His treasured Tijuana

Although he left the border region decades ago and now leads the life of a prominent man of letters here in the Mexican capital, Campbell periodically returns to Tijuana to visit his sisters, reunite with old friends or take part in literary conferences. For him, and for an earlier generation of transplanted frontera writers, he says, Tijuana remains "our Ithaca."

The reference, of course, is to Homer's epic poem "The Odyssey," in which the Greek hero Odysseus spends 10 years wandering at sea en route from the Trojan War, before finally arriving at his Ithaca home.

Similarly, the distant Tijuana of Campbell's youth is very much a tangible place that he revisits in his mind and in his writings.

Half-century-old memories still stir him: the scorching autumn winds blowing in off the desert; Hit Parade tunes piped in from San Diego; bars, cabarets and bullrings packed with U.S. day-trippers; and weekend exoduses across the border to shop at Woolworth's and J.C. Penney.

At the same time, Campbell is keenly aware that his sepia-tinged vision of postwar Tijuana -- a scruffy, provincial town of perhaps 60,000 souls -- has been displaced by today's sprawling, culturally dynamic metropolis of nearly 1.5 million, riddled with narco trafficking, corruption and painful questions about illegal immigration and identity.

Expect Campbell to tour his audience through a quasi-mythical landscape of memory and desire when he speaks tonight at L.A.'s downtown Central Library in the wide-open Zocalo "Public Square" lecture series.

The 63-year-old novelist and essayist says he intends to talk about "a very subjective Tijuana, very personal, a Tijuana of the memory," not the contemporary Tijuana that so fascinates academics and others scanning for semiotic signifiers along the borderlands.

"I don't identify very much with this 'problematic' " of Tijuana, says Campbell, sipping espresso at his book-filled home in Mexico City's bohemian Condesa neighborhood, where he lives with his wife.