Opinion: Being a Spanish-speaking gringo was unusual in the '70s. It helped me tell Tijuana's stories. [Opinion]
There are many ways to see the sprawling city of Tijuana, including through the eyes of journalists on both sides of the U.S.Being a Spanish-speaking gringo in the late 1970s, I was a novelty of sorts and that helped me to connect with my Tijuana colleagues at the newspapers there starting at my first full-time newspaper job as a photographer at the now-defunct North Shores Sentinel in San Diego.
In 1994, I was assigned to work from our Tijuana bureau full time instead of going down only when there were assignments. I made it my mission to find stories I could tell that illustrated things we shared in common, but perhaps in different ways, as well as what made us different.
Daily news stories came up, too. Chronic failings of the region’s infrastructure allowed whole neighborhoods to slide down hillsides in the seasonal rains. Children got lead poisoning because an illegal smelter for old car batteries operated next to their homes. The roller-coaster politics were also a daily source of work for us.
There were times when we were put on guard. Once, during a security evaluation of our bureau in Tijuana, a listening device was found installed on one of the phones, the phone that Greg Gross had used during his time working on stories that included drug trafficking, government corruption and other issues that we covered.