On Plaza Santa Cecilia in late Could, rainbows reign supreme. Within the shadow of Tijuana’s iconic arch, which marks the northern fringe of downtown and the southern fringe of the red-light district, a technicolored banner broadcasts La Marcha del Orgullo, the Delight March. On the bars that line the plaza, below black lights and at nighttime, males carry out in drag and maintain one another tenderly in slim smoke-filled halls. Behind buckets of Tecate, they sing and sway together with Mexican love ballads from the Eighties. They’ve a straightforward means about them, their shoulders relaxed, their face muscle tissue easy.
Being so near the border, Tijuana is a swirling web site of transience and transformation. The inhabitants is an amalgam; whereas official surveys rely round 1.6 million residents, the numerous binationals who journey backwards and forwards every day spike the quantity nearer to 2 million. Tijuana-based city planner Gibram Sanchez, 29, calls his metropolis a “melting pot” of influences; migrants from Haiti and El Salvador and China have all wound up right here, on the doorstep of the USA, lots of them hoping to finish the final leg of the arduous journey to their American dream. However for a lot of, after all, what lies on the opposite aspect of the border is much from a promised land. Many will die making an attempt to cross, or be separated from family members, or be disillusioned by an absence of alternative. Menace looms over town: of heartbreak, of violence, of petty crime and pickpockets. Woven into homosexual Tijuana, on the razor’s fringe of the red-light district to the north, is a wariness of that menace and others, and an entrenched want to neglect them. Pictures, photographs, photographs!
The scene at Bigou, a brand new LGBT nightclub that caters to a youthful millennial and Gen Z crowd.
Because the rainbowcore would recommend, there are many homosexual bars in Tijuana. However there aren’t any explicitly lesbian bars. Town does, nonetheless, have a wealthy historical past of homosexual male mobilization, chronicled in a 2019 dissertation by social scientist Jesse Anguiano of Western Michigan College. The motion started within the Seventies; Plaza Santa Cecilia, at the moment a vibrant homosexual vacation spot, served as one of many earliest assembly websites for town’s homosexual male liberation teams. Anguiano writes about Tijuana’s first official Delight march in 1995, after a hateful response to an unofficial march over a decade earlier: In 1983, spectators hurled eggs and insults from the sidewalks at a bunch of 30 homosexual males marching for his or her rights.
Laura Gonzalez, who moved to San Diego from Tijuana 5 years in the past, says that these days, this slice of downtown is comparatively progressive in contrast with the remainder of Mexico. However with metro San Diego and its flourishing queer life lower than a half-hour to the north—the Hillcrest neighborhood, which is town’s thriving homosexual district, is residence to 2 lesbian bars—Tijuana can nonetheless really feel prefer it’s lagging behind. She attributes this to the tradition of machismo that persists all through Mexico—orienting public life, together with the queer milieu, towards males. “I really feel just like the tradition there’s possibly, like, 10 years behind what’s occurring right here in San Diego,” she says.
The scene at the moment displays homosexual Tijuana’s male-centric historical past. There are all-male bathhouses and strip golf equipment, some inside a couple of blocks of the plaza. At El Ranchero, miniature cow skulls with lethal-looking horns preserve watch over the bar as shy queens in pink and purple robes lip sync to gradual, syrupy hits from a long time passed by. Upstairs is a stripper pole that I think about will get put to good use on busier nights; tonight, although, a lone pair of younger males pull one another across the ground to sultry bachata rhythms.
An evening of black-lit revelry at one of many many golf equipment alongside downtown Tijuana’s Avenida Revolución.
On the opposite aspect of the plaza, Avenida Revolución, the homosexual artery of downtown, pulses to life with electro beats from the dance flooring of Premier Males’s Membership and Rubiks. Drag performers cosplaying as Amy Winehouse and Mexican pop star Gloria Trevi personal the night time at Coyote Bar, residence of what’s seemingly the world’s finest tequila soda (additional lime and Tajín, please). Latinos Bar throughout the road, in the meantime, can get downright raucous. The group is a mixture of bachelorettes and their “bride tribes,” entire households out for a couple of hours of dancing, and teams of younger folks—queer and never—who come late to retire a night of ingesting elsewhere within the space.
Gonzalez, nonetheless, says that she and her queer feminine buddies didn’t at all times really feel that downtown TJ was for them. Any homosexual bars that they may go to have been centered round cis males. Earlier than she moved to San Diego, that lack of secure areas gave approach to a tradition of DIY nightlife and “lesbian events”—small get-togethers at each other’s homes, adopted by the occasional journey to a bar like Insurgente Faucet Room or Tropics. “All my queer buddies [would] simply hang around like that,” she explains. “It’s safer, it’s cozier and it’s simpler.” Within the years since, she’s observed marginal progress, because the neighborhood embraces new areas which can be “extra pleasant for trans, homosexual, lesbian and queer folks.” Enclave Caracol, a brand new neighborhood heart and café, is one among them. The partitions are wearing punk feminist murals by Colombian avenue artist Erre; within the efficiency and gallery area, the middle usually platforms queer TJ-based artists, lots of them ladies.
Nonetheless, Tijuana’s queer ladies lack an area to name their very own. The one exception is Yadiras, a karaoke dive one block east of Revolución that’s advanced into an unofficial lesbian hangout. On the door, my buddies and I are greeted by 65-year-old Julia, a bartender right here for the previous 28 years. Inside might double as a cool teen’s basement in 1988, with retro geometric carpet and cushioned, velour-lined swivel chairs. On the partitions are posters of pinup-style ladies, plus leftover Mardi Gras decorations and a UFC match taking part in softly from a mounted TV. It’s calm and comfy. Julia brings us our drinks: a Tecate with additional lime for me, a tequila soda and a Dos Equis for my buddies. We clink. There aren’t any strobe lights or drag queen ballgowns. Gonzalez, who visits this bar often with feminine buddies, describes it as “the place you’re feeling secure. The place you possibly can sing your lungs out and nobody cares.”
From Yadiras, we drive 5 minutes to Taco Nazo Río, a beloved chain for quick, low-cost tacos that scorch my esophagus. We cross again over the border at 1 a.m., the rainbow flags and techno beats of the plaza simply 10 minutes and a world away. Avenida Revolución is already far behind us, slicing by means of that metropolis of reinvention, steadily evolving, a small revolution of its personal.
