The social elite of Tijuana -- its surgeons, lawyers, maquiladora managers, marquee chefs -- have over the past few years built a colony of wealthy refugees just across the border in San Diego. With those mysterious kidnapping gangs getting more brazen and more deadly, Richard Marosi reports at the L.A. Times that tijuanenses with means are settling in Eastlake, Chula Vista.
This migratory phenomenon has been practiced long before the upper classes felt threatened enough to catch on, though, but for different reasons. On my dad's side, he and my uncles left Tijuana as soon as they were of age. On my mom's side, most of my cousins and relatives lived in Tijuana when I was little, while we were the rare ones who lived in San Diego. Now most of us live in San Diego. The ones who've stayed are the rare ones.
It's standard social climbing for some members of the low to middle classes of TJ. And it's about living a perpetual state of gray. San Ysidro may be U.S. territory, but for many of us natives to this slice of the border, it is merely a neighborhood in Tijuana that happens to be on the north side of "the line."
* Photo above, an Andrade family piñata-bashing in San Ysidro, Calif.
