Border-City Idee Fixe

Abstract

is one of those places that almost everyone has heard of. Mention the city's name and vivid images come to mind: the jail, raunchy cantinas and strip joints, prostitutes, drugs, sad-eyed donkeys painted to look like zebras, and taxi driven selling pictures of their sisters. Everyone knows about Tijuana. - Ernst C. Griffin and Larry R. Ford, Tijuana: Landscape of a Culture Hybrid, 1976 While everyone knows about TJ, it is also true that few indeed know beyond Avenida Revolucion, its sometimes revolting but never dull tourist strip. Essayist Richard Rodriguez correctly observed that Tijuana is . . . a metropolis crouched behind a hootchy-kootch curtain. . .: The that Americans grew up with was a city they thought they had created. The that has grown up is a city that will re-create us (Rodriguez 1987, 42). Today is nearly the largest of the many bustling urban nodes that crowd the Mexican side of the border where Latin America abuts Anglo-America [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The image of the place as a tawdry tourist destination is still common among North Americans and is, by blanket extension, the image they have of all Mexican border towns (Curtis and Arreola 1989). In fact, the tourist caricature of the Mexican border city is only one of several distorted, yet persistent, illusions we sustain of these places; places we think we know but actually only know about. Our ideas about these places have become fixed, immutable in our collective consciousness. GEMINI COMPLEX One of the strongest impressions of Mexican border towns is that they are where an American counterpart complements the Mexican place and where each closely straddles the borderline (Kearney and Knopp 1995). This compulsion to see the places as twins is not surprising, because many border towns are indeed paired settlements where physical proximity implies a certain relationship and interaction. There are, it should be mentioned, exceptions, like Camargo, Tamaulipas - which does not hug the border and therefore stands independent of its American cohort of Rio Grande City, Texas - and Sonoita, Sonora - which is a mile or so from the border and its tiny American complement, Lukeville, Arizona. Nevertheless, many of the paired settlements have long-standing social connections that are hinted at by their vernacular names: Los Dos Laredos, for Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas; or Ambos Nogales, for Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona. But coupled settlements are not the same as twins. The genetic implication of twin cities suggests communities that have been generated from one seed and, therefore, have identical characteristics. In almost all instances in which places are compared, however, this assertion does not hold, as a traveler to the Texas border observed: As we walked through Nuevo Laredo, waiting for the bus to leave, it seemed in some ways as if we had entered the looking-glass double of the older town across the river. Laredo had been the most Mexican town we saw in the United States, and this was the most American town we were to see in Mexico. . . . But, despite its dependence on American money, despite the strength of American influences on its life, Nuevo Laredo was still Mexican in a way Laredo can never be again. (Woodcock 1957, 20-21) One difference is variation in the founding dates of border towns (Arreola and Curtis 1993, 13-22). A few of the Mexican settlements were planted during the Spanish colonial era, mostly along the Texas borderland: for example, Paso del Norte in 1659 (Ciudad Juarez since 1888) and Reynosa in 1749. Yet El Paso and McAllen, the American border towns that face these places, are, like most Mexican and American border communities, essentially late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century settlements. Even where the towns have strong social relationships, as in Los Dos Laredos, there can be a time lag between the dates of founding. …