Super Bowl XXXVII

Bullfights lose status as Tijuana's Sunday pastime

© St. Petersburg Times
published January 25, 2003

TIJUANA, Mexico -- The gate is unlocked and the rock-strewn parking lot is empty except for a stray dog and a few battered and weary palm trees. Toreo de Tijuana -- bullfighting of Tijuana -- sits silent atop a hill in the middle of the city like an ancient baseball stadium or something from a Mad Max movie.

From a doorway under the sagging wooden grandstands, a slender boy wearing a Gap T-shirt and a red baseball cap emerges. He says it's okay to look around.

His name is Edgar Beas, he's 16, and his father manages the bullring. The season runs from May to November, he says, that's why there's no one here.

"My dad wanted me to be a matador, and I tried it," he says. "But it was scary. When I get older, I want to do something with animals. Maybe be a veterinarian."

He says some people from the National Football League were in town the other day, to put on a clinic for the city's underprivileged kids. But when his father offered to hold bullfights the day before the Super Bowl, they said they wouldn't help him.

He knows why.

"But you can rent this place if you want to have a party," he says. "It holds 12,000 people."

From the merchants hawking handbags and wrestling masks on Avenida La Paz to the taxi drivers clustered at the main border crossing, the sentiment is pretty much the same. Tourism in Tijuana is down, and the Super Bowl isn't helping.

Egren Beas, Edgar's father, says that 15 years ago, 10,000 people would pack the bullring on a Sunday afternoon. Now, he's lucky to get 2,000.

"We have to compete with the Internet, TV, the movies and San Diego. They don't want people coming here. Especially to the bullfights. They said they wouldn't help me promote a bullfight before the Super Bowl, and I don't have enough money to promote it myself. So it won't happen."

But it's not just the Americans with cameras and fat wallets who aren't coming. The people who live in Tijuana are also finding other things to do.

In its younger days, Tijuana was a wide open town. Strip joints and bars. Sex for sale. If anyone looked at all, it was the other way. But the town is a city now of more than 2-million people. Donkeys painted black and white (Mexican zebras) are still available for photos on a few street corners, and the police cars are still different makes and models and in varying degree of disrepair.

But the streets are cleaner now, and drugstores outnumber bars, thanks to skyrocketing costs for prescription drugs in the United States.

If people score drugs in Tijuana now, it's Paxil, Viagra and Retin-A.

Through this transformation, Toreo de Tijuana hangs on, a reminder of what Tijuana used to be. It is one of the oldest bullrings in Mexico, built in 1930 and remodeled in 1957. It has rickety iron stairs, scarred wooden rails surrounding the floor, and a tiny chapel under the stands where matadors go to pray before a bullfight.

Egren Beas hangs on, too.

"I'm staying on because it is very sad for this type of culture to die," he says. "I don't want to see bullfighting go down the drain, and I have to at least try to save it."

Beas grew up on the same block as the bullring. He danced in the stands when Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass played here when he was a boy. And last year, he gave up his insurance business when he learned the manager's job was open.

He defends bullfighting with the same passion a person might defend abortion rights or capital punishment.

"The bulls we use are bred for one reason," he says. "To fight. They are called toros bravos -- brave bulls. And if you have no more bullfights, those bulls will become extinct.

"You have bullfights in northern California, but the bulls aren't killed. But here, it's expected. It's an art form."

It's also seen by many as cruel and barbaric, a throwback to the days of big-game hunting, mink stoles and Hemingway novels. The bull is stabbed repeatedly before it is finally killed and hauled out of the ring by a mule. And if the matador is judged to have performed well, he gets one or both of the bull's ears. If he does exceptionally well, he gets its tail.

"Another problem is that we don't have any matador idols right now," Beas says. "There is one, but he's from Spain, and he charges $150,000 a fight. Too rich for me. We charge $9 general admission here, and kids under 12 get in free."

But come May, he'll try again. He'll put yet another coat of paint on the bleachers and spruce up the place as best he can. He'll bring the matadors to town on Wednesday, put them on the local radio stations and show them off at the restaurants, "to try to bring in the girls."

So this, he is asked, is better than selling insurance?

"No," he answers. "But it's more fun.

"Look, you have to see it once in your life. If you don't like it, don't go again. But if you do, you'll be hooked."

But time may be running out, no matter what he does. He says he's heard a rumor that the bullring may be torn down next year. To make way for something else.

He shakes his head and sighs.

"A Wal-Mart."