Top 34 Tijuana Quotes & Sayings

I had no clue of Hollywood until I became a teenager. Then I got a fake ID in Tijuana and discovered Shelly's Manne-Hole, on Cahuenga and Selma, where I saw John Coltrane and his piano player, McCoy Tyner, and Elvin Jones, the drummer - my idol.

It's the most absurd story. I grew up in the dirt streets of Tijuana, dying of all kinds of diseases - tuberculosis, fevers, all that - and it somehow turned into this charmed life. I don't know exactly how.

In Tijuana, because there's such a mix and match of people and regions and we're a newer city and everyone comes from some place else, I think we're just given permission to play with our food.

I really only eat burritos in Tijuana from street corners that come out of coolers from businesses with no name, telephone or website.

I haven't had a drink in thirteen years, but occasionally I'm tempted to have one beer. The problem is that if I have that one beer, I wake up in Tijuana four days later with a tattoo and a sore ass.

We're living in what used to be Mexico, and there's this very fluid border feeling. You go a little bit south of Tijuana, for instance, into Ensenada, and it still seems kind of borderlike. And you go much farther, suddenly the prices are lower, the prostitution is different, the commerce is different, everything feels more "Mexican."

It is not simply that these two cities are perched side by side at the edge of the Pacific; it is that adolescence sits next to middle age, and they don't know how to relate to each other. In a way, these two cities exist in different centuries. San Diego is a post-industrial city talking about settling down, slowing down, building clean industry. Tijuana is a preindustrial city talking about changing, moving forward, growing. Yet they form a single metropolitan area.

I talk about reducing our dependence on foreign oil. If we're buying electricity from a solar-thermal plant in Tijuana, I'm not sure we should say that's evil. If we are buying wind power from Alberta, I don't have a huge objection to that.

Although there was a point with the Tijuana Brass where we were playing for such huge crowds that I kind of lost contact. At one point, the only connection I had with the audience was with people out there lighting cigarettes.

What has happened in the last generation is that Tijuana has become a new Third World capital - much to the chagrin of Mexico City, which is more and more aware of how little it controls Tijuana politically and culturally. In addition to whorehouses and discos, Tijuana now has Korean factories and Japanese industrialists and Central American refugees, and a new Mexican bourgeoisie that takes its lessons from cable television.

We have a great, positive relationship with Mexico. The Tijuana mayor crosses into San Diego, we talk all the time and vice verses. It's about neighbors working together, and that's my very clear message about a bi-national region that works. That's a competitive advantage.

When I was small, my parents came back from Tijuana, and my dad bought me a very small acoustic guitar. I loved it. I started making up my own songs right away.

The pollution that flows from the Tijuana River Valley into the Pacific Ocean threatens San Diego's environment.

If you believe in what you do, you are immortal. The day that you don't believe it, the day you're taking other people's opinion, you better go to Tijuana.

I had no regret to the 'cuchi-cuchi' show. It showed me the way to the bank. It's a gimmick. It's fun. It has nothing to do with sex... it's energy and fun... If it wasn't for 'cuchi-cuchi,' I would be selling tomatoes in Tijuana.

Of course, San Diego chooses not to regard the two cities as one. Talk about alter ego: Tijuana was created by the lust of San Diego. Everything that was illegal in San Diego was permitted in Tijuana. When boxing was illegal in San Diego, there were boxing matches in Tijuana; when gambling was illegal, there was always Tijuana.

My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom thought she was moving into a hacienda, but they lived on a dirt street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English. She didn't know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic.

I called my managers, and they were like, 'What is Tijuana Jackson?'

Tijuana is a baby compared to pre-Hispanic cities like Puebla or Oaxaca, the birthplace of mole.

It fills my heart with pride and joy that international food writers and press have taken an interest in Tijuana.

I'm a purist when it comes to certain foods, and al pastor tacos (known as adobada tacos to us in Tijuana) is one of those foods. I lived off them - literally.

Those of us that were raised in Tijuana have so much access to San Diego. I was crossing the border every day when I was a kid, and that back and forth has a huge influence on the cuisine. So the U.S. is coming down to Tijuana, Tijuana is going to San Diego. There's this great blending, a great exchange.

The average age in the U.S. is now thirty-three, whereas Mexico gets younger and younger, retreats deeper and deeper into adolescence. Mexico is fifteen. Mexico is wearing a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt and wandering around Tijuana looking for a job, for a date, for something to put on her face to take care of the acne.

One summer, when I was on break from architecture school in Tijuana, my aunt gave me a summer job cleaning up and peeling garlic, and I got to see her in her element. She was so passionate and such a good teacher, I decided to quit architecture school and go to culinary school in Los Angeles.

San Diego, in fact, is one of the hardest places to sell Mexican food. You just cross the border into Tijuana and they have better food that's more authentic and for half the price.

I realized that it's all really one, that John Lennon was correct. We utilize the music to bring down the walls of Berlin, to bring up the force of compassion and forgiveness and kindness between Palestines, Hebrews. Bring down the walls here in San Diego, Tijuana, Cuba.

In Tijuana, we have cuisine from every region of Mexico and cooks from all over cooking in all of the restaurants, so there is a huge influence from sources like the Yucatan, Oaxaca and Puebla.

I think I was meant to be a musician who speaks his mind about social justice issues. And I grew up in a lower middle class family, but a family that had enough money to buy a $50 guitar and a $50 amplifier, and had a basement to rehearse in. What I think the global human cost of this horrific poverty is how many Mozarts or curers of cancer are slaving away in the Maquiladoras along the Tijuana border, or in the Indonesian sweat shops? There are billions of people who will never become the people they could be, or the people they were meant to be, due to crushing poverty.

When I was a little boy in Tijuana, it was wonderland. We left when I was probably four - I was dying of tuberculosis.

Dancing in Tijuana when I was 13 — that was my 'summer camp.' How else do you think I could keep up with Fred Astaire when I was 19?

Growing up, I didn't realize how unique it was to live on the border of the United States and Mexico. It wasn't until I started doing interviews with the press that I actually began to appreciate just how cool it was that I would cross the international border every single day from Tijuana into San Diego to go to school.

When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy.

I've crossed the Mexican border and gone to Tijuana a few times over the years, but I've never felt comfortable there.

I decided that there is really some sort of entity that I call Imperial, and I decided to extend it all the way along the California-Mexico border and into Tijuana and then to the Pacific because it all has a similar feeling.