U.S. Transplants Find Good Life in Baja

ROSARITO, Mexico —  You’ll have to pardon Jim Kniss for seeming blase at the sight of the porpoises spearing the surf a mere football field’s length from his living room window.

The former West Covina administrator has seen so many porpoises--even the occasional whale--glide past his seaside home near Rosarito that the sightings have become as ho-hum as a backyard beehive.

The real wonder may be in the price that Kniss and his wife pay for this slice of paradise: just under $300 a month.

“It’s 60 feet to the beach,” said Kniss, 67, who moved south of the border with his wife, LornaLee, after retiring in 1987. “If I were in Newport Beach, my house would be worth a half-million dollars.”

The couple are typical of an expanding community of U.S. citizens, roughly estimated at 40,000 people and made up largely of retirees, who have relocated to Baja California beaches long favored by weekend tourists and surf bums. Lured by a laid-back lifestyle and low rents, the U.S. transplants dominate the 70-mile chain of settlements--tony condominium complexes, no-frills trailer parks and suburban-style tracts--hugging the sea from Tijuana south past Ensenada.

Although Americans in Baja live as foreigners amid a language few of them can speak, the proximity of the border allows them to keep one foot planted on familiar terrain. Their satellite dishes pick up sports and local news from San Diego. They cross the border for medical appointments and to stock up monthly on canned goods and sacks of dog food at warehouse stores. Their homes sport all the modern gadgetry, from bread-making machines to TV remote controls, found north of the border.

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Still, there are reminders--the occasional power outages, inscrutable bureaucracies and what can be years-long waits for telephone service--that these residents are more than just an hour’s drive from their former lives in California.

“It’s not for everyone,” said Kathy Iles, a former Orange County escrow agent who lives in a 70-lot settlement outside Rosarito with her husband and 10-year-old son. “You do have to gear things down so low. Some people can’t do that.”

Local officials welcome the dollars that American immigrants pour into their economies and the jobs they provide for Mexicans who work as housekeepers or handymen. But some Mexicans are dismayed that the developments that sprang up over the years sealed off beaches once open to the public.

“The [beaches] where we can go are all full of rocks,” said Maria Ines Serna, who tends a corner store on a hillside above Cantamar, a seaside community 14 miles south of Rosarito. “The places where we want to go are all owned by the Americans.”

Technically speaking, the Americans own none of the land they inhabit because of a Mexican law preventing foreign ownership of land within 50 kilometers (30 miles) of the ocean. So most of the transplants rented lots from Mexican landlords and shelled out their own money to build, crossing their fingers that the lease arrangement wouldn’t change. Under separate arrangements called fideicomisos, foreign residents can keep property through long-term trusts held by a bank or other fiduciary institution.

Renters are “pretty much at the mercy of the landowner,” said Jim Kniss, who figures that he and his wife have put about $27,000 into their three-bedroom brick house over the years. “It’s like the stock market. Don’t invest anything you can’t afford to lose.”

The Americans who built earliest began visiting the area more than 20 years ago, hauling campers and carfuls of children at a time when the fishing was legendary and many streets in Ensenada were still unpaved. Trailers sprouted additions and later grew into houses. The vacationers retired, and many flocked back to Baja for that same brand of leisure all year long.

The American community also includes young couples who fled hectic jobs and daunting real estate prices for the relative calm and affordability of Mexico, where a $30,000 annual income can comfortably sustain a family of six.

“It’s like growing up 20 or 30 years ago. It’s slower, kinder,” said Suzan Piacentini, who moved to the Rosarito area from Santa Barbara seven years ago with her husband and four daughters. Three of the girls attend a bilingual private school in Rosarito; the oldest daughter, 16, will return to Santa Barbara next year to finish high school.

Those who settled in Baja California two decades ago remember a rustic drive past windows flickering with lantern light--a scene far removed from the tourist resorts and sports bars that punctuate the route today.

Edward and Marilyn Krause spent a weekend at an acquaintance’s vacation cottage on the bay facing Ensenada in 1970. Three days after going home to Orange County, the couple bought the place.

