But before getting there I had to walk to the bridge, over the bridge (I didnt have quite enough pesos to get a taxi and I knew there was a branch of my bank in downtown El Paso. Why not just walk? hah.), several block from the bridge into downtown proper, find the bank, get some dollars, then find a hotel. There's lots of sort of rundown sad looking hotels down here, but i found one that's not too bad called Gateway Hotel. insanely expensive by the standards of what I've been paying (anywhere from 2 to 11 times more expensive) in Mexico and Guatemala, but I get a lot more. Water from the tap that I can drink! Hot showers! All day long! Toilet that can flush down toilet paper! Air conditioning!
AC? you bourgeois pig, you're thinking about me. Wait, listen - it was in the high 90s here when I walked across the border yesterday, and today, and for the next week, its supposed to hit about 104 F. That's hot. You pretty much have to have AC, or you die, here. And many do. Meanwhile I saw on TV this morning that the Pacific Northwest is in the middle of a cold wave with lots of rain and even snow in some parts. Wow. I'm sorry, my Portland friends, but that is good news for me. It makes me happy to be sweating my ass off in the nice hot dry Frontera....
So here I am, and its weird, hard to tell when to speak which language, sometimes. And this morning a funny a pleasing thing happened. I was eating a cheap breakfast in the hotel's cafe and I bought a copy of one of the Juarez newspapers, El Diario, which they sell in El Paso - in fact they have a Juarez version and an El Paso one, both in Spanish. Anyway, regular non-intellectual newspapers I can read pretty well now in Spanish. I still take forever to get through an article in La Jornada, cuz its more highbrow. But anyway I was reading El Diario and eating breakfast and the waitress said in spanish that they dont get many gringos reading the Juarez paper here, where are you from, Spain? And I said no, the U.S. and she was really surprised and said usually gringos read the El Paso Times, wow, you know spanish, and I said, well, I'm still learning.
It kind of surprises me that more gringos in a border town like this don't know more spanish. Actually, I bought that paper because I wanted to see if there was any recent news of any murdered women in Juarez. Nope, not today. There were lots of men killed in various parts of town, though, including the owner of a big bar called El Mango. Some guys just drove up and blasted him and then zoomed off, bullets ricocheting through the window toward the neighboring children's nursery.
Anyway. Today I have errands. Go back across border, call some potential interviewees. Go to a bank to pay my Mexican border exit fee (i think it's 13 bucks). Wander around, think about where to shoot more footage. Try to find a high building to shoot a panorama of the city from. But basically I'm not in a rush. Yestereday I realized I have a day longer than I thought. For the last week I was thinking, for some reason, that my flight out of El Paso was Sunday, but its monday. So I have 3 full days here. Hopefully that will be enough time to get all the footage I need. I think it will be.