Backlash on the Border: Conservatism and the Rise of the New Economy in the San Diego–Tijuana Corridor

Moving day had come. On January 20, 1974, Mexican police and heavily armed soldiers moved in on the settlement of Tierra y Libertad. Located in the heart of Tijuana, this squatter community consisted of a collection of cardboard hovels shielding their migrant occupants from the elements and representing the last vestiges of hope for a better life. Driven from the interior of Mexico by agricultural privatization, the people of Tierra y Libertad had come to Tijuana in search of economic opportunity. What they found instead was a city unequipped to meet their needs: chronic housing and water shortages plagued the quickly industrializing border metropolis. To survive, migrants forged hard-scrabble existences. Adults, both women and men, looked for employment wherever they could, whether it be in a maquiladora or agricultural work. Teenagers combed the city for recyclable materials, and young kids sold paper flowers to Anglo tourists. ¹

The people of these shanty towns were victims of a grand design to tame the Tijuana River and forge a “New Tijuana.” These types of slums, increasingly numerous by the early 1970s, represented not only an embarrassment to government officials but also an impediment to the redevelopment of Tijuana anchored around an overhauled downtown complete with new high end retail space, upscale condominiums, and a cultural center meant to attract wealthy consumers from both sides of the border. ² Such projects became possible with the consolidation of single party authoritarianism and the abandonment of ideals of the Mexican Revolution in the 1960s. Seeing Tijuana as the “gateway to the homeland,” the federal government in Mexico City moved heaven and earth, as well as impoverished communities, to initiate the largest redevelopment project in Latin American history. ³

Yet the story of the Tijuana River project and its origins is a tale of two cities. San Diego, Tijuana’s northern neighbor, shares not only an international border but also a long history of economic interdependence. The taming of the Tijuana River and the creation of “New Tijuana” were part of a string of projects born of an ecosystem in which two cities, belonging to two different nations, shared close proximity. Initially, massive development projects such as these were part of a larger cross-border booster-oriented vision that sought to remake the entire region into a consumption nexus where the economies of San Diego and Tijuana seamlessly blended together. ⁴ The San Diego Chamber of Commerce exerted much of its energy to build an international city that utilized a porous border to construct an urban space with shared infrastructure and facilities in the realms of energy, transportation, and even public education.

This vision of a more thoroughly integrated border community went unrealized. As the only majority white city on the U.S.-Mexico border, San Diego area homeowners pushed back particularly hard against cross-border economic development. Long engaged in a dogmatic defense of their quality of life, white middle-class communities perceived creeping border integration as yet another threat perpetrated by run-away business interests. Having fended off previous development efforts spearheaded by the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, white homeowners felt emboldened to utilize the political tools available to them to undermine cooperation between their city and Tijuana. ⁵

As a result, the form of development that replaced the booster vision of integration was one of an economically bifurcated metropolis in which Tijuana served as a barracks for a politically marginalized industrial working class whose exploitation subsidized the consumptions habits of a robust English-speaking middle class located mostly north of the border. Rather than a product of the modern post-NAFTA “New Economy,” this bifurcated system arose in a haphazard manner. It was not solely a top-down phenomenon in which capital orchestrated the redevelopment in accordance to the imperatives of global neoliberalism. ⁶ Instead, San Diego/Tijuana’s “New Economy” emerged through a process of contestation: a battle between international capital and its demands for profit and San Diego’s white middle class homeowners dedicated to maintaining their quality of life by resisting border integration. ⁷

The resulting work-around, which represented a momentary truce between capital and San Diego’s middle class, came at the expense of Mexican laborers and ushered in a new form of conservative politics which rebranded the forces of modern globalization as potential threats to middle-class quality of life. Representing a multilayered identity tied to the expectations born of mid-century liberalism, quality-of-life proved a dynamic political force, capable of picking up, adapting, and even combining, different political impulses ranging from environmentalism to eugenics. Whether retirees, middle-managers, or elite educated knowledge workers, each of these groups possessed the same material goals of protecting their property values, safeguarding the educational opportunities for their children or grandchildren, and enhancing the quality of their leisure. Mooring their political machinations in the material basis of liberalism makes the contradictory coherent while also revealing the unparalleled dynamism from which modern conservatism draws its power.

The same forces that drove opposition to the Tijuana River project north of the border are the same as those that had made it essential to area business leaders in the first place. San Diego’s long-incubated civic culture, centered as it was on aversion to threats to homeowner quality of life, proved a consistent obstacle, and one that forced the city Chamber of Commerce to constantly adapt. Like many cities, San Diego had embraced the “city-beautiful” movement of the Progressive Era with its focus on open space and recreational areas. ⁸ The redevelopment of Balboa Park for the Panama Exposition of 1912 enshrined this principle at the heart of the city. The leading advocate of clean nonindustrial growth for San Diego was John Marston, who while a paternalistic defender of workers, realized there were certain advantages to avoiding the presence of a robust working class. He urged San Diego to cultivate and attract “the kind of man or business that fits in with our natural conditions.” ⁹ Whereas other cites attempted to reconcile “city-beautiful” with twentieth-century industrialization, San Diego saw them as incompatible and doubled down on an economy built around tourism and attracting Midwestern retirees. ¹⁰

