KPBS On Air
Tijuana: Then and Now
May 1990
by Fernando Romero
I REMEMBER THE LITTLE red light inside the Romance Club, one of the many strip-tease joints that lined Tijuana's main drag in the early 1960s. It would flash when Perico, the club's crusty doorman, saw a policeman or anyone vaguely resembling an undercover cop approaching, sending the nude dancers scrambling for their G-strings.
The dancers never took their eyes off the light atop the curtained entrance, even while gyrating to the dissonant strains of the rag tag musical trio in which I played the drums. If they were caught in the nude it meant a heavy fine to the club's owner and unemployment to the offending ladies. Certain clubs didn't need a little red light. Their owners had an 'agreement" with authorities, and their sex-laden shows, featuring acts such as Beauty and the Beast and the well-endowed Norma Vincent Peel, were protected.
At the time, the Vietnam War was heating up. US. servicemen and civilians were flocking to Tijuana's bars and bordellos, continuing a tradition begun in the boozeless days of America's Prohibition, when Tijuana was nothing more than a ranch with a collection of watering holes, cathouses and a resort casino favored by America's movie stars and wealthy entrepreneurs. By the early '60s, Tijuana had become a fledgling city, but Avenida Revolucion, the main drag, still was a 24 hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week party where 50 cents would get thrill-seekers a handful of amphetamines from a corner cabbie and a dollar would fetch a beer at a night club and a close-up look at the strippers.
From the Romance's darkened bandstand I would watch the drunken sailors buy the girls watered-down drinks in exchange for a few hours of lustful petting. Outside, the night clubs' neon signs and doormen beckoned the parade of visitors to come inside. The air was filled with the sounds of police sirens and show music and the smell of frying food. As it turned out, I was witnessing the last vestiges of my city's "black legend."
Inevitably, the city that had been a rite of passage for generations of Americans began to change. I immigrated to San Diego in 1971, just as the Mexican government began the massive construction of the Tijuana River channel, aimed at developing its wide, sandy banks into the city's business and commercial district. New neighborhoods were being built almost overnight by the tens of thousands of people who, attracted by opportunity arrived yearly to the city. It was the dawn of the new Tijuana.
With the 21st century looming, the city's stock in trade is no longer sex and drugs. As the KPBS-produced documentary The New Tijuana, airing Thursday May 24, at 8 p.m., demonstrates, the city that was once Mexico's ugly duckling has turned into the goose that laid the golden egg. It is a boom town -- the second most populous city on the Pacific Coast -- where commerce and industry flourish and young women work in factories and stores instead of the brothels and strip joints.
Tijuana, says economist Romero Reves, 'is the most dynamic, high-profile" city in Mexico. Its blossoming economy has been spearheaded by the maquiladora (assembly-plant) industry. It comprises more than 600 factories owned mainly by American, Mexican and Japanese interests. Everything from television sets and car brakes to toys and clothing are manufactured. In fact, more televisions are assembled in Tijuana than anywhere else in the world.
Maquiladoras employ more than 55,000 workers in Tijuana (more than 500,000 workers in Mexico in 1,600 plants), generating about $15 million in monthly revenues for the city in wages and taxes. Tourism -- the family kind -- is at an all-time high, with more than 35 million visitors expected this year. Commercial activity, spurred bv the increasing number of visitors and a growing Tijuana population that now surpasses 1.5 million, is also booming.
Shopping malls and name-brand stores sprout overnight. Construction goes on everywhere, from the fashionable River Zone business district to El Florido, a four-year-old neighborhood on the city's eastern rim that is now home to 10,000 families. The four-lane Avenida Paseo de los Heroes (Walk of the Heroes) that cuts across the business district has replaced Revolucion Avenue as the city's main thoroughfare, Lined with trees and modern buildings that house a cultural center, banks, hotels, supermarkets, shopping malls, discos and furniture stores, the two-mile Paseo de los Heroes gives witness to Tijuana's progress. So does the Agua Caliente Plaza, a massive building near the Caliente Racetrack, whose 300-foot twin towers have become the city's trademark.
