Like your road widened, Mister? In the pre-dawn gloaming, the roadbuilding machines are just black shapes lined up beside the southbound lanes of Interstate 15. From the overpass at Miramar Way, only the light from …
July 31, 2023
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Stories by Luis Urrea
They make I-15 wider at Miramar Way
Dirty words don't translate all that well from English to Spanish
Do you make these embarrassing mistakes when you cuss in Mexican? The exact same rhythm of “shave-and-a-haircut” translates in Spanish as chinga tu madre (“fuck your mother”). If we add the pleasant “two-bits,” it’s an …
December 5, 2022
Doubleday follows Luis Urrea to Tijuana, priggish Richard Henry Dana visits the presidio
A Living Cloud The next morning, I am greeted by my media escort, Penny. This is a fascinating new feature of my life — escorts. They pick you up, drive you around, provide snacks, meals, …
January 10, 2022
Luis Urrea daydreams of San Diego, Oklahoma girl spends summers on Bonair Street
Homeboy on the RangeAfter school, 1965: Spring. Wearing my idiotic St. Jude’s Academy uniform. My bright red sweater calling vatos and homeboys from miles around to come kick my ass. I had a crew cut …
December 4, 2021
Stuck on Russian ship in Ensenada, in Baja for the eclipse
Ship of Fools “She poured wine for all of us. I picked up a glass and raised it in a toast and said, ‘Nostrovia ... Gorbachev... Nostro-via.’ The place erupted. The damn first engineer comes …
November 28, 2021
Truth about TJ taxis, cut-throat upholstery competition
I am my own queen "Once, a guy, a drunk guy took my taxi from downtown. He wanted to go to this particular colonia, this neighborhood. It was raining, I remember. When I got there, …
October 4, 2021
Tijuana through white eyes: the bus from Mexico City, where margaritas came from, the La Mesa prison
Destination Tijuana “Don’t let them tell me the bus is new. Of course, we always get there on time; it’s just on the way there are, well, complications. It’s in the nature of the route. …
August 15, 2021
Fires in Alpine, San Felipe Valley, Julian
Rustic Firetraps Imagine a wildfire driven by winds gusting at 80 miles per hour is racing toward your house east of Alpine. In the predawn darkness, you can see the red-orange glow of the inferno …
February 7, 2021
Angel dust on its way to San Diego, meth heads talk, Tijuana glue sniffers
Embalmed Angel Teer says that he started smoking sherm when he was 16. "I used it a lot. I used a lot of drugs, but the older you get, the less fun it gets. Smoking …
February 1, 2021
Best Reader stories from 1991
Satan chasers San Diego has many experts in the field of Satanism who say the county is a hotbed of Satanic activity. The hidden canyons of the back country, Ramona, Santee, Escondido, even Oceanside, are …
December 28, 2019
Luis Urrea and the Reader
Born in Tijuana, Urrea wrote feature stores for the Reader from 1990 through 1994. Urrea's collection of short stories, The Water Museum, was a finalist for the 2016 PEN-Faulkner Award and was named a best …
May 4, 2019
Dalton's Luck: A San Diego Mystery
The assassins spotted Dalton Lee in the Miami airport. Later after it was all over, he'd remember that moment when they locked eyes and he smiled like he smiled at everyone. Often he would doubt …
September 8, 1994
Luis Urrea takes book tour media to Tijuana dump.
Visiting the Tijuana dump is no different from visiting a friend at work. It is, after all, a factory. And the trash-pickers are busy — too busy to worry about lazy gringos wandering about.
July 22, 1993
Underprivileged Tijuanan brothers learn about grief the hard way
Nobody knew what happened to the boys’ parents. Not even the boys — Chacho, Elijio, Carlos, and Jorge — could explain what had happened to them. As is so often the case in Tijuana, one …
November 25, 1992
My grandfather hoped to establish a commune in Tijuana
They’d give tortillas to us plain — good enough! Or they’d roll a few drops of lemon juice in one, or a pinch of salt, or both. I ate a couple of these mini-tacos while I waited.
October 8, 1992
Logan Heights comes to me in Colorado and Wyoming
Mexicans out here lie low. I know a Chicana poet who teaches at the University of Colorado, and every semester or so, some genius in a truck calls her a “greaser” or an “Injun.”
September 24, 1992
Tijuana cops don't get no respect
He flicked on the siren. It whooped satisfactorily, sounding like a television show. "Muevete, pendelo" muttered to the cars that blocked his way as he maneuvered the Rio de Tijuana thoroughfare. I glanced at the …
November 21, 1991
Glue-sniffing urchins in old Tijuana
His name is Andres. He awakens with the sun. He lies in bed as long as he feels like it, picking the crust of glue off his upper lip. It’s white and vague as milk …
October 3, 1991
Reader writers write about first day of school
Mr. Van Winkle asked the Student Council Reps, to indicate to the classes that if they can convince him through sound logical arguments that they should ride skateboards to school that he will reconsider his position.
September 12, 1991
Do you make these embarrassing mistakes when you cuss in Mexican?
Like Australians calling each other bastard, Mexican men tend to refer to each other as cabron all the time. Listen to them at the bars in TJ: it’s cabron this and cabron that.
August 22, 1991
Luis Urrea tells of his father and Tijuana
January 10. My father, in a red American Motors 440, drives north through the Sonora desert, ticking off towns as the sun rises to his right. Santa Ana, Caborca, Tajito. He is on his way …
July 3, 1991
Mexicans are often criticized for being cruel. It’s true.
I had popped my knee — it sounded like chicken bones breaking when it went, and a sheet of white pain blanked me out. I fell to my side and gasped. Several of the missionaries …
May 9, 1991
Tijuana dump now two warring colonias: Panamericano and Trincherazo
Families appear whose fathers have gone across the wire, not to return. The mothers can be seen, later, hauling the gifts and the food and the candy up the steep cliffsides, their children yelling and laughing.
March 7, 1991
Last running of the bulls in Tecate
It was a noble experiment. For ten years, beginning in 1979, the city of Tecate, Baja California, sponsored Pamplonada, a running of the bulls, inspired by Hemingway's much-loved event in Pamplona, Spain. Pamplonadacan be roughly …
January 24, 1991
Reader writer befriends family at the Tijuana dump and they are killed.
One of the most beautiful views of San Diego is from the summit of a small hill in Tijuana's municipal garbage dump. People live on that hill, picking through the trash with long poles that …
November 15, 1990