Rocky Point, also known as Puerto Peñasco, has long been a popular destination for tourists, particularly those from Arizona. The beaches and bars have been a draw for decades, with many college students and other visitors making the trip south. However, the safety of the journey along Mexico’s Federal 8 highway has been a significant concern.
People enjoy the coastal breeze at the port in Rocky Point.
Binational Safety Corridor: A Collaborative Effort
To address these safety issues, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Sonora Gov. Claudia Pavlovich announced the creation of a safety corridor along Federal 8 in December. This project aims to improve road safety through several measures:
- Bilingual road signs to guide drivers.
- Better trained medical and law enforcement first responders.
The project, dedicated in March, is the first binational safety corridor linking the United States and Mexico.
“It’s a dangerous situation because it’s a two-lane road,” said Tom Herrmann, spokesman for the Arizona Department of Transportation. In addition, speed-limit signs south of the border transition from miles to kilometers per hour, which also can confuse American drivers.
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Key Components of the Safety Corridor
A major component of the project is an increase in Mexican police officers and first responders who have been specially trained by ADOT. With law enforcement agencies working together, Herrmann said, safety personnel can get to crashes much more quickly.
“We try to coordinate with paramedics, try to coordinate with the hospitals, whether that’s in Mexico or across the border in Arizona,” he said.
ADOT spent nothing but time to train Mexican officials, Herrmann said, and Sonora officials will decide how much signage they will install and how much medical personnel they will dedicate to the corridor.
Mexican municipal, state and federal police park along the side of the safety corridor near Sonoyta.
“People will come in with more confidence,” he said, which will increase the tourism dollars on which northern Sonora depends. always has played a role in the city’s economy, and the safety corridor is one way to help maintain that relationship.
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Sonoyta police Officer Juan Francisco Portela Hernandez walks near a border checkpoint in Mexico.
“There’s always been that American community that has been a part of the growth of Peñasco, and it will continue to be because there’s a big connection,” Altamarino said.
While many tourists come from Arizona, Puerto Peñasco has seen an increase in visitors from other states.
Department of Transportation. Department of State, in a March 16 travel warning, urged travelers to “reconsider” going through Sonora, although it identified Sinaloa and Michoacán as the most dangerous states.
“We love Mexico, and we love coming to the warmer climate,” Patrina Bryant said.
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is beneficial to the state, and travelers should feel confident south of the border.
“I would have to say that tourists should visit us,” Martinez said. “It’s secure, and it’s the most beautiful in the whole state.
“This is just a strengthening of the relationship,” Herrmann said. “It was embraced by people of both states, and we’re very excited that it’s in place.
Mexico’s Federal 8 highway between Lukeville and Puerto Peñasco.
Combat Sports Resurgence in New York City's Nightlife
From an East Williamsburg rave to a Manhattan private club, combat sports are on the menu.
Before this year, I didn’t know a single thing about combat sports. My understanding of the relationship between competition and partying was formed over a handful of moderate bar trivia performances. The only fight I had paid money to watch was a student debate in grad school, and it sucked. But when a friend told me about this rave going down in Brooklyn's East Williamsburg, with Rae Sremmurd headlining and a live MMA fight in the middle of it, my interest was piqued.
So, to be honest, was my skepticism. I knew tech moguls were training in Muay Thai and threatening to hit each other on X. The yuppiest people I knew from college were joining brand-name boxing gyms in their transplant cities. I pictured the new wave of UFC spectators as downtown reactionaries still jonesing for conservative-coded provocation. But combat sports have been a quasi-legal fixture of New York City nightlife for over a century, and some of that still-vibrant spirit has translated into a new circuit of events drawing big crowds to warehouses in the Brooklyn boonies and slick venues in Queens. Or so I discovered on my journey across three boroughs in an effort to experience and understand New York City’s fight nights. I winced. I sweated profusely. I ate my assumptions. I stood in awe.
“If a fight breaks out at the playground, everybody and their mom’s gonna go watch it. Humans watch these things.” This is the thesis of Bekim Trenova, the mastermind party promoter behind the party series Fight Night (FNT). He’s the one who thought to book Rae Sremmurd. The FNT crowd is young and cool, and his fights have the added appeal of hot ring girls and the unceasing throb of techno. Some of the trainers and fighters I spoke with rolled their eyes at FNT’s fights-as-set-pieces; others wanted in on Trenova’s momentum, lauding him as a visionary who’d been first to fill a now obvious niche.
At an FNT rave last spring, the vast converted warehouse is murky-dark and pulsing. The crowd keeps their puffers and leather on against the clammy air leaking through the windows. They pack in on three sides of the gated-off ring in which Trenova, in a crisp white shirt with the mic pulled tight to his lips, screams practiced spitfire. At the start of each match, the spotlight hits the sweat-lacquered fighters like a hammer.
“I'm just going to compare it to a night at the great hall at the Brooklyn Mirage,” said Orlando, a fighter competing that night. Like the epically proportioned EDM venue, at FNT, “you walk in and it's about to be the dopest night of your life. Bekim is going apeshit, like….” He searched for the word. “Like a circus handler.”
