Heriberto Yepez - lecture - 30 May 09 @ Woodbury

"Writing, in Tijuana, means writing about Tijuana."

Yepez is a philosopher, a writer, a journalist, a psychotherapist. Currently teaching at Universidad Autonoma de Baja California, he has published over a dozen books of poetry, essays, short stories and novels. Made in Tijuana (2005) and Tijuanologias (2006) are two of his examples of exploring the history, myth, and culture of the border town we know as Tijuana. His lecture focused on understanding Tijuana as a heterochrony, a time-place, separate from everything else. It altogether bypassed Modernism, and went straight into Postmodernism, thereby exposing itself as a hybrid, as something that isn't natural, and has no identity other than that which it holds. "Tijuanologies", a term popularized by Yepez, are those stories of the city which have given rise to what it has become: Tijuana as a "good time", as "sin city", as border culture, as anarchism, etc. Heriberto proposes that we change these views of Tijuana from "aesthetical" to "ethical." He asserts ethopoetics as the means to viewing Tijuana: adding a dimension of realism and humanity to the myth.

"...the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up