My name is José Luis Valenzuela Pérez; I am a Tijuanan by birth and by conviction. For more than three decades, I have been living at the crossroads—both literal and metaphorical—between Tijuana and San Diego: as an industrial engineer, as a college professor, and as a consultant for companies that operate on both sides of the border. But there is one aspect of my life that doesn’t appear on any résumé and yet has defined who I am just as strongly: art. For many years now, I have been practicing photography consistently and passionately. Under the pseudonym @elgatoazultj, I document Tijuana from the inside—its human portraits, its nightlife, its industrial landscapes, and its improbable skies. My lens doesn’t seek out the tourist postcard; it seeks the real texture of a city that the world usually sees from the outside—from the other side of the wall—and that I inhabit, walk through, and photograph from the inside.
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