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

This is part of a series that celebrates border towns: the world's most vibrant cultural crossroads—and its most contested frontiers. I’ve watched a seagull illegally cross the international border five times now. First, he flew onto the American side. Then, oblivious to the armed Border Patrol vehicle just a few feet away, he waddled back into Mexico through the narrow spaces between 15-foot pillars that make up the border wall. The barrier doesn’t stop when it hits the Pacific, but continues into it, waves crashing indiscriminately on both sides. Along the US-Mexico border, the man-made fence continues into the Pacific Ocean. Nature does not adhere to the border in Tijuana, a man-made divide that is simultaneously heartbreaking, world-dividing, inconvenient, and a fact of daily life. On the Mexican side, people live right up to the fence: I watch a jogger, headphones in, run along the shore, touching the pole before turning around to continue; families sit in beach chairs less than 50 feet away, ordering Micheladas and grilled seafood under flapping umbrellas. But there are also names painted along the steel poles, of US army veterans who were deported to a Mexico they didn