Trenova’s first fight-party, in 2009, was an unsanctioned matchup between local amateur fighters and guys he had met while working as a model. “I was having the face of Armani fight this other kid from Harlem, and the face of Calvin Klein fight some other hood kid.” A 2014 Dazed zine captured the haywire scrappiness of FNT’s early years.
“Fighting wasn’t that popping then, to be honest,” Trenova said. These days, “popping” barely covers MMA’s blast wave of influence and fandom. Who’s at FNT now? “The coolest kids in New York,” he told me, naming off a mélange of local influencers: MadisonLST, Dine with Dez, No Strings. “All these subcultures follow me. It’s one call, and everybody’s in.”
Trenova’s March event featured the previously mentioned top-hatted man, breathing fire onto the out-thrust private parts of his team of enthusiastic assistants. Though now legally sanctioned, FNT maintains a spirit of transgression that might hold wider appeal now that liberals have traded their totalistic moralism for the edgier mien of “dark woke.” Earnest fervor is out. Side swipes are in. Here, the crowd is not well-versed in MMA, but they scream like hell. Some of them, Trenova told me, tap into a “primal yelling” they didn’t know they were capable of. Orlando, the fighter, said, “I was more excited to show off in front of that crowd than, like, actually win the fight."
A little pageantry is baked into all entertaining sports. As Trenova points out, having a rave at a fight is “like ‘Mo Bamba’ being played at a football game.” But as someone who, prior to this reporting, had never seen anyone get punched in the face, let me attest: This isn’t football. This is a different kind of spectacle entirely. The one that filled Madison Square Garden in the ’70s, when it was Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier II boxing, and drew 19th-century crowds to bare-knuckle brawls in anonymous fields outside London. In 1500s Japan, it went down on the hard-packed clay of the dohyō. It was the hottest ticket in the Roman Empire. Before that, it was animals. It’s the world’s oldest pastime. And once again we’ve returned to two dudes in a ring. There’s just something about it.
***
The gallery room at Manhattan’s Classic Cars Club on Pier 76 is called The Stable. It houses the club’s troop of steeds: the 1969 Chevy Camaro SS, the Lamborghini Huracán Performante, the Ferrari 328, et cetera, any of which can be checked out by dues-paying members for a joyride up the Hudson River. But tonight the cars have been wheeled back to the edges of the room to make space for what looks like an upmarket dinner theater in the round.
Only it’s not exactly a stage at the center of the soaring 8,000-square-foot space. Drenched in red and blue lights, flanked with tables where champagne buckets sweat, it’s a regulation-size boxing ring. Five or six times a year, the club hosts a fight night for members and their guests. The ringside tables go for $1,300. The dry-aged ribeyes go for $145. They sell a lot of steaks on fight night.
“Our members have an interest in escapism in cars,” Michael Prichinello, the club’s co-founder, told me. “We're racers. Motorsport is our go-to.” He dreamt up fight night as an extension of that inclination, appropriate for a clientele who like their entertainment high-risk and high-gloss. “Boxing is quite glamorous,” he mused. FaceTiming a few weeks ahead of the event, he looked like a reclining philosopher, gazing offscreen in a turtleneck: “When someone is risking life and limb or a particular level of safety, the spectacle is just always higher, and I think that the glamour goes along with that.”
Boxing match at a private club.
Fight night is one of the Classic Car Club’s most well-attended events and an official division competition for USA Metro Boxing, the governing body of much of amateur boxing in New York. Beyond the windowed garage doors, rolled open onto the dun-colored Hudson, a polished crowd strings the loungy terrace, cocktail glasses lolling in their hands. A flock of women who look hardly out of college glide into the room in black minidresses, stilettos clicking; long, blown-out hair swinging behind their shoulders. They settle around an open table, looking at their phones. When we take our seats so the fights can begin, a regatta of tuna tartares comes sailing in over our heads.
Noah Weinstein, who runs hospitality for the club, swings by my table to make sure I’m having the time of my life. “This is, dare I say, a bit more civilized than MMA,” he comments, noting the litany of rules and safety regulations in play: no holding and hitting, nothing below the belt, fists only, gloves on. (It’s a line that’s been drawn many times before, most famously by John McCain, who was a wrestler and boxer throughout his youth.
“It’s amazing what USA Metro Boxing does, giving these men and women a huge opportunity,” Weinstein said when I met him by the bar early in the night. “No one else is doing an event like this,” he said. “You get people from all walks of life, brushing shoulders and watching these men and women put it all out there.” The General Admission crowd, composed mainly of the fighters’ family and friends, can be heard shouting encouragement during the bouts, but, as they occupy a single row of chairs divided from the rest of the gallery by an airport stanchion, we’re not all brushing shoulders.
