Eating My Way Through Tijuana, Where Food Tells the Story of the Border

As we bite into shatteringly crisp egg rolls and pass a Mun Shou plate topped with chop suey (a dish Zepeda says her own grandmother used to make every Sunday in Tijuana), Chan, the restaurant’s owner, points to a mural on one red wall of the restaurant that traces her family history, charting three generations of Chinese restaurateurs in Tijuana. “My grandfather was born in Canton in 1910, and he came on a boat not knowing which port he would arrive in,” she says, sliding a plate of puffy bao buns to me. “He created the first Chinese restaurant in Tijuana and ran it for 55 years.” Her dad decided to follow in his father’s footsteps, and started his own restaurant that lasted for 28 years. Just 15 years ago, she began Chan’s Bistro, she says. “When I see that [mural],” Chan says wistfully, “I remember where I come from.” The flavors of soy sauce and sesame, so perfectly balanced with hints of acid and chile, could be simplified as Chinese-Mexican fusion, but I know better than that after all the eating we’ve done. This unique union of cultures and flavors didn’t just collide in the kitchen one day—these dishes required long, arduous, life-changing journeys in order to land before me.

“When you’re from Tijuana, you’re a kid of the world,” Zepeda adds, her chopsticks finally coming to rest on the plate.

That evening, I roll my suitcase down Avenida Republica toward the border, which I will once again cross on foot to return to Southern California.

As I walk down the main drag, passing shops selling Mexican leather satchels, knockoff soccer jerseys, and piñatas, ready to be scooped up and taken back to San Diego, I can’t help but think of what a privilege it is to be able to walk myself home, to be able to move between worlds so freely.

Soon, in just the space of a mile, I will no longer have access to such a plethora of seafood tostadas and oozing birria tacos. If there is a cantina in San Diego that serves Tecates on a 24/7 schedule like Tropic’s Bar in Tijuana does, I don’t know it. Then, the wheels of my suitcase harmonizing with my footsteps, I hear a song replaying in my head that I listened to on the drive down: “La Línea”, by Mexican singer Julieta Venegas (a fellow border kid, born in San Diego and raised in Tijuana, as Zepeda noted earlier), featuring Yahritza Y Su Esencia. It’s from her new album, Norteña, and through piano keys and yearning accordion notes, tells the story of two people separated by the very line I’m about to walk across.

To coexist with this border, either as a passing traveler or a resident of either side, is to live with this duality. La línea can be a mere inconvenience, or a life-altering divide. It might depend on who you are, or it might depend on the day. But there’s a reason so much art, literature, food, and music is inspired by the feeling of being caught between two worlds.

“It’s very different when you have the possibility of crossing the border versus when you don’t,” Venegas herself will tell me over the phone a few weeks later. “If you have that possibility, there are things you choose to take from both sides.”

The beauty of Tijuana is using this to its benefit. “All border towns have their own special thing, but what I love about Tijuana is this exchange,” she continues, savoring the richness of this fact with pride. “There is so much exchange.”

The US-Mexico border as seen from the San Diego side.

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