Script
Dear Diary: Bristol to Tijuana
By Liz Crow
June 1996
FX: BORDER TRAFFIC, CHINOOK HELICOPTERS, MUSIC
Summer 1996. The border of Mexico and California
Every day it’s the same: on the US side there are patrols, helicopters and search lights, white jeeps parked on the bluff, their occupants surveying Mexico, and the sweat and grime of a border crossing. A tall corrugated iron fence marks the divide – stretching right out into the ocean.
On the Mexican side, the fence is covered with graffiti and slogans: El Mundo Dividido and Welcome to the New Berlin Wall.
Our bus passes through the checkpoint and drives on past hawkers selling papier-mache.
The highway crosses a ravine spilling shanty dwellings, and skirts past an incongruous green mansion with icing pink and white domes.
We enter the border town of Tijuana, known widely as a funnel for a continent’s drug traffic, for its cheap and freely available sex, and, in more recent years, as a kind of international alternative health mecca for those with too much money or too much desperation…