What unites lovers of combat sports and fast cars is an appreciation for calculated death-courting, Prichinello tells me. In racing, like in boxing, the winner is “the one who pushed a little bit further and skated on the lines of traction a little bit deeper. One physically vanquished and the other one didn't. And that's been celebrated through time, right? That's gladiatorial.” What brought the Roman patricians to the Coliseum, what drives tech elites to stage UFC-style fights at cryptocurrency conventions, and what brings Classic Car Club members to fight nights, is not, in Prichinello's estimation, an appetite for bloodshed. It’s an aspiration to what it must feel like to face the stakes and come out victorious.
“You really get to know what you're made of and where your limits are when you're in a sport like boxing or a motorsport. And I think that’s a real luxury, knowing where your limits are,” he said.
***
In the locker room at Warriors Cup, the professional and amateur Muay Thai promotion billed as the “Home of East Coast Muay Thai,” the fighters have about 10 minutes to pack up their stuff and head downstairs to a backup locker room in the basement. The locker room is about to become a nightclub and the DJ needs to set up-partygoers are already lining up on the sidewalk outside. For now, we’re upstairs at the Melrose Ballroom, a multi-use venue in northwest Queens. The athletes who have already fought tonight are napping on the benches in sweats or getting ready to go out themselves. Those still waiting for their time slots are stretching, doing pushups, getting their hands wrapped by their coaches in gauze and elastic. “It helps keep your bones in place,” James Guccione tells me. He’s a part owner of the promotion that runs the fight and, I learn, a sometimes pop-up baker of cream puffs and pizza. He fist bumps everyone in sight, greeting them each by name. They call him “Gooch.” There’s a curtain set up on a temporary rod, a custom meant to keep the peace between the red corner and blue corner, but here it’s mostly pulled back and no one seems to mind the borderline.
In the 2000s, when Guccione was a fighter himself, pro-level Muay Thai fights were illegal in the city, falling within a 1997 state ban on certain MMA styles that wasn’t lifted until 2016. At the time, Guccione fought for Chris Tran, who ran an earlier iteration of Warriors Cup.
Muay Thai was also veritably niche. When the unfamiliar martial art form was introduced one night in the 2000s for a single bout at Friday Night Fights (a late, great mostly boxing fight club that started in a gym basement downtown in the late ’90s), the crowd didn’t know how to react. “The moment that first kick landed, the whole crowd was like, woah,” recalled Eddie Marini, who used to matchmake for the fights. “The smack of the shins on the ribs-boxing guys had never seen that.” It went from one fight that night to two fights the next. Soon, half the card was Muay Thai. “Eventually, we got rid of the boxing.”
Marini organized Guccione’s last fight, in which his jaw was broken. “Yeah, I had James’s wife tell me how much she hated me that night,” Marini told me on a call with Guccione and Tran. They all laughed. Guccione quit fighting and the three men joined forces to become Three Pillar Promotions, dedicating themselves to giving Muay Thai the platform they feel it deserves in the US through Warriors Cup.
Below the upstairs locker room, the black-box-style event space is noisy with 850 people, by Guccione’s estimate. I slink around the VIP balcony’s edge and find my booth. We’re halfway through the card, getting to the prime fights of the evening. Flame projectors roar to life as each fighter enters to his walkout music (ranging from hardcore to Mexican ballads to hip-hop to “La Vie en Rose”). The announcer is a woman. She sounds like Bruce Buffer and wears a mint-green suit. The fighters wear mongkols: braided, wreath-like headbands representing their gym lineage that can only be removed by their trainers, just before the action. They climb into the ring and perform the Wai Kru, bowing at each corner post in a ritual that honors their teachers, opponent, and the ring itself. When both fighters are ready, the referee calls the fight to action with the Thai command “Chok!”
The Muay Thai fighter’s arsenal includes his fists, elbows, knees, and shins, which makes it a hell of a lot bloodier than boxing. “Once those elbows start hitting you in the face or the head, it's like you just open up. It’s real,” Marini said. Now I see what he means. In a delicate calculation of balance, timing, and opportunity, the fighters twist and torque their bodies to land powerful blows to their opponents’ temples, jaws, ribs, and thighs. Lips and eyebrows crack open, streaming red. “Cut men” beside the ring dab the wounds between rounds with adrenaline mixed into Vaseline, to temporarily stop the bleeding so the fight can continue. It seems to work for about 20 seconds.
When the fight is in play, the party falls silent. All one hears is the hypnotic jangling of the sarama, the traditional Thai music played during rounds, and the heavy slap of body against body, until a fighter lands a particularly effective blow. Then the crowd roars together. One of the groups pressed in behind me practices Muay Thai themselves; the other is here to see someone’s boyfriend fight somewhere down the card.
“There’s never booing. There’s never yelling at the fighter. Somebody gets hurt, everybody gets quiet to make sure that they're all right. When you go to MMA, it’s not like that. There’s no class,” Guccione said in our call. Marini concurred: “No class. Trash pandas.” At their last show, Guccione told me, they combined with a kickboxing promotion that brought in the MMA crowd.