Tijuana Desenmascarada

Abstract

Tijuana Desenmascarada Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Tijuanan workers assembling electronics in a maquiladora. Photo from The New Tijuana (Frank Christopher, 1990). The principal trope in artistic, cultural, and intellectual representations of Tijuana is space: spaces of the border, spaces of xenophobia, and spaces of liminality. In a nineteen-thirties documentary film of a US border patrol around Tijuana, two policemen are seen driving their vehicle into the desert. They stop at a pure white column, resembling an Egyptian obelisk but inscribed with the words “US-Mexico Border.” They proceed to traverse the desert spaces on foot, occasionally dropping on one knee to inspect the sand for traces of illegales, mojados. They are like Indian scouts fleetingly the center of attention in a Western movie. Cut to a commercial silent movie, Licking the Greasers (also known as Shorty’s Trip to Mexico). Here, yanqui cowboys rescue Shorty’s (Mexican) girlfriend. As they hightail it for home, they pass by the same white, border-defining obelisk and they are safe once again. The famous monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey could not be a more potent symbol of spatial order and fealty. Globalspace Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Postcard: “Boundary Monument Between U.S. and Mexico, Tia Juana, Mexico. During the past 150 years, political and economic relations between the US and Mexico have been characterized by an ever-increasing integration. The nineteenth-century preindustrial period witnessed a border urbanization principally in centers that had been established under eighteenth-century Spanish rule, [End Page 211] including Ciudad Juárez and San Diego. The growth impetus later spread to nineteenth-century towns established as civil centers and forts under Mexican rule, including Tijuana in 1840. And finally, after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hídalgo created the international boundary, it affected towns established as forts and supply stations (e.g. El Paso, Texas), and post-Civil War settlements such as Nogales (Arizona and Sonora), Tecate (Baja California) and San Ysidro (California). Between the 1900s and 1960, the US economy moved rapidly toward industrialization, and initial linkages with Mexico were based on agriculture and tourism. Industrial growth and urbanization in the South-West were rekindled after the Great Depression, and consolidated by the second World War. Another boom (this time in agricultural employment) was stimulated by the 1942 US Emergency Farm Labor Program, also known as the Bracero Program. At first, the program employed about 50,000 Mexican workers in US agriculture; by the time it ended (in 1964) over 4.6 million contracts had been issued. Entire neighborhoods sprang up in cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, based largely [End Page 212] on temporary residents. In the early fifties, Tijuana was reputedly the fastest growing city in Mexico. But in the recession following the Korean War, US unemployment rose and the government initiated “Operation Wetback” to return Mexican laborers to their homeland. Border cities grew at record levels as returning laborers resettled. In 1954 alone, over one million Mexican braceros were deported from the United States. During the sixties the global economy entered a period of economic restructuring, associated with international financial instability, the rise of competitive trading blocs, and the oil crises of 1973 and 1979. One of Mexico’s responses to high unemployment was to initiate the Border Industrialization Project (BIP) which authorized the establishment of maquiladoras (assembly plants) in specially-designated zones. By 1992, there were over 2,000 such plants in Mexico, employing about half a million workers. 1 Several drastic devaluations of the peso also affected the industrialization process, and Mexican wage levels tumbled relative to the US. The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) simply confirmed what was obvious to most border mavens: the US and Mexican economies were increasingly being integrated and wired into the global economy. The spaces of the borderland became concrete manifestations of the emerging globalspace. Localspace Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Postcard: “El Paso de Los Angeles ‘The Pathway of the Angels’” Globalization can be traced in Tijuana’s evolving urban form. The city’s five...