[Arrancones Callejeros]

Under yellow-orange streetlights, in the shadows of maquiladoras, commercial centers, residential neighborhoods and the U.S./Mexico border, comes the roar of engines and cheers of the crowd. Underground racing clubs, independent drivers and fans gather nearly every weekend, late at night, in various locations throughout the city. It is an expression of freedom and control. The car is an extension of the human body. For some it signifies maleness, machismo. For others it is the sensual, feminine form. And for still others it is a sacrament, to be respected and honored. The race is the expression of these values, lasting only a few moments, and the streets of Tijuana become the battlefield, brothel, or church.

Frontier Life explores the world of underground street racing clubs -- Club Kallejeros and Club Euroworks -- as they customize, alter and race their cars, negotiate the course and avoid the police.

Car worship originated on the U.S. side of the line, but has since developed its own language in Tijuana, much like the colloquialism arrancones, which itself signifies this cultural language, with elements of street, ignite, start, drag, race -- but no single English word that captures its meaning.

Back in 1969, Tom Daniel designed the model car kit "Tijuana Taxi" for U.S. toy company, Monogram-Mattel. The original "Hot Hauler From South of the Border" with its ornate Spanish frame and "Big Poncho" engine, provided one of the first windows into this culture of car worship and velocity. But to get a better sense of what's happening here, one must look around the city: Garage doors are used as building materials for homes. Tires prevent banks of earth from slipping, keeping the hillside houses stable. Immense speed bumps attempt to keep a slower pace in neighborhood streets. Taxi drivers custom paint their taxis, and adorn the outside with the name and image of their girlfriend. This is the vocabulary. This is the language. With easy access to cars and parts from the U.S., and a fast evolving dynamic in this Baja border city, the scene is an interesting intermixture of sophisticated Mexican aesthetics, norteño kitsch, and frontier spirit -- an expression of style and speed all its own.

[No Beba]

The movement and flow of the city is what keeps its collective head above water. Water (treated and untreated), its essentiality and constant motion, collectivity, connectivity -- an apt analog to the city itself.

A rusty fence, built with military landing mats, runs between San Diego County and Tijuana, extending into the Pacific surf as a line of high steel bars. The border fence begins and ends in the ocean, whose waters pay no attention to it whatsoever. Waves roll in and break indiscriminately on both sides, signifying all the ironies and contradictions of United States border relations with Mexico.

One of the most critical and longstanding international issues facing the border lands is the discharge of municipal sewage and industrial wastes into the rivers flowing from Mexico to the United States. The "company line" North of the border asserts that all the communities on the Mexican side lack adequate municipal wastewater collection and treatment systems. Industrial effluents also contribute to surface water pollution. Many Mexican industries, as well as Maquiladoras owned by U.S. companies have no on-site treatment facilities, and industrial wastes including toxic substances are dumped into river systems. Further, Tijuana's rapid growth rate has made it difficult for the city to construct and maintain an adequate sewerage system to control these flows.

But Frontier Life breaks past the propaganda and simply presents the viewer with strange and beautiful images of water at every stage in its circulation in and out of the city, as the director of Tijuana's wastewater plants explains the process and the unique challenges involved.

[The Sound Proposal]

Other regions of Mexico have their own musics: Mariachi in Jalisco, Danson in Vera Cruz, Norteño in Monterrey, Tambora in Sinaloa. Tijuana folk music is a fusion of these musics that originate from the corrido. Many years ago, during the revolution, corridos were sung from town to town, spreading news and stories of the battles. After the wars ended, the corridos were adopted by the drug dealers whose adventures became the songs that spread throughout the region. These songs developed into norteño, the Mexican "country music."

In 1999, Tijuana-based musician Pepe Mogt, started playing around with raw recordings of Sinaloan banda groups (usually characterized by tubas, trumpets, cymbals, and more-tropical percussion). He joked about infusing Mexican hillbilly sounds into his electronica to pick up some local fans. When he took the recordings to his friends, they gorged themselves on the clankety beats and belching horns. The Nortec (norteño + techno) sound emerged and seven electronic music projects formed the Nortec Collective.

Fussible, Bostich, Panóptica, Clorofila, Hiperboreal, Terrestre, Plankton Man.

These bicultural Mexican binationals devoured influences from both sides of the line, and appropriated the sounds and images from their environment -- la migra, prostitutes, the assembly-line tech industry, narco chic -- as raw materials to construct their transgressive music and art. Nortec has become what might be the first postmodern way of life with a south-of-the-border center, and as Baja California artists from various disciplines identify with the Nortec aesthetic, there is a new proposal on the table, a new look and a new soundtrack for a city that has discovered something uniquely its own.