The extraction and relocation of the pre-Hispanic monolith known as “Tlaloc” from San Miguel Coatlinchan to the National Museum of Anthropology (Museo Nacional de Antropología) in 1964 were captured through the production, circulation, arrangement, and storage of different types of images. These images have been organized using different processes of montage that sought to somehow fix the event and, which are therefore deeply political. Following Roland Barthes’ invitation to “listen to” images to access their “obtuse sense”, I resort to ethnography as a way of addressing the resonances and the affective ties that cannot be contained within the edges of their frames and insist on interrupting any effort towards their logical and temporal arrangement.

This article presents narrations and social dynamics of the red zone or the tolerance zone in Tijuana, Baja California, which has been, for seven decades, one of the most important enclaves for sex work in the Mexico-United States border. Coahuila Street, known locally as “la Coahuila”, located in the Zona Norte, has one of the world’s most dynamic sex markets. This work presents the findings obtained after almost five decades of visiting this peculiar space by the border, and specifically, from a three-year period (2015 to 2018) in which ethnographic visits were carried out gathering narrations by sex workers, employees in establishments, users and visitors, all of whom share experiences surrounding sex work in this area. The aim is to offer a retrospective and current look at the dynamics of sex work in the Zona Norte, the diversity of actors that interact in La Coahuila, as well as narrations and descriptions on this place which is unique for the country’s sex market.

Pedro and Andrés talked about the ways of interacting when researching in the regions: drinking beers, playing cards, telling jokes and other ways to get close to the people under study to talk, play and laugh with them, and at the same time get to know their culture and get to know them. These interactions give rise to affection and friendships. They are coexistence in the heat of a campfire in which each researcher "must accept a certain alteration of his or her vision of the world," as Andrés pointed out. An interculturality that goes back and forth.