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National Geographic : 1989 Dec
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touches on a mansion of mortar and stone. Commissioned by a Los Angeles couple, the house covers 8,500 square feet and took 70 men three years to complete. Yet it was built for only $390,000, a fraction of what the buy ers would pay for the same home in California. "We live in a state of continuous gossip about who's building and where," said Diaz, who speaks in the glib, rapid-fire tones of a Mexico City native. "Yesterday I watched a cabdriver point to my house and tell a tourist, 'That's where Sylvester Stallone lives.' " Word of all this has spread to distant states in the Mexican interior, where unemployment soars. Perhaps one out of three people living in Cabo San Lucas today is a construction worker, and hundreds more arrive each week looking for work. These newcomers live in a Baja California:Mexico's Land Apart To turnparched land intofarms, Baja Califor nians use underground water. On his ranch near Ciudad Insurgentes, where annual rain fall is four inches, Arnulfo Reyes irrigates cotton, wheat, and other crops with well water. sprawling shantytown on Cabo's north end, far beyond the village's ability to provide them with basic services like sewerage and water. "This town reminds me of Puerto Vallarta a few years ago," Luis Coppola told me. "Tre mendous growth with absolutely no planning. Private enterprise can work miracles for the Mexican economy. But we need government to give us infrastructure. Otherwise it doesn't take a genius to see the problems ahead." On the other hand, some see Baja Califor nia's chronic inefficiency as not all bad, 723
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