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Haziq and I crossed the border southbound with Maghrib on the horizon. The only information I had looked up before, 3470 Paseo Playas, was going to take us directly to the masjid in Tijuana. The only plan my friend Haziq had was to get authentic street tacos. In retrospect, we should have planned more thoroughly, but I am not the best of planners.
After crossing through the security checkpoint, a hive of taxis roared before us.
"Isn't there one taxi company we're supposed to trust?" I asked Haziq.
"Yeah," he said.
"Which one?"
Silence stood between us as we stood unmoving in the crowd. We started walking and ended up in the taxi of a built Mexican man, about thirty years old, with a bald head and a tattoo creeping up his neck from under a black shirt. I was on high alert.
As we headed out on the road, the driver noticed our age and started talking about some unsavory places to visit - even joking how we would find our wives there - and I, still running on fear, did my best to reiterate that we just wanted to go to the mosque. "The mezquita," I said, even though his English was great. Despite his continuous prompting, I saw that we were going in the right direction as I looked out the window. However, I realized that the address I had searched, 3470 Paseo Playas, put us far south of the border. At least we are not getting kidnapped, I thought. On seeing the entrance to the mosque, the driver quieted down. "Mezquita," he said.
After paying too much for a fifteen minute ride, presumably in exchange for not being kidnapped, we stepped onto the stairs of the mosque. It was at the corner of what was once a series of row houses but had since become various storefronts. A man with a gray beard and a backwards hat stopped his conversation at the side of the building and unlocked the doors for us.
There were four rows of prayer mats on white tile behind a plastered alcove for the Imam. Haziq and I prayed As'r separately, so one of us could keep watch.
As we finished our prayers, the man in the backwards hat came in and introduced himself as Paco. There were a few other men who also arrived as the sun dipped: a construction worker from Ensenada, who told us that he was trying to learn Arabic in between working up and down the coast during Ramadan; an immigrant from Algeria, whose family donated food for the jamaat; and Paco, who punctuated his sentences in Spanish and English with the words Allahu Akbar.
When the sun set, I called the adhan, and we broke fast with dates and water. We prayed Maghrib, said our salaams, and stepped onto the street in search of a taxi and tacos. By now, the sparseness of street lights was glaring, and the rarity of taxis apparent. We stood on the street waiting.
Suddenly, a voice behind us called us back to the mosque. "Stay for dinner," Paco said, and then afterwards, he would drop us off wherever we needed to go. I was still suspicious from our taxi ride earlier, but I tried to convince myself that it seemed an unreasonably long con for somebody to pray and break fast with us before trying anything. Besides, the lack of taxis made our choice clear. So we stayed.
We shared the meal on a thin, teal bedsheet on the tile, as we sat on the floor in a circle of five or six people. We had an Arab style burger with chickpea soup -- not the authentic Mexican food we were looking for, but delicious and still authentic in a different way. As we finished, we walked with Paco to his truck.
"Allahu Akbar," he said. "You two blessed us with your presence today, Allahu Akbar!"
Haziq asked if there were any taco places he recommended.
"No!" he said. "Son contaminados! I won't let you eat there." He shook his head, warning us that bits of pork would be mixed into even the vegetarian street tacos. This was the reason Paco did not like tacos. "And you know," he continued, "I had to keep you for dinner because I know the blessings for feeding a fasting man."
As we drove through the yellow lit streets that coil up the hills of Tijuana, Paco revealed that he had never learned how to read or write. He was always in the special classes, he said, growing up. He moved around through the years, to California and back, and he even had a family. But it was not until he found Islam that he found his place. His purpose. He founded this mosque and was building another in the countryside.
Haziq asked if we could stop at a pharmacy. His mother needed a prescription which was cheaper to fill in Mexico.
"You mean," Paco said, " I have the opportunity to give medicine to your mother? Allahu Akbar!"
We stopped at three pharmacies. At the last one, as Haziq was at the register, I mentioned to Paco that his masjid in Tijuana was really the only plan I had made before coming to Mexico. "Allahu Akbar," he said and gave me a hug. "Thank God that you came to see us, that I heard your voice in the adhan, that I could feed you, and help his mother." The artificial light brought out Paco's watery eyes set in his wrinkled skin.
We got back in the car. The darkness soon gave way to border lights as we said our salaams.
Our walk took us through vendors and traffic as my heart beat hard in the Tijuana night. We had nearly run out of money, but we were full of wonder at this earnest Mexican Muslim man - a certain politician's least favorite demographic - and his sincerity in carrying out the greatness of the God we believe in. Although we never did get those tacos, we left Mexico full of wonder, fear, and awareness. We entered the US with taqwa.
Taariq Mohammed recently graduated from Johns Hopkins as a biomedical engineer and began studying medicine at New York University. He is the youngest son of Trinidadian immigrants, and enjoys martial arts, weight lifting, music performance and composition, as well as travelling.