TIJUANA

This is a brief sampling of histories, geographies and ideas of one of the most dynamic and volatile border cities of North America. My obsession lies in, how does this 126-year-old city deal with culture, identity and its future? Tijuana is a city always looking to cannibalize a past in order to project itself into the future. A city always deceiving, always contrasting, a heterotopia in re-mix. It is evident (at least to me) that the city evades all definitions. Yet, at the end of the 20th century Tijuana became known as the laboratory of postmodernism and a poster child of urban informality and hybridity. This short presentation will be to places that are important to the understanding of its urban landscapes, histories and cultural practices that form the multiple imaginaries of the city.

Tijuana as an idea. The Beginning! In 1889 Mexico City engineer Ricardo Orozco was hired to give order to the various ranches that had been established before the Mexican American war of 1848. Orozco was trained at the famous Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City and his training was influenced by French Positivism and urban ideas of Garden City planning from the US. This positivist ideals and the new plan for Tijuana marked the beginning of the myth of the city and the birth of a conscience of otherness, not Mexican in its totality and not American in its influence. Antonio Padilla, Tijuana urban historian mentions, “one of the prime relations between the map and the ideals of positivism influenced by Agusto Comte, was the rejection at the onset of a return to a historical tradition typified by the Hispano-Colonial model conformed by a grid with a center as the seat of religious and political power. The Zaragosa plan was an idea, a utopic endeavor of Orozco and the influence of his training, yet once the plan was laid out and implemented it went through radical and violent changes.

“I am only concerned with what is not mine. Law of Man. Law of the cannibal.”

Oswald De Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto”

Cuantas Tijuanas The Writer Richard Rodriguez once said, Tijuana is a city of world-class irony. The city is being reconfigured and rethought constantly by globalization, economic disparity and by the struggle of a society to cope with the myth of illegality, which has now become a ruthless reality. It is a common saying that to name something is to understand it, and Tijuana has been subjugated to countless baptisms such as; Tijuana Hybrid, Tijuana Third Nation, Tijuana Cultural Mecca, Tijuana Post Border and so on. Yet, as Fiamma Montezemolo once said, Tijuana is not Tijuana, because if all truths are fictitious, or partial constructions, Tijuana, evidences that she has thousands of relative truths. It has a mimetic or canabalistic tendency to conceive itself, at least for a certain moments, similar but no quite as Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles, E.B. White’s New York ,or any other urban image is sees fit to present itself as. Tijuana itself. Tijuana’s search for otherness is a type of defense mechanism, a means of survival and in others cases it allows the creation of a fictional world. As our mutual friend Rafa Saveddra, writer, DJ and Tijuanologists, explains, "Build your own idea of the city... TJ is too real to be a simulacrum, too artificial to be a legitimizing act. Tijuana is the chip and the software to recreate, feign and sell our own voices". .

Tijuana would reincarnate into its notorious sin-city image due to the influence of two major entertainment infrastructures located in the Tijuana River Valley, the Tijuana Racetrack and the Agua Caliente Casino. And in 1928 American entrepreneurs, trying to make a profit by making Tijuana an early Las Vegas, founded the Agua Caliente Casino. They employed Los Angeles architect Wayne McAllister for the design of the building. The Casino pampered Hollywood celebrities such as Buster Keaton and Rita Hayworth; had racehorse jackpots in the thousands of dollars; and encouraged the opening of bars and hotels in Downtown’s infamous Revolution Avenue, Tijuana’s famous street and stage set for Hollywood films like The Tijuana Story, Amercia’s Bargain Basement of Sin. It is relevant to say that Los Angeles or “Hollywood” for that matter - was responsible for the characterization of Tijuana throughout the 20th century. The city’s reputation had more to do with the cultural hype of California, than with the history of Mexico. .

(…Only visited when nobody is watching…)

In 1939 the Casino closed it doors. Yet, entertainment was still Tijuana’s panacea! Big bands, piano bars, cocktail lounges and affordable booze catered to visitors from the north 24 hours a day – sin city was born. It was visitors like Jelly Roll Morton, Jack Johnson, Nat King Cole and literary figures such as Earnest Hemingway that gave a fresh jazzy look and feel to the city. Tijuana wanted to be modern no matter what it took! As the famous LA born musician Herb Alpert once said, “Tijuana is a spectacle, a garish border town… But it is also sometimes a strangely wistful place.” .

Tijuana ≤ New York Fantasy The city of Caesar (salad)

It wasn't until the early 50’s that the Mexican Government realized Tijuana was an American city in its own territory or as the writer Heriberto Yepez said, “Tijuana is the only American city governed by Mexico!” To Mexico City authorities Tijuana lacked a sense of national identity and presented to foreign visitors a strong limit, a rapture between what was Mexican “Tijuana is not Mexico” Ramond Chandler once wrote in The Last Good Bye, So, they drafted a plan (again) that included a wide boulevards similar to the Paseo Reforma in Mexico City with roundabouts and large scale statues of national heroes that intended to foster national pride to the border. And After 40 years this acts of national modernism never became strong symbol of the collective memory, Maybe because, In Tijuana - everyone is always about to leave! .

“Tijuana is not Mexico” Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1953, p. 27.

In the 1970’s Tijuana became one of Mexico’s fastest-growing cities attracting hundreds of migrants from southern states to the borderland’s manufacturing centers. The new workers settled in canyons and riverbeds in the city. When industrial parks began to appear in other areas south of the border, they attracted informal residential communities around them. At this moment, the paradox between government-sponsored urban projects in the cause of nationalism and the opening of the borders to international industries became the moment for the re-codifying of Tijuana. The onset of the Hybrid City! .

Globalization has increased the movement of people goods, services, information, news products and money and thereby the presence of urban characteristics in rural areas and of rural traits in urban centers. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums

The American dream came in a box. In the infamous box of the manufacturing plant, the box house of the factory worker that redefined once again the realities of the border town and gave impetus to semantic restructuring of the cities built environment. .

“I promise to convert the City of Tijuana to an equal or better city than San Diego, California.”

Hank Rhon, Tijuana Mayor 2004-2006

Yet, for some resistance was not futile, but as De Andrade explains the subversive attitude of the city, has permitted the production of an autonomous and original culture, until now .

«Tijuana is the happiest place on Earth»

Krusty The Clown, The Simpsons