“I’m not normally that impulsive, but we just loved it,” recalled Edward Krause, 63, a former insurance adjuster. “It was a cleanness and a quietness. At that time it was pretty primitive--and the fishing was great. It was the opposite of what L.A. was about.”

The Krauses later bought a larger house in the same area, a fishing and farming region called Punta Banda, and moved in full time in 1981 after early retirement. Telephones and cable television arrived only a year ago; the few hundred American residents there used to keep in touch mostly by CB radio. Water trucks still deliver door-to-door in the neighborhood, which could be mistaken for a Southern California subdivision but for the gravel-covered streets.

The retirees gaze at sweeps of cliff-edged coast rivaling California’s best and stay busy through amateur drama groups, sewing circles and social clubs for Americans. A group in Punta Banda has its meeting hall and bar, where members gather for steak nights and country and western dancing. A drama club headed by Krause built its own 99-seat playhouse using donations and chairs salvaged from a former theater in West Covina.

Krause and other residents of the American enclaves said they enjoy an Old World neighborliness that has grown among them in the face of common challenges such as water shortages, car repair problems and the language barrier.

Snafus in Spanish have made for red-faced moments. Krause’s theater group was horrified to learn that homemade signs it had plastered all over town inadvertently advertised a private body part. A crew raced around with paintbrushes to repair the mistake.

“It can be trouble,” Krause said.

Parents said the adventure of Baja living has strengthened their families, who are hours removed from old friends and relatives. Making new acquaintances can be difficult in a place where communities are miles apart, making get-togethers more difficult, and many people lack telephones. Fewer organized activities, such as after-school sports, exist for children than in the United States, said Piacentini.

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But Piacentini, whose husband works as a tile contractor in Baja California and abroad, said those disadvantages are outweighed by the benefits of having her children explore a new language and culture far from California schools troubled by drugs and gangs. On a recent afternoon, daughter Isabelle, 12, made plans for a sleepover at the home of a school friend, bantering fluently in the Spanish she has spoken half her life.

Isabelle, who just finished the sixth grade at a private school where classes are taught in English and Spanish, said she misses nothing about the United States. Pressed, she thought more. “My cousins,” she offered finally.

The schoolchildren are somewhat unusual among the American residents for their close connections to Mexican neighbors. Most adult transplants tend to settle in complexes made up almost exclusively of Americans, and contacts with Mexicans often are limited to those they have hired to clean their homes or make repairs.

“The Americans who live here do not mix with the locals socially. They do have friends, but it is not common,” said Hugo Torres Chabert, the acting mayor of Rosarito. “They’re friendly and they bring local business. But most of all, they volunteer with local services.”

Indeed, the retired Americans have won much good will for their work in local charities. A Rosarito group helped build a school and raises tens of thousands of dollars for the local Red Cross hospital and ambulance. Retirees in Punta Banda spearheaded formation of the volunteer fire department now protecting the rural region. And in Maneadero, a pair of retired teachers opened a mission and clinic for migrant Indian field hands after spotting their squalid shanties 13 years ago.

Even in areas where the poverty is less severe, the contrast is stark between the beachside developments where the Americans dwell and the ramshackle settlements of Mexicans dotting both sides of the coastal highway. Some of the retirees said the sight of such conditions moved them to charity work for the first time.

“Most of us aren’t used to seeing that kind of poverty,” said Anita Alicia Armend, a retired health educator active in the Cruz Roja, the local Red Cross.

Members of the American community consider themselves neither expatriates nor travelers. Most now consider themselves Baja residents. Many hold passport-size documents issued to foreign residents by the Mexican government, although officials have no reliable tally of how many U.S. retirees are registered to live in Baja California.

“We’re an American barrio in Mexico,” said Krause, the retired insurance adjuster.

But some American residents look to the future with trepidation. A proposal to bring casino gambling to Rosarito has people like Jim and LornaLee Kniss worried that a resulting land rush might price them out. Others, such as Suzan Piacentini, fear that gambling could shatter the sedate environment in which her children have thrived. She even mulls giving up the beachside house that her parents built and hunting for an even quieter spot at the tip of Baja California--more than 700 miles away.

“We’ve always been kind of gypsies,” Piacentini said. “We could move to Todos Santos and hit the Price Club only once a year.”