San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Border: How San Diego, Tijuana create hybrid communities
San Diego, Tijuana create hybrid communities on far corners of their countries
With Presidentelect Joe Biden promising to address — and likely fundamentally change — the current situation at the U. S. Mexico border, it is important that we first understand just what that situation is.
I have just spent a couple of years writing my new book, “El Tercer Pais” —
Spanish for The Third Country — about the true nature of life at the border of San Diego and Tijuana, meeting everyone from the power brokers to everyday people on both sides of the wall to understand their lives and their attitudes toward those on the other side of the border wall.
What I came to understand is that just about everything most Americans — including myself — and most Mexicans believe about the border, and life on the other side, is wrong. Remarkably, this is even true for nearly half of the residents of both cities who have never visited the other side. If we are to ever solve the riddle of the border, we need to explode those stereotypes and see the border as it really exists today, and not through a lens created decades ago.
For example, here is some of that reality. The wall, as imposing as it is, has largely been assimilated by residents of both cities. On the San Diego side, streets of the hugely popular Las Americas Outlets retail center actually end at the wall. Who shops in that mall? Mostly prosperous Mexicans — because, despite the old stereotype, highend retail goods are cheaper in the United States.
Meanwhile, on the Tijuana side, the wall forms the backdrop to maquiladora factories. Contrary to the old image of Tijuana as curio shops and craft workers, these huge factories — which likely made the pacemaker in your chest and the Toyota truck you drive, as well as hundreds of sophisticated electronic products — use the latest AI and robotics.
As a classic example of how the popular image is turned upside down, consider Taylor Guitars. Where does it make its custom craft guitars? San Diego. Its technologically innovative, massproduced guitars? Just across the border.
Remember those traffic signs warning San Diegans about families of illegal aliens risking their lives running across freeways? Those signs are now in museums. The stereotype of hordes of poor, undocumented Mexicans swarming over the border hasn’t been the case now for decades. The reality: The latest immigrants are mostly from Central America. And it isn’t only some Americans who want the wall to keep them in
Mexico, so do a lot of Tijuana businesses. Ask a maquiladora manager in private and he is likely to say he wishes those immigrants would stay in Mexico at work in one of their factories — and in return, they’ll arrange for them to earn a high school or college degree, pay them competitive wages, train them, provide daycare and even let them hold their weddings on weekends in the cafeteria.
That leads to another truth: The wall isn’t really a barrier to most people, at least not on the San DiegoTijuana border.
Indeed, as much as the effort has been to expand this barrier in recent years, a simultaneous initiative of new ports of entry, fast pass lanes, and other programs has been devoted to making the once hourslong crossing as brief as possible. As a result, for many of the tens of thousands of people crossing back and forth each day, it has become an increasingly simple commute.
And who are those people? Doctors from Chula Vista heading south to work at the hospitals of Tijuana ( the world’s most popular destination for medical tourism), students from Tijuana attending classes at San Diego’s universities, business people with offices on both sides.
All of these changes are the result of 40 years of growing engagement — by civic leaders dealing with common regional issues, mothers making friendships at school events with other mothers from the other side, academics studying the nature of the border, law enforcement working in concert to fight crime, and business people forming alliances and making crossborder investments — to find a common cause based on an increasing recognition of a common destiny. Both cities, located on the far corners of their respective countries, have found that, in many ways, they have more in common with each other than with their national capitals. And, at the very border, the two cities are creating a new and distinct hybrid culture: El Tercer Pais.
That rapprochement is likely to only grow in coming years as the two cities become more integrated — and view each other with ever more respect. This will be especially true as Tijuana surpasses San Diego in population and its per capita income continues to rise.
Something unique is taking place in San Diego and Tijuana that promises to be model of crossborder relationships throughout the world — and a lesson to their home countries. And it is likely to make the wall between them increasingly irrelevant.