The Cliff Dwellers

By Richard Marosi

Sept. 6, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

TIJUANA — A life capsized has stranded Jose de Jesus Torres atop these craggy cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Waves crash and dolphins dance as this modern-day cliff dweller waits for another opportunity to cross the U.S. border.

Torres spends his days slinging a fishing line into the frothy sea. His friend, Orlando Bernal, sits on a rock reading a dogeared Bible. Walking atop a 30-foot wall of rocks and sand on a recent day, Torres pointed to a desolate beach far below.

“This is my backyard,” he said. Then Torres turned to look at the rugged coastline stretching north to the border. “And this is my frontyard.”

Torres and his friends are floaters -- like possibly thousands of others biding their time in Tijuana -- waiting until the summer cools to arrange border crossings over the mountains or across the desert. Though a thriving lodging industry caters to Tijuana’s gente de paso -- people passing through -- those without money usually end up living on the streets and in alleys or sometimes on the cliffs offering views of the San Diego skyline.

Earlier this summer, Torres and Bernal were deported from California, where they lived for more than a decade and had earned enough money as construction and restaurant workers for one-bedroom apartments and hamburgers, with enough left over to send to relatives in Mexico.

Now they live at the mercy of the sea along this scenic but dangerous stretch of coast just south of Tijuana, called El Vigia, which local fishermen and residents say has long provided a refuge for those with nowhere else to go. The area is cut off from the city by steep walls of wave-battered boulders and dirt streets patrolled by stray dogs.

By night, the friends lie under the stars on a rock shelf above the ocean, lulled to sleep by the lapping surf and the howls of sea lions. Some nights they string their blankets as makeshift tents. By day, they fish or scour the caverns that pock the cliffs, searching for mussels or crabs.

The men, whose beards have grown long and scruffy, leave solitary footprints in the sand. They watch the frolicking dolphins and fall asleep under pink sunsets.

But the setting is precarious. One slip on the jagged rocks could send a man tumbling to his death.

And the men are always hungry. Torres, a 29-year-old who shields his face from the sun with a blue cap, has shed 20 pounds since he started fishing for food using a line weighted with spark plugs.

When a row of fins suddenly pierces the greenish-blue waters, he knows lunch will have to wait. “The dolphins are also hungry and also have to eat,” he said.

“Hopefully, they’ll swim away soon and leave some fish for us.”

Tijuana can be an inhospitable place for migrants unless they can afford housing or pay human smuggling rings to put them up at three-star hotels or fleabag motels in the red-light district.

Recent deportees from the U.S. are especially vulnerable. Their clothes are often dirty and frayed and police often consider them vagrants or criminals. Many don’t have the Mexican identification documents necessary to qualify for jobs.

“They’re strangers in their own country,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, director of Tijuana’s Binational Center for Human Rights. “Without ID, they can’t work. They don’t know anybody and, culturally, they are more familiar with the U.S.”

Torres, who speaks fluent English, said he, Bernal and another cliff-dwelling friend, Felipe Gonzalez, moved to the coast in part to escape police harassment. Torres said he had lived in the U.S. for 10 years, most recently working at a construction job in San Diego, when he was arrested for drinking in public. The next thing he knew, he was deported to Tijuana, a city he barely knew.

He assumes his girlfriend took all of his belongings, which included a 1979 Cadillac. “I lost everything I had just for one beer,” said Torres, whose hometown is Guadalajara.

Torres tried hiking back to California through the mountains north of Tecate, but was caught twice by U.S. Border Patrol agents.

He found a refuge on the cliffs, where he met Bernal, 30, and Gonzalez, 44. Bernal said he had been deported from San Francisco after being arrested for driving while intoxicated. Gonzalez said he had left the U.S. to visit his ailing sister in his home state of Guerrero.

Like Torres, both men had lived in America for more than five years and could not find work in Tijuana because they didn’t have their Mexican identification documents. To obtain the IDs, they would have to travel to their home cities in Mexico’s interior, which they could not afford to do.

They have found construction work around Tijuana, but it usually doesn’t last more than a few days.

Waiting to cross, their lives now turn on the tides.

The men rise at 2 a.m. and rappel down on a thin steel cable to a seaweed-strewn beach below, a lone flashlight their only source of illumination. It’s low tide, so the receding waves expose a cavern filled with boulders coated with mussels, which they pluck into pails. They reach under the rocks searching for crabs.

Most afternoons find them balancing on rocks, swinging their mussel-baited hooks into the sea. Their scarred hands have been slashed from the fishing lines and crabs that tear at their skin.

The sea is bountiful here, and many local fishermen regularly reel in large catches of grouper, sardines and rock bass. But the three friends lack nets and fishing poles. They are lucky to catch one fish.

They cook their catch on a tiny grill over a fire fueled with sagebrush, strips of wood and plastic bottles they find along the rocks. They sell some of their mussels as bait to fishermen and walk 30 minutes to a store to buy an onion or tomato, which they stir with a stick into a pot of mussels and crabs.

They rely on one another: Each man’s catch is thrown into the community pot, and they share their meager water supplies.

Torres likes to whistle Mexican tunes or lie on his blanket and read about glamorous lives in People magazine. Bernal leafs through the Bible, which he says he doesn’t fully comprehend.

Gonzalez never tires of fishing. A short, wiry man, he fished for 10 hours straight on a recent day, stopping only after the rocks stripped away the spark plugs on his fishing line.

That night, the men curl under their blankets without eating dinner, but Gonzalez has not lost faith in the sea.

“Tomorrow is another day,” he says. “Maybe one of these days, God willing, I’ll cross the border. But for now, I’m OK here. I feel good fishing with my friends.”

Torres, meanwhile, gazes at the lights of downtown San Diego twinkling in the distance from his cliff-top perch. His old life was only 15 miles away, but he feels separated by an ocean.

“Es una vida pesada,” he says. “It’s a hard life.”

To see more photos and hear audio from photographer Don Bartletti, go to latimes.com/stranded.