All of this industry is creating enough jobs to make Tijuana the only city in Mexico virtually without unemployment, says economist Reyes. Tijuana, he says, has become Mexico's financial model for the future. The Mexican government, saddled with a foreign debt of more than $100 billion, is trying to turn the economy around by opening its markets to foreign investment. It is also seeking to turn its industrial base into an exporting powerhouse. Tijuana has shown the way, Reyes says, and the government is ready to follow.
At age 100 Tijuana celebrated its centennial last July, the city that U.S. author Ovid Demaris once described as "the toughest, roughest, gaudiest, filthiest, loudest -- the most larcenous, vicious, predacious -- the wickedest bordertown of them all,"' has turned into a respected, if somewhat tarnished, matron.
Such a metamorphosis could not have occurred without the changes that took place just 20 miles to the north, where social changes and progress have transformed San Diego from a sleepy Navy town into a modern city with a multi-faceted economy. Entrepreneurs from Mexico and other countries have seen the financial advantages of being close to California and its economic clout, and their presence in Tijuana is creating no small amount of economic potential.
Historically, the relationship between San Diego and Tijuana has been strained. Tijuana's reputation as a corrupt, sinful city has not entirely been erased. However, there are signs that the relationship is improving. Officials from both cities are seeking cooperative solutions to common border problems, and the cities' economies are becoming intertwined. The maquiladora industry for example, straddles the border allowing companies to operate manufacturing plants on both sides at considerable savings. In addition, Tijuanans last year spent about $1.5 billion in San Diego.
However, despite its evident progress. Tijuana still is a Third World city struggling to solve enormous socioeconomic ills. The consequences of decades of governmental mismanagement and corruption, and lack of infrastructural planning are taking a heavy toll. Tijuana's founding fathers did not foresee hundreds of thousands of immigrants who would overrun established boundaries, settle in rugged hills and canyons surrounding the city and tax the basic services. The effects of poor urban planning during the 1950s, when the flow of immigrants started in earnest, are now being felt by a city bursting at the seams.
For instance, only half the city -- downtown, the River Zone business district, the La Mesa district, and several wealthy and semi-wealthy neighborhoods -- is properly urbanized, with well laid-out streets and infrastructure. The other half, composed mainly of shanty towns perched on hillsides or sprawled in valleys, has been built helter-skelter. Many neighborhoods have no plumbing, paved streets or electricity. Only about 70 percent of the population gets water service.
The problems don't stop with housing. Yearly, 40 percent of the population is cut off from health care services. The city's general hospital, which along with the overburdened Red Cross hospital provides free care for the poor, struggles to stay open, sometimes lacking the most essential medical supplies, such as gauze.
Walking the Streets of Tijuana and meeting with its leaders, I See many signs that these problems may go the way of the city's black legend -- into the past. The winds of political change sweeping through Eastern Europe and Latin America have also been felt in this city and the rest of Baja California. Last July 38-year-old Ernesto Ruffo Appel of the rightist National Action Party (PAN) stunned Mexico by winning the state governorship, becoming the first opposition governor in the country in 61 years. Tired of the years of inept and corrupt rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the electorate voted its representatives out of office. The PRl had not lost a presidential or gubernatorial race since its inception in 1929.
On the coattails of the charismatic Ruffo -- who was born in San Diego but renounced his U.S. citizenship at 18 to serve in the Mexican military -- the PAN also won the mayoral races in Tijuana and Ensenada and nine of 18 state congressional seats. The PANistas have promised honesty in the handling of public funds and a total restructuring of the state and city administrations. They are focusing their government programs on citizen participants and on providing housing and regular service for the poor.
For the last six and a half years I have witnessed part of Tijuana's remarkable transformation. The lazy, acquiescent town of old is now a vibrant metropolis where most of the rich and poor toil for an honest buck. Occasionally I stroll along Avenida Revolucion, stopping in front of the curio and leather-goods shop where the Romance Club once stood. Over the clamor of bargain-hunting tourists, echoes of the club's music flood my consciousness, bringing back the images of an older Tijuana, a Tijuana that is not only gone, but is well on its way to being forgotten. In its place is rising a new city that may well represent the future -- not only for Mexico, but for San Diego and the other cities perched along the western edge of the Pacific Rim.