Tijuana: Landscape of a Culture Hybrid

Abstract

IJUANA is one of those places that almost everyone has heard of. Mention the city's name and vivid images come to mind: the Tijuana jail, raunchy cantinas and strip joints, prostitutes, drugs, sad-eyed donkeys painted to look like zebras, and taxi drivers selling pictures of their sisters. Everyone knows about Tijuana. Mention that you are doing in the city and people wink knowingly, titter lecherously, or intimate that they know what kind of research you are doing (you sly devil, you). Somehow Tijuana has become tainted.' It lies beyond the pale of legitimate social scientific inquiry. A perusal of academic journals yields virtually no articles on Tijuana, and the recent (and only) scholarly book on the city does little more than reinforce the Tijuana stereotype.2 Yet Tijuana is a fantastically dynamic place. It is one of the world's most rapidly growing cities,3 a focus of massive internal migration, and a center of Mexican economic development. It is a true urban culture hybrid, with a landscape and morphology that have resulted from a volatile mixture of central Mexican tradition and Southern California pizzazz. The tremendous cultural and economic interaction taking place along the border is reshaping cultural values, attitudes, and preferences. This cultural hybridization is reflected everywhere in the landscape and is begging to be explained. We have therefore decided to do just that.