The drive to the site yesterday was memorable. Through El Niño and Ojo de Agua, where we saw two houses we built, one last year and one the year before that. Bustling, this city. The Ojo de Agua road heads south and eventually makes an intersection with Highway 2. Busy intersection. There is a traffic light but the light seemed only to heighten the chaos. I was making a right on a green. A semi coming through from across the freeway must have had a green yield for its left-hand turn but this truck was bound and determined to make its left, oncoming traffic be darned. It was a free-for-all. We headed west/southwest on the highway for perhaps ten miles before preparing to take a left against/across the traffic coming the other way on what, at that spot, was a three-lane highway, with some cars traveling at about 50 mph. As is custom in Tijuana, some of the cars coming the opposite way see that traffic needs to turn and they stop so the turning traffic can get across the road. Two out of three oncoming lanes had vehicles pausing to let me turn, but one lane was still thrumming through at full speed. So the cars that wait out of courtesy get a hat tip from me but unless all of the traffic is going to wait, the partial courtesy is pointless. I waited a bit until I knew I could make it across regardless of whether oncoming traffic was going to stop or not. I floored it across the three lanes only to have to stop pretty quickly because there were all kinds of semis and other trucks stacked up at the mouth of the road we were turning onto, the surface of which was dirt and rough. There are basically no rules for driving in Tijuana except one: don't screw up. Luckily, I was not the only person uncomfortable with the idea of making this turn again, which we didn't. Our Amor rep Davíd took us to the site by way of another route the rest of the week—a route which was longer but also new, to me, and quite picturesque in the way Tijuana can be, reminiscent of an old dusty town in Italy I might visit some day next decade.

The troubling left hand turn behind us, we took the dirt road into the neighborhood of El Refugio. Which is absolutely booming. Huge factories, one after another. Maquiladoras: factories in Mexico run by a company from another country which will export the product out of Mexico to the U.S. and beyond. We started to climb the dirt road first around and then up and behind a huge long metal-roofed plant run by a company called Watkins Wellness, which an internet search indicated was in the business of making hot tubs.

Past the hot tub factory and climbing through a network of dirt roads cut into a towering hillside replete with pockets of construction, it was like the early days terraforming the surface of Mars. Climbing, turning, twisting, dry dirt roads that were actually pretty smooth, scrubland all around us, not quite the desert, not quite Sonoran. We kicked up dust, the van wearing it like a sheen. But as we got up higher into the hillside the view turned panoramic, looking west, north, east, the city of Tijuana one big factory chugging along in the dusty sunlight. City to the north below us, a quarry underneath our feet. Earth moving machines, Caterpillars, bulldozers, backhoes, jackhammers, hulking water trucks. Houses being built all around us, not densely but here and there as far as you could see. Terraces, steps, plumes of dust, roads being dug out of the hills. Not mining in space but mining for space. The city must grow, it will go where it will, into the hills, carve out a new neighborhood. Groundbreaking, small crews at work on some of the nascent buildings, others project on hold without anyone around, abandoned, for now. Some of the houses you'd be happy to live in in America, others more basic, others only half-done with cinder block walls. No cookie-cutter houses here, not an America-style development but much more diverse, each lot according to its own budget, its own schedule...

Read the full account of the trip here...