This chapter immerses the reader in Tijuana in 2021, portraying the city as both gateway and bottleneck for African and other displaced migrants attempting to reach the U.S. border. It traces how shelters, makeshift camps, churches, NGOs, and state offices configure a fragmented humanitarian landscape in which people are constantly waiting, negotiating rules, and recalibrating their plans. The chapter foregrounds the sensory and emotional textures of life in limbo: overcrowded spaces, bureaucratic queues, and everyday strategies to secure food, information, and minimal safety. By following African migrants’ interactions with shelter workers, smugglers, local residents, and border authorities, the interlude shows how racialization, gender, and legal status shape access to protection and mobility. Tijuana emerges not simply as a border city, but as a key node in transcontinental migration infrastructures, where enforcement and care, violence and solidarity, coexist. This interlude thus sets the stage for the individual life histories that follow, situating them within the broader urban and geopolitical dynamics of the U.S.–Mexico border.