Across the Street is Mexico: Invention and Persistence of the Border Town Curio Landscape

Abstract

Across the Street is Mexico: Invention and Persistence of the Border Town Curio Landscape D a n iel D . A rreo la Professor, Department of Geography Arizona State University, Tempe AZ 85287 Presidential address delivered to the Association o f Pacific Coast Geographers, 61st Annual Meeting, Flagstaff, Arizona, October 16, 1998 iiI t WILL BE A LITTLE PLAZA but it will be totally themed so it looks like you walked into Mexico,” says Gail Chase, general man­ ager of Desert Sky Mall in west Phoenix. La Placita will mimic the ambiance of a Mexican border town. “The fun of it will be cramming a lot of shops into a small space,” says Chase. “It will be fun to meander through the area and feel that you’re in a Mexican market­ place” (Arizona Republic, July 16, 1998). The notion of a themed marketplace has become something of a cliché in American retail and entertainment circles, if not in Ameri­ can landscape study (Relph 1987; Goss 1993). Even the kitschy Mexican border town hook is “old sombrero,” or “b.D.,” because similar contrived landscapes appeared in southern California “be­ fore Disneyland.” 9 10 APCG YEARBOOK • VOLUME 61 • 1999 Arguably, the beginning of this particular form of Mexico-land promotion has its root in those north Mexican border towns that have so viled yet captivated North American tourist imaginations for more than a century (Arreola 1996). Contrived and pretentious as it may be, one can still be impressed with the staying power of this land­ scape; few modern commercial hypes have enjoyed such longevity (Figure 1). Persistence begs the question: “W hy?” Historians (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) may have given birth to the notion of “invented tradition” as an academic concept, but we should not for­ get Woody Allen's admonition via his recent film Deconstructing Harry; “Tradition,” he said, “is the illusion of permanence.” As geographers we have asked questions about the invention and resilience of regional landscape images. One thinks, for example, of Joseph W ood's (1991) interpretation about the shaped identity and persistence of the New England village as a popular icon and how it Figure 1—The curio landscapes of Mexican border towns like Tijuana exhibit a form of commerce that is more than a century old. Photo by author, 1996. ARREOLA: Across the Street is Mexico 11 is possible to transport such landscape to the Mendecino coast of California. Or Donald Meinig’s (1979) symbolic communities in­ cluding Main Street with its origins in the Middle West, and its reproductions across the Far West including Meinig’s home region of the Palouse in eastern Washington. Others have stirred this pot from more postmodern positions; to wit, Kay Anderson’s (1987) quite useful argument for understanding the construction of a racial cat­ egory via Chinatown, and most recently, architectural historian Chris W ilson’s (1997) brilliant deconstruction of The Myth of Santa Fe: Creation o f a Regional Tradition, wherein Wilson shows quite con­ vincingly the truth of John Caulfield’s (1994) oft-repeated definition of postmodern— something that is a copy of a non-existent original. My story is less well known, but the subject is equally romantic. And, I would maintain, it is also geographic because it concerns an image of a culture— Mexican; a process of exchange— tourism; and the invention of a place— the border town curio landscape. Mexican Expo to Mexican Vogue Mexico and Mexicans became especially curious to the world following the long sleep of Spanish colonial control that ended in 1821. In my doctoral dissertation, Landscape Images of Eastern Mexico: A Historical Geography of Travel, I explored the nature of geographical knowledge about Mexico as revealed in the popular travel account (Arreola 1982). To me, this was a kind of “geosophy,” a word coined by John Kirtland Wright (1947) to describe geographi­ cal knowledge from any and all possible points of view. While travel narratives and their illustrations can be devices for uncovering im­ age about place, the foreign travel account is, by definition, an assessment by an outsider and not, therefore, a self-conscious repre­ sentation. Perhaps the earliest means whereby Mexico promoted itself to the world as a...