Tijuana

• 1. Introduction

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  Tijuana sits at the very edge of Mexico, the westernmost city in the country, pressed against the line where California ends and Latin America begins. More than fifty million people cross between Tijuana and its sister city San Diego every year, along a border of about 24 km. It is the most visited border city in the world. As of 2024 its population reached 2,297,000, making it the most populous city in northern Mexico and one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the nation. Yet the same city that draws tourists also ranks among the most violent on earth by homicide rate. How did a cattle ranch named for an aunt become a manufacturing powerhouse, a culinary destination, and a place where danger and ambition live side by side? The answers begin with a single Spanish land grant and a disputed word in a vanishing language.

• 2. The Name Dispute

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  Rancho Tía Juana is the name Santiago Argüello Moraga gave the land he received on a Mexican land grant in 1829. The first Spanish mission recorded the settlement under shifting spellings: Rancho Tía Juana, then Tihuan, and finally Tijuana. When the city was founded under that final spelling in 1889, the older form Tia Juana lingered. It stayed the English name for the river and for a U.S. settlement, now part of San Ysidro, until roughly 1916. Historians lean toward the view that Tía Juana came from the Kumeyaay word Tiwan, meaning by the sea, drawn from the language of the First Nations people of the San Diego-Tijuana region. Urban legend tells a different story. It claims Tía Juana, Spanish for Aunt Jane, was a real woman whose inn fed and housed travelers. No record of such an inn exists. The first building in the area was Argüello's own, raised only after he had already named his ranch. In California, the city is simply called T.J.

• 3. From Rancho To Border

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  The Kumeyaay, Yuman-speaking hunter-gatherers, held this land long before any European saw it. In 1542, the colonist Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo toured the coastline, and Sebastián Vizcaíno mapped it in 1602. By 1769, Juan Crespí was documenting the place that would later be called the Valley of Tijuana. The deciding moment came in 1848. As a result of the Mexican-American War, Mexico lost Alta California, and the line between the two Californias shifted north between San Diego and Tijuana. Of the roughly 1,000 Hispanic families living in Alta California, most stayed on the American side, but some moved south to remain inside Mexico. Suddenly the area carried a new purpose. Once a place of ranchers, it became a zone of farming, livestock grazing, and passage for prospectors. In 1889, descendants of Santiago Argüello and Augustín Olvera agreed to develop the city, and the date of that agreement, the 11th of July 1889, is honored as Tijuana's founding.

• 4. Vice And Glamour

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  The California land boom of the 1880s sent the first wave of tourists south, called excursionists, many chasing echoes of Helen Hunt Jackson's novel Ramona. The Panama-California Exposition of 1915 in San Diego drew crowds that Tijuana met with a Feria Típica Mexicana, complete with curio shops, regional food, thermal baths, horse racing, and boxing. The first professional race track opened in January 1916, just south of the border gate, then was nearly destroyed at once by the great Hatfield rainmaker flood of that same year. Prohibition turned the city into a magnet. In the 1920s, U.S. nationals crossed for legal drinking and gambling, and the Avenida Revolución area became the tourist center, with casinos and the birthplace of the Caesar salad. In 1928 the Agua Caliente Touristic Complex opened, with a hotel, spa, dog-track, private airport, golf course, and casino. During its eight years, Hollywood stars and gangsters flew in to play, and Rita Hayworth was discovered there. A singer known as la Faraona was shot in a love-triangle and gave birth to the legend of a beautiful lady ghost. In 1935, President Cárdenas decreed an end to gambling and casinos in Baja California, and the complex faltered and closed. The buildings reopened in 1939 as a junior high school and were finally torn down in the 1970s.

