Atwater-based furniture and accessory designer Tanya Aguiñiga, the cover feature in LA CityBeat's design issue last week, is a product of a binational upbringing. She was born in San Diego and raised in Tijuana, going back and forth every day for school, like so many students and workers still do today (including many of my friends and relatives):
"I have a really weird duality in me, because I lived in two countries on the same day, every day, for 18 years," she says.
The experience also made her acutely sensitive to the visual world. "I got used to how clean San Diego was and how everything is just perfectly paved. In Tijuana, it's all cobblestones, and I'd be, like, 'I can’t roller-skate in my street!' I became a really, really visual person because I was getting so much stimulus from both sides."
Aguiñiga worked with the noted Border Art Workshop and makes what looks like a really cool "Forest Roll," pictured above, bottom left. Here's the CityBeat link.
Reminds me: Check out this 'A Considerable Town' piece by Jim Ruland from a couple LA Weeklys ago. Ruland describes the bizarre commute of a binational worker during the period when Mexico decided to keep the traditional switch-date for Daylight Savings Time, meaning that for a few weeks Mexican time was an hour off from U.S. time. Wacky.
* Previously, "The border back-and-forth."