TIJUANA, Mexico -- They swarm across the border at night by the thousands, some crammed in cars, some on foot. They come for things they can't get in their own country: a few Margaritas, a Corona beer T-shirt and mostly, a little adventure.
Each weekend, hordes of teenagers from Southern California come through the San Ysidro border stop and invade Tijuana. The kids just want to have fun; their hosts, the merchants of Tijuana, just want to make a living. Both desires merge along a frenzied six-block stretch of Avenida Revolucion.
Tijuana's main drag has always been a playground for American tourists, who account for 45 percent of the town's economy. In recent months, Revolucion has gotten funkier to suit a new generation of gringos: teenage party animals who come from as far north as Los Angeles to drink a lot, haggle a little, flirt with each other and otherwise act like American adults.
Today, hookers no longer operate openly along Revolucion; instead, they work the side streets, looking for U.S. military men. Dusty old curio shops are losing ground to slick designer clothing stores that rock to the beat of Madonna. Major department stores have cleared out hand-sewn dresses to make way for jeans and sweatshirts.
But the most striking change along Revolucion has occurred one flight up, in the notorious second-story 'balcony bars' where 18 year olds can drink legal and cheap until four in the morning.
'A lot of American kids are coming down here,' says Ferdinand Vega, who manages the DDC-10 clothing store at 9th and Revolucion. 'The drinking age is a big difference, and so is the variety of discos -- they go from one disco to another to another.
'And prices are lower. Beers in bars up north are $2.50 to $3.00; here, beers are $1 to $1.50.'
Jeff Stalcup, 18, of San Diego, heads south with his friends nearly every weekend because, he says, 'we can get into nightclubs here and we don't need a lot of money.
'At the Rojo Dragon, you can get Corona by the bottle for 65 cents. We could sell stock in that place. We try to get big groups of people, maybe 10 to 20 at once, so it's like you just bring your party down with you.'
'There's an element of danger here,' says Damion Mylet of Van Nuys, Calif., who is buying blankets and straw baskets for his dorm room at San Diego State University. 'You're the 'bad neighbor to the north.''
Sometimes, rowdy young Americans get a little more danger than they bargain for. This spring, San Diego's KFMB-TV aired a news segment showing a drunken American teen, sobbing with fear, held in the back of a Tijuana squad car after an altercation with police.
The young man was released in a matter of minutes but the image is still a fresh wound on both sides of the border. Neither the Mexican merchants nor the American teenagers want to spoil a good thing so everyone is staying cool these days.
'With a little alcohol, sometimes the kids get a little rowdy,' says Vega. 'But that's what they come here for: to have a good time. If they get in trouble with the police, all the police do is detain them for an hour, talk to them, give them advice and let them go. Sometimes they don't even pay a fine.'
The kids have pretty much figured it out: don't act too drunk and be prepared to pay off the local police (whose take-home pay averages $86 a month).
'If you don't cause problems, the Mexicans don't cause problems,' said Christopher Hazeltine, 18, of Imperial Beach, Calif., watching Revolucion's traffic from the balcony of Club A.
'But if you have American license plates, you better drive perfect,' says his friend, Theresa Grow, also 18 of Imperial Beach.
'If you have money in your pocket, you can buy your way out of trouble, or you can give them a watch or a gold necklace,' says Hazeltine.
'I'd rather go to jail than give up my gold necklace,' says Elizabeth Baez, 18, of San Diego.
The new wave of young American tourists has spawned a new wave of young Tijuana entrepreneurs. Unlike their fathers, who were content with peddling souvenirs, the merchant brat pack charts tourist demographics and keeps up with marketing trends in America and Europe.
'Compared to the rest of the country, Tijuana has always been up-to-date,' says Oscar Escobedo, the dean of the young businessmen. 'The appeal is not just drinking. It's like traveling to Mazatlan or Italy or anyplace foreign: you dress different, you try on a weird hat, it gives you a certain feeling.'
At age 32, Escobedo is one of the oldest of the young bar owners. His Margaritas Village, now in its sixth year, helped set the balcony bar style by eschewing Mexican decor for a high-tech look.
Waiters zip around Margaritas Village dressed like construction workers in denim overalls and yellow hardhats. Strobe lights flash from the ceiling; television screens show rock videos synchronized with songs blaring from a giant stereo system. There is not a pinata or a clay urn in sight.
'Revolucion has changed a lot in the past 12 months and that's because of American teenagers,' says Escobedo.