• 5. The Maquiladora Engine

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  In 1965, the Mexican federal government launched the Border Industrialization Program to draw foreign investment, and Tijuana filled with maquiladoras, the assembly factories that diversified its economy. Manufacturing work pulled people from across Mexico, and the population swelled from less than half a million in 1980 to almost a million by 1985. The city's proximity to Southern California, paired with a large, skilled, and relatively inexpensive workforce, made it a favorite for foreign companies exporting under NAFTA. At its peak, in 2001, Tijuana held roughly 820 of these plants. Most maquiladora jobs began at MX$100 per day, about 5 US dollars as of September 2016, well above the Mexican minimum wage of Mex$57.46. Companies that built here include Medtronic, Sony, BMW, Toyota, Dell, Samsung, Ford, Microsoft, Airbus, and Volkswagen, many clustered in the Otay Mesa and Florido sections. In the past decade the city became the medical device manufacturing capital of North America, surpassing the previous leader, Minneapolis-Saint Paul. Scantibodies announced a new plant of 130,000 square meters devoted to medical devices, a build to suit by FINSA.

• 6. Reinventing The Skyline

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  Cartolandia, or Paperland, was the name for the wide plain of cardboard and metal shacks that the Tijuana River once flooded east and southeast of downtown. In 1972, work began on the first concrete channeling of the river, clearing the shacks and adding 1.8 million square meters of usable land. On it rose the Zona Río. The 1981 opening of the Plaza Río Tijuana mall and the 1982 Tijuana Cultural Center, known as CECUT, made Zona Río the commercial heart of a modern city. New boulevards with monument-filled roundabouts evoked the grand Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City. The skyline itself is young. Among the first highrises were the twin towers of the Grand Hotel Tijuana, and a building boom later stalled with the Great Recession. The Trump Ocean Resort Baja Mexico, planned for Playas at 98 m, never rose. The current tallest building, New City Residential, reaches 102 m. From Tijuana's skyline the San Diego skyline can be seen, though the high hills around central Tijuana usually block the reverse view.

• 7. Cartels And Bloodshed

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  Tijuana is the birthplace and base of the Tijuana Cartel, and that fact has shaped its reputation as much as any tourist draw. From 2007 through 2010 the city suffered a high level of violent crime tied to gang warfare, the Mexican drug war, and human trafficking. Homicides peaked in 2010, when 844 people were killed, compared with 355 in 2004. In April 2008, police found 1,500 shell casings on city streets after a single battle left 13 suspected drug traffickers dead. The violence stemmed from a turf war, as the administration of President Felipe Calderón weakened the local Arellano Félix cartel, and it slowed when the larger Sinaloa cartel took control. The killing returned later. By the end of 2017 the number of murders reached 1,744, almost double those of 2016. In 2018, OECD data recorded 2,253 homicides, equal to 129.8 per 100,000 inhabitants. The fear reached beyond residents. Around 2008, thousands of Tijuana's elite bought homes in Bonita and Eastlake in Chula Vista, California, to escape violence and kidnapping. In 1994, the PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was assassinated in the plaza of Lomas Taurinas; the shooter was caught, but doubts about the mastermind remain.

• 8. A Cultural Mecca

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  Newsweek once called Tijuana one of the most important new cultural meccas, and the label fits a city with a fierce independent art scene. In 2004, the city won international acclaim for an art exhibition displayed on the cement banks of the Tijuana River and along the border fence in Otay Mesa. Collectives like Bulbo and film projects like Palenque Filmaciones, behind the award-winning Tijuana Makes Me Happy, push different realities of the city outward. Music runs just as deep. Javier Batiz founded a group in 1957, absorbing the blues and R&B of T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King that crossed the border. In 1962 the American trumpeter Herb Alpert found inspiration at the bullfights and formed The Tijuana Brass after his hit The Lonely Bull. In the 1990s the band Tijuana No! emerged, blending ska, punk, and reggae, with Julieta Venegas as a vocalist on the song Pobre de ti before her solo career won her two Grammys. The city is also the birthplace of the Nortec and Ruidoson electronic styles. Its food has earned its own fame, with Baja Med cuisine and chefs such as Javier Plascencia, alongside tacos, food trucks, and artisanal beer. Tijuana now receives 2.5 million medical tourists per year, a number that hints at how many reasons people still find to cross its border.