One day in 1968 when Juan and Abel Velazquez were 15 years old, their father sat them down and placed before them canvases of black velvet.
Jose Velazquez had been a boxer in Mexico City. Later, he taught himself cartooning and, from there, to paint on velvet, which is how he was supporting his family.
"Time for playing is over," he told them. "It's time to make money."
He took up a brush, dabbed it in pink paint and handed down to his sons the one craft he knew. Starting with a simple classic of Tijuana velvet, he taught them to paint the Pink Panther. When their attention or brush strokes strayed, he grabbed his sons by the hair and shook them.
"We just wanted to go out and play," says Abel.
Other velvet icons followed: Snoopy, the Playboy Bunny, John Wayne, prowling tigers, black lovers, white lovers, Jim Morrison. The Velazquez twins became known as "The Photographers" because what they painted invariably looked so much like its subject.
They were not the first velvet painters in Tijuana, but they are now almost the last. Like bleary boxers who fight on despite too many rounds, the Velazquez twins still lug their velvets around Tijuana trying to sell them to tourists, never with much luck.
After decades of defining Tijuana, velvet painting is disappearing. Only seven or eight painters still do velvet, and none of them is young. In the entire city of Tijuana, more than 1 million people strong, only three men regularly paint Elvis on velvet.
One of them is Enrique Felix. "My children now are in their 20s," says Felix, who owns a curio shop. "I don't want them to do this. This is a good way to die of hunger. When we die, no one will know the technique. It'll be forgotten and disappear."
Tijuana is proud to be an industrial city now, a pit stop in the global economy, where 650 foreign-owned maquiladoras employ 120,000 people. Tijuana churns out roughly 20 million televisions every year, more than any city in the world.
Yet few events say change as clearly as the decline of velvet painting, the art that was Tijuana's hallmark for so long.
For the United States, the 1970s were days of lava lamps and black lights and vans with waterbeds. Tijuana was the Florence of kitsch. The city's tourist shops were virtually wallpapered in velvet painting. The city had corridors of velvet painters, where teen-agers could learn from veterans how to paint sad clowns or John F. Kennedy.
The father of all this was a debauched American billboard painter named Edgar Leeteg, who moved to Tahiti and was immortalized in the book Rascals in Paradise by James Michener and A. Grove Day. Leeteg would paint all week, then drink and carouse all Tuesday, when his money and whiskey arrived by boat.
He died during a drunken spree in 1953, leaving behind many Tahitian children, and hundreds of velvet paintings hanging in bars, restaurants, and whorehouses in Hawaii. No one remembers how velvet painting came to Tijuana. Some speculate it was through U.S. sailors, who saw Leeteg's work in Hawaii and, once back in San Diego, began asking Tijuana painters if they could do the same.
Whatever the case, velvet painting took hold in Tijuana in the late 1950s. By the 1970s, the city had a well-trained battalion of painters able to provide whatever icons of machismo and pop culture tourists wanted splashed on the fabric.
Imitation of what sold well became the prevailing ethic.
Painter Jesus Gutierrez photographed a neighbor with rugged features. Using the man's photograph as the model, he painted a bandit. The man's face became the standard bandit for dozens of Tijuana velvet painters. Through the years, they would add whiskers, an eye patch, scars, a beard, a mustache or a cigarette. But the nose, eyes and chiseled visage remain unmistakably the same man - his name lost to history.
"You paint something, and if it sells well, everyone does it," says Gutierrez, who owns a gallery in town and years ago stopped painting velvet.
Velvet quickly became the purview of immigrant merchants who visited Tijuana from around the world. Bart the Armenian lived in New Zealand and ordered 200 paintings every time he visited. An Indian fellow who lived in Trinidad and Tobago would also order 200 or 300 paintings every visit
The Canadian Arabs are remembered most fondly of all. They would arrive almost every month and order paintings in lots of a hundred. Tijuana's painters would frantically dash the work off over the next two weeks. The Arabs would fill entire big rigs with Tijuana velvet and truck it to Toronto. "They'd empty Tijuana every time they'd come," says Juan Velazquez.
Hurrying to fill an order, Jose Velazquez one day finished a canvas and tossed it aside. Later, he found it had landed face down against a blank velvet and had left a print. The Velazquez studio hushed. He swore his sons to secrecy. Soon they were painting one canvas heavy with paint then laying it against blank canvases and rubbing the two together. They'd quickly fill in some detail and have a saleable painting in a fraction of the time it took to paint it from scratch. Soon, the Velazquez home was a velvet production line.
During these years, the twins built their parents a home, paid the household expenses, bought cars and clothes, and gave money to their sisters.
One day in the mid-1980s, however, the Canadian Arabs stopped coming, without even a final goodbye. By the end of the 1980s, velvet's glory days were at a close. Painters stopped painting, died or moved away. Jose Velazquez spent the last years of his life as a cartoonist in front of the Fronton Palacio jai alai hall.
Velvet painting once defined Tijuana. In its decline, it remains a faithful barometer of that part of the city for which the world still knows Tijuana, but which is fading.
In place of velvet painting, the city has television assembly plants and, after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, thousands of middle-class folks from the capital. These days far more Mexican businessmen than American tourists visit Tijuana.
The Velazquez family continues on in velvet. Yet the brothers can't make enough selling to stores, so they take them to the street.
Recently, Abel Velazquez was prohibited from selling his paintings on the tourist bridge to Avenida Revolucion. Mixteco Indian vendors from Oaxaca - selling serapes, gum, wrestling masks and grains of rice with your name on it - complained he was hurting their sales. The final indignity is that Indians, once the most disparaged of the migrants to Tijuana, now have the political power to push around velvet painters.
"We spent our youth in velvet painting. They were nice years. But it's like everything else," says Abel Velazquez. "Everything ends."