'When I opened Margaritas Village, about 1,000 kids would come down Friday and Saturday and maybe 600 on Sunday. Right now, 3,500 kids come down on any given weekend night and on a good Saturday, we might see 5,000.
'Most of them spend $12 on Margaritas, $3 on a Corona T-shirt, a couple dollars more on food. They definitely get more for their money, especially now, with the exchange rate at 1400 pesos to a dollar.'
Escobedo and the other bar owners are dismayed by bad publicity about the American kids -- 'the night Channel 8 did that piece,' he says, 'there wasn't one U.S. citizen put in jail' -- and they have organized their own association to help clean up Tijuana's image.
'Our members, all bar and restaurant owners, talk to the police a lot. We are going to buy five more police cars and more equipment to patrol the tourist area. And there are 32 bilingual police, making three times as much as the regular police, who now patrol this section.'
Escobedo runs both the association and his various businesses out of a third-floor Revolucion office that straddles two cultures. Black-and-white posters of Marilyn Monroe share wall space with old photographs of Revolucion from the 1920s, a sleepy little street with a few cars and a handful of storefronts.
Six doors down from Escobedo's office, Hector Santillan has been operating the same curio shop since 1952. In the past year or so, he has seen a younger, louder group of American customers who bypass the ashtrays and silver bracelets and head right for a glass case full of $4.99 switchblades, which are illegal in most parts of the United States.
Santillan is afraid that rowdy teenage tourists are scaring away older Americans with more buying power. 'We used to get a lot of family groups but the kids have been changing our type of business,' he complains. 'They only support the balcony bars and the only thing the bars do is make a lot of noise. Sometimes the kids throw beer bottles off the balconies.'
Merchants in nearby Rosarito Beach have told Santillan that 'the same problem is happening down there,' he says. A group of Rosarito businessmen, citing ugly behavior in Tijuana, have formally proposed banning balcony bars from their town.
But Santillan knows that Revolucion will always go where the money is. 'The number of balcony bars went from 6 to 10 in about three months and there are four more to be open in a couple of months. I believe it's a governmental problem; it's business -- more money, more tax.
'We need the money and I believe that as many as they ask for, they'll get. The only thing we ask for is more regulation.'
Santillan was pleased when the bar owners recently agreed to pay a policeman to patrol each bar all night. And he emphasizes that he bears no ill will toward the young Americans.
'We can't say it's just American kids; this is how all the kids in the world act,' he says. 'There are balcony bars in Puerto Vallarta, Acapulco, Mexico City, even Madrid. This happens all over the world; they have the same problems all over.'
Downstairs, Mexican teenagers work the streets, hawking bunches of cut flowers and armfuls of silver bracelets. Upstairs at Club A, American teenagers chug beer and dance.
Jack Ricci, 19, of San Diego, sits down, puts his head back and a waiter pours a 'Tequila Popper,' a shot of tequila and 7-Up, down his throat. His two guests from Brooklyn, N.Y., Kelly Grier, 17, and Jennifer Sarago, 17, look on in awe.
The two girls can't believe they are really, actually drinking Mexican beer in a bar in Tijuana AND that the bar is really a neat disco with rock videos and everything.
'I hadn't heard anything nice about TJ,' says Sarago. 'I heard that all the guys come down here for one reason. And also that everything's cheap here.'
'We were freaked out about coming over the border,' says Grier.
'It's nicer than I thought,' says Sarago. 'I live in New York and this is a lot nicer than anything we have there.'
'Maybe we won't go home,' says Grier with a giggle.
Like the balcony bars, the funky clothing stores along Revolucion, including Benetton, Fiorucci, Rubin Torres and DDC-10, are raking in money by selling American teenagers what they want at prices they can afford.
At DDC-10, Ferdinand Vega boasts that designer jeans costing $45 to $50 in the states are only $26 to $28. A lot of kids drop in to his store to suit up for the discos, he says.
'We close at 8:30 p.m. during the week but we stay open until 11 p.m. on weekends because we get a lot of business. They come in here, buy clothes and change right into them. They even ask us if we can hem their pants.'
At 10 o'clock on a Friday night, a group of young Americans swarm over DDC-10, grabbing up jeans and pullover shirts. As Vega bags their loot, one of the girls pulls out an Instamatic and takes his picture. Her friends squeal with laughter.
Vega, blinded for a moment by the camera's flash, grins at the girl and stuffs her money into his cash register.
