PLEASURE AT ANY PRICE
There is much gayety that ignores the future
A true picture of a typical vice resort the like of which is increasing in
America, though usually under cover. The price is fearful, and exacting.
IGHTY-FIVE saloons and but a single
pi church! This is notorious Tia Juana,
Mexico, just across the border from Cali-
fornia. Glittering drinking houses with
jazz orchestras to entice the crowds.
Polished bars that seem to run interminable
distances down the long halls. Painted girls waiting
the next dance or the next drink in a very business-
like attitude. Drunken men staggering about the
streets unnoticed. Women in giddy hilarity drink-
ing and gambling. Jazz — sordidness — liquor —
drunken debauching — this is Tia Juana.
“Wine, women, and song” is an appropriate title
to be applied to this resort just below the United
States line that is drawing the thousands to its
pleasure marts. In the cabarets, thick with to-
bacco smoke, reeking with liquor, is the constant
tom-tom of weird jazz. Scores of slot machines
click, click as dollars, half dollars, and quarters are
gambled away to the god of chance. And this is
the rendezvous, ‘The All-Year Playground of
America,” to which Americans flock for their
dissipation. And it is only one of the so-called
““oases’’ along the border.
Holidays and week-ends find the highways lead-
ing across the border into Mexico filled with one vast
parade of cars. Thousands of automobiles pass
through the international lines here every day. Some
ten thousand automobiles cross to Tia Juana on
week-ends, and as many as twenty-five thousand
PAGE TWELVE
By MERLIN L. NEFF
cars have thronged the highways on holidays.
One newspaper correspondent describes this
licentious spot in the following language: ‘‘Hard-
eyed women who slouch along the streets, cigarettes
dangling from their lips. Greasy and unshaven men
who lounge along and stare insolently at passers-by
as though appraising their pocketbooks. And every-
where the feeling that the people you meet on the
street somehow don’t belong in the strong daylight,
but instead fit naturally into the darkness.” And
after viewing the resort he finally concludes, “But
as for Tia Juana — if I were caught there at night
I believe I'd go to the brush of the mountain foot-
hills and take my chances with the mountain lions
rather than the people I saw in that place.”
This drinking and racing center seems to be
filled with the offscourings of humanity. Vet
thousands of respectable American people, well-
dressed and comely in appearance, enter the cabarets
and saloons for a giddy spree. With a snicker and
a shrug of the shoulders they flaunt their disregard
for law and respectability.
The question comes to one’s mind as these sights
appear and reappear, “Why? Why? Why? Cannot
men and women see that the wages of such sin is
degradation and death?” It seems impossible to
believe that such strong-looking men and clear-eyed,
sensible-appearing women should take so recklessly
THE WATCHMAN MAGAZINE