TIJUANA — When Zully Martinez began to sing, it sounded like a love song and felt like an exorcism.
Bathed in dim candlelight, 50 opera lovers waited silently before her in a cafe in Colonia Libertad, a banged-up neighborhood famous for boxers, smugglers and gangs that slouches into the steel wall separating Mexico from the United States.
She opened her palms and began "Pur Dicesti, O Bocca Bella" ("Beautiful Mouth, at Last You Have Spoken").
Outside, a motorcycle growled by; a car alarm babbled in reply.
Never has opera seemed more welcome and more appropriate for Tijuana than these days, when city streets have run with blood and vengeance.
One of Tijuana's leading sopranos, Martinez was here to offer her antidote, a caress to the sweeter part of her city that the world rarely notices.
Like resisters to some totalitarian regime, her audience huddled in the small space. They were teachers, office workers and merchants from Tijuana's middle class -- one of the largest of any city in Mexico -- who have wanted more for their children than the strip clubs and velvet painting the city is known for.
They sat attentively, some hunched as if in prayer for a little more than an hour, listening to Neapolitan love songs, to Verdi, to Puccini and to the plaintive bolero "Besame Mucho": "Kiss me, kiss me a lot, as if tonight were the last night . . . because I fear to lose you, to lose you again."
A medieval violence has overwhelmed this ragged but normally optimistic border town. Two factions of a drug cartel fight daily for street primacy, leaving a trail of shootouts, decapitations and kidnappings. In January, police arrested a man known as "El Pozolero" ("The Soup Maker"), who allegedly admitted to dissolving about 300 bodies in lye over the years, paid by a drug kingpin, "El Teo," who has stalked people's nightmares for months.
From their streets of madness, Tijuanans have sought refuge indoors.
"The only good thing is that these kinds of cultural events have grown like never before, perhaps because people are looking for some kind of harmony," said Suzy Fuentes, whose brother, Enrique, opened the Cafe de la Opera, where Martinez performed.
ijuana's love affair with opera and classical music began in 1991. An 18-member professional Russian chamber orchestra left the remains of the Soviet Union and moved to Tijuana at the behest of a local music promoter.
