How you’re supposed to obtain access to a Mexican archive:

  • write a stilted and respectful letter on the official letterhead of your university requesting permission several months in advance
  • include a handwritten note of introduction from your advisor or someone suitably important-sounding, like a titular member of the Catholic clergy
  • follow up with endless phone calls
  • actually talk to the bureaucrat in charge of the archive, who denies any knowledge of you and your request for access
  • resend letter and note of introduction
  • follow up with more endless phone calls
  • talk to the bureaucrat in charge of the archive, who now claims he’s not solely responsible for the archive and you’ll have to get further permission from some other bureaucrat in some other bureaucracy
  • repeat process with new bureaucrat and new bureaucracy
  • and any other bureaucrats and bureaucracies invoked as roadblocks to your access
  • receive letter of permission from original bureaucrat, who has now covered his ass in case you turn out to be a motherfucking psycho who a) kills self or others in the archive, or b) burns said archive to the ground
  • with letter of permission in hand, show up at the archive and endure several hours or even days of double-checking that letter is indeed authentic and was not written by the signatory bureaucrat under duress
  • voila, you’re in!

The Nick Roberts method of obtaining access to a Mexican archive:

  • show up unannounced and talk your way in

Note that I didn’t say bribe your way in.  That’s cheating.  You can buy anything in Mexico with a bribe, including approval from El Presidente himself to let coke-laden 747s from Columbia transship at Mexican military airfields.  Nah, you have to talk your way in.  Besides, it’s cheaper that way.  And I need to preserve what’s left of my money until the supplemental grant funding is released.

That’s why I’m scrambling upstairs to the second-floor offices of the Oficina Municipal para los Impuestos Maquiladores – the Municipal Office of Maquiladora Taxation – better known by its Spanish acronym OMIM.  This little-known agency is technically extinct, since the City of Tijuana is no longer allowed to levy taxes on maquiladoras.  That’s a privilege reserved for the federal and state governments now.  But the agency lingers on for all the usual reasons, such as residuals and inertia and patronage – and maybe even its archive of documents from the 1970s and 1980s, the golden age of maquiladoras, when China was still shellshocked from the Cultural Revolution and India was just a place where nobody appreciates a good steak.

There’s always somebody standing between me and the archive, and that gatekeeper is invariably a secretary.  A female one.  I’ve been barging into Mexican offices for five years and I’ve never met a male secretary yet.  Give a mexicano a choice between the pink-collar ghetto and starvation, he’ll pick starvation.  At least starving is macho.

I never know how I’ll play it until I set eyes on the secretary, sizing her up, figuring my angles.  This time my roadblock is a weary fortysomething mauling an honest-to-god typewriter.  She doesn’t look up from her typing.  “The director is at lunch,” she sighs in Spanish, when I inquire about his availability.

No shit.  Why do you think I timed it like this, waiting in the lobby until the stairwells emptied?  “No problem, senora.  I’ll just wait for him to get back.”

The typewriter stops clacking.  She makes a show of opening the leather-bound appointment book and running a fingernail down the pages.  “He has an opening next week – ”

“Really, it’s no problem to wait.  Gives me a chance to do my calisthenics.”  I begin doing lunges in the middle of the floor, hands on hips, form perfect.

The secretary hasn’t even bothered to look up until this point.  Now her eyes are widening into plates of refried beans.  I can’t tell whether she’s more surprised that I’m a fluent gringo or turning the director’s anteroom into my private gym.

I switch to deep knee bends.  “Isn’t all the rain something else?  I live in Colonia Libertad and the gravel roads there, they’re washing out!  Where do you live?  Do you get much erosion in your neighborhood?”

She’s staring a hole through her typewriter, trying to pretend there isn’t a wacked-out American invading her office.

That’s when I start doing jumping jacks, abbreviating my arm-raises so they don’t punch through the low ceiling.  My hiking boots thwack into the floor like pile drivers.  A framed picture on the wall jars askew.  Objects on her desk rattle.  “So I’ve been telling this friend of mine who lives with me, the thing you need to understand about Tijuana is – ”

“Why are you here again?” the secretary interjects, her dourness melting into panic.

I stop jumping around like an idiot.  “I need to examine the civic tax records of a defunct maquiladora called Korea Textile S.A.  It’ll only take a moment.  Less than an hour, I’m sure.”  I give her my patented megawatt smile.  “I hate to trouble the director with such a trivial request, especially when you could just let me into the archive.”

She’s glancing at the wall clock, dourness seeping back into her face.  For a long dragging moment I worry I’ve overplayed my hand and lost her – but then she says “Less than an hour?” in a naive hopeful voice.  Bingo, I’m golden.