the near future on booktv on c-span2. >> welcome to san diego on booktv. located 120 miles south of los angeles it's california's second-largest city with a population of about 1.3 million. nicknamed the birthplace of california it wasn't the first site visited by europeans and what is now the west coast of the united states. today its largest economic drivers on the military and tourism and the cities downtown area is less than 15 miles from the border crossing with mexico, the busiest border crossing station in the world. with help of our cox communications and charter spectrum cable partners, for the next hour will feature some of the areas local authors we begin with kimball taylor on his book "the coyote's bicycle." >> it doesn't look like it but this is a broad river valley, and in the winter when we get

rainstorms, it can flood quite significantly. i came down here in 2008 to do a story about these thousands of car tires that washed into the united states from mexico during any significant rain. the thing that was interesting about that is that those car tires originated in the united states here when we buy a new set of tires and leave the old ones at the dealer and would actually pay if the two have been disposed of properly, but most often they are sold in mexican middlemen and there taken to baja. when you're discarded they're just left in the watershed and when it rains they just wash back into the united states for free. i was here at this ranch talking to the folks who operate the place about the car tires that there were picking up at that moment and putting into a big dumpster. just on this parcel alone there

were hundreds of car tires after one storm. we are talking about the circularity of it. here are california car tires coming to us from mexico. he said it's just like the bicycles. i said what are you talking about? he said, right over here. we walked around there, 200-year-old barn and he had a giant pile of bicycles. he says he collected 1000 bikes in the last six months. i said where did they come from? he turned at any point of this hill because he wanted 300 feet higher than the american valley below and he said the mexicans. it turned out that every parcel along monument road i went to after that had a pile of bicycles from the state park to the gomez place right down here, there's a counterpart and other ranges. the people of the valley were just collecting these bicycles that were abandoned by migrants.

rarely did they see people on bikes. it happened that night or happen when people were not looking, but day after day bicycles were accumulating. their experience is very interesting because, as i mentioned, it's, it's very world community. people are making money off of horse ranching, renting out stalls. there's organic farms, commercial farms. and yet they are dealing with these international issues right on their back door. the whole story of migration follows economic patterns. when we have a boom like we did during the housing, during our housing bubble, there was quite a bit of crossing, a lot of mexicans and central americans crossing to fill those low skill

jobs that were in command at the time. along this boundary people have crossed in every imaginable way. and when they do they encounter the regular americans who live right here. the people, the the locals are quite pragmatic. i wouldn't say ideological, and they treat interesting stories. in fact this is a river valley, and in the river, in the winter it often floods. right over here, this rancher that lives in this parcel actually told me that he found a man who had crossed on the river on the boogie board and the got stuck in a tree as the river retreated. there was a lot of -- when i first came along these abandoned bicycles in the river valley.

some people thought it was just cosmetic, the idea that someone would just casually psyching ling along -- cycling along to my complaint is you. some people thought it was for the speed because you could cover the distance. it would take you nine minutes and one minute. but it actually has to do with technology. every technology that the border patrol brings to bear on the border, be it razor tripwires are infrared cameras or the barriers themselves, every technology as a hack. they all have a weakness. for example, the laser tripwires, the infrared cameras, they go blind in our c fox that we get quite often hear and become utterly useless.

in the case of the bicycles that hack had to do with a string of 18,000 seismic sensors that border patrol relies on. the seismic, you can imagine, they, they detect earth shaking things, siding, pounding, sidin, running, walking. traditionally it is the migrants who run and walk, or as the border patrol roles on quads and jeeps and in trucks. so the bicycle technique reversed that trend, and suddenly migrants were able to cross over ground, that in the past they would've easily been detected. traditionally, the san diego sector was one of the busiest along the entire border.

according to an author named joseph nevins, the experience here where you have such a dense mexican population and meeting such a traditionally white population in san diego, that that went the whole debate a certain kind of politics. so this has been one of the hottest in terms of crossing but also politically. and so this is the most enforced five-mile stretch of our 2000-mile border, and we've had quite a big border patrol presence. in recent times a lot of agents have been shifted to the desert, to arizona. but still there's a huge presence here in san diego. you can see on a daily basis everywhere you go on these high lands there's border patrol

agents and trucks watching the boundary. you can see them in their jeeps, on foot. the name of the game in terms of smuggling is creativity. agents will say that they are on the creative defense, and the smugglers are on the creative offense. sometimes it's really funny, the things that smugglers will come up with. for example, the fence here, the average mile costs 3.5 million dollars on average to build. if you go to youtube you can find a video of smugglers using a $24 carjack to jack that fence up almost to the height of a man, and smugglers cross under the fence and then they just

kick the check out and the fence falls back into place. on the video smugglers are laughing the whole time. just this year creativity involved in smuggling can be, can make for some pretty interesting stories. this valley right here is called smugglers gulch. smugglers have been using this since the 1800s. they have been smuggling everything from tom at one point lacy undergarments were highly packed and they smuggled underwear, to everything else. alcohol during prohibition, even cattle at one time. and most often it's been people crossing. under the secure fence act of

2007, during the construction of this wall, engineers filled in this entire valley with this giant berm, and totally changed the watershed so that they could put a fence on top of it. i don't know how many cubic yards of dirt, but it's vast. the interesting thing about this though is that there has always been such fortification on the boundary. under a juniper tree is a little plaque that the boy scouts put in place to celebrate the fact that father junipero serra crossed from mexico into the united states to these valleys,

either here or in lhasa ramos which reache is just over the hd established what became the california mission system. and basically san diego itself. so our roots in traveling across the boundary go to, our ancient in fact. i think when it comes to this debate about border enforcement, seemingly everyone is willing to have an opinion, but so few are willing to inform themselves. so one of the hopes i had for this book, when the readers meet the characters, they are meeting people who live on the boundary, whether it's people who are involved in enforcement, people who just make their livelihoods here, or people whose career it

is to cross the border illegally. spewing migration numbers have been down since 2008, and negative even. so more people are going back to mexico and central america that are coming across. also study say that people tend to cross in a certain age range, say from your late teens to your early '30s. if you cross in that age, then you're not likely to. mexico went through this youth boom earlier in the century and people are crossing but now that youth boom has aged out of those ranges. i mentioned those two things because not only have we had negative migration numbers for almost 10 years, but we are not likely to see another boom. so when we look at sending -- spending billions of dollars on defending this boundary that is not going to be crossed in the numbers that had been, that money is our bridges and our roads. that's our schools that if were

just going to be pouring it in the desert i think people should be aware what they are defending. >> the uss midway is the longest serving aircraft carrier of the 20 century. the first and a three ship class of carriers that featured an armored flight back and a group of 120 planes. it was built in only 17 months, but missed action and world war ii by one week. turned into a museum in 2004 attracts over 1 trillion tourists annually. up next to continue our featured on the cities history and literary life as we talk with san diego state professor william nericcio, about his book on mexican stereotypes in popular culture. >> in my book i tell this story about, i was at the university of connecticut. i was a first-year first-year professor. i received my ph.d from