Even at this early stage, Tijuana played a key role in San Diego’s economic identity. From the Progressive era forwards, citizens on both sides of the border came and went as they pleased as goods and services flowed back and forth. Occasionally, there were business disputes but nothing the San Diego and Tijuana Chambers of Commerce could not arbitrate on their own. While leery of the radicalism that San Diegans perceived to lurk south of the border, the city boosters increasingly saw Tijuana as an integral part of San Diego tourism. Advertisements for the Panama Exposition of 1915 heralded Tijuana as a must-see location for potential visitors; it figured so prominently in booster material that rival Los Angeles admonished San Diego for its lack of patriotism. But many of the area boosters invested so much in Tijuana, that the business interests of each city were indistinguishable from the other. In fact, the San Diego press often treated Tijuana as a subsidiary of San Diego, in one instance claiming that Tijuana’s entertainment district was “the greatest attraction the city [San Diego] has.” ¹¹

After the United States implemented prohibition in 1920, the profitability of cross border investment expanded. Anglo capital poured into Tijuana over the course of the next decade fueling the rapid construction of bars, clubs, resorts, and even a state-of-the-art horse racing track. All of this made Tijuana an even more essential part of San Diego’s quest to lure tourists: San Diego and its lily-white beaches by day; Mexico and its sinful temptations by night. Over time, this carefully cultivated psychological segregation between a clean San Diego and a sinful Tijuana became more and more embedded in San Diego’s civic culture. The invisible international boundary separating the two cities did more than differentiate drinking laws, it carried the psychic burden for San Diegans committed to distinguishing the imagined wholesomeness of their community from the debauchery they projected onto Mexico and Mexicans. Yet, the truth of the matter was that, by and large, Mexicans did not participate in the sinful activities, nor was it Mexican capital underwriting their production. In both cases, it was the upstanding citizens of San Diego and their beloved tourists that were the mainstay customers. ¹²

By the post–World War II period, the perception of San Diego to potential outside capital was that it was a geographically isolated backwater at the “end of the line.” Nevertheless, the city profited from the rise of the military industrial complex. By 1959, 78 percent of San Diego’s employment relied on defense industries. ¹³ Much of it was white-collar research and development but there also existed manufacturing. Convair plants just outside of the city employed thousands. After the Korean War, many of these sites either contracted or closed. The overall decline in military demand and the expanding technology of jet propulsion combined to make San Diego an expendable location. The resulting unemployment rate and its impact on the local housing market had the Chamber of Commerce in a panic. Time magazine ran a story on the city entitled “Bust Town?” ¹⁴ The Chamber of Commerce knew that to diversify it faced a twofold problem: business needed incentives to open up operations, but the middle-class citizens of San Diego also needed convincing that such development was in their best interest.

In 1961, the San Diego Chamber of Commerce initiated a new outreach effort. The “Build Industrial Growth” (BIG) initiative was the city’s latest attempt at industrial recruitment and the Chamber of Commerce hoped to involve the broader community. Over 250,000 orange envelopes were sent throughout the county. Each contained the BIG mission statement, which described itself as “big, vital, and essential to our continued growth and prosperity.” Inside was also a request that each recipient send back a $1.00 commitment to further boost recruitment efforts: “Get your dollar into the pot. It’s your future you’re investing in.” ¹⁵ Many of the envelopes returned, few contained a dollar.

The response to BIG was overwhelmingly negative. Scathing and long-winded rebukes of the goals of the Chamber of Commerce all touched on the same theme: San Diego should not be trying to grow. One letter began “If you want to live in a BIG town so bad why in the name of heaven don’t you move up north to Los Angles and enjoy all the benefits of big city life [like] smog, limited parking, unendurable traffic, increased crime rates and various other ADVANTAGES too numerous to mention.” This particularly “disgusted” San Diegan continued, “Just for kicks send a delegation of your most rabid members up to L.A. and make them stay for six months. When they return see if they still have the intestinal fortitude to try and perpetuate such a disaster on our nice little town of San Diego.” ¹⁶ Another letter contained more nakedly class oriented fears that efforts at industrial recruitment would bring “unskilled labor many of whom would merely add to the load the welfare carries.” ¹⁷ And lastly, another kept its response succinct: “fight crime, fight slums, no New York here, Down With B.I.G.” ¹⁸

Across the board, responses consistently compared San Diego to other metropolises. In the eyes of its citizens, San Diego was unique and exceptional and had achieved this by avoiding industrial capitalism and its ill effects, namely the physical and political presence of a working class. The congestion and pollution of frenetic capitalism, and the accompanying burden of workers in need of social services, were perceived as threats to San Diego’s quality of life. For vocal middle-class residents, the promotion of capitalist growth for its own sake threatened the quintessential character of the city.

This negatively impacted San Diego’s search for industry. A 1969 industrial planning survey, looking back on the missed opportunities of the previous decade, concluded that citizens’ fear of becoming Los Angeles had made firms uncomfortable with relocation. ¹⁹ Tax breaks, subsidies, free facilities and other inducements greased the wheels initially; but in the end, businesses had to feel confident in the long-term viability of corporate welfare before an area was deemed worthy of investment. In San Diego, it was not a strong union presence or mobilized workers that poisoned the water; instead, it was a home owning class whose attitude toward industrial development oscillated between ambivalence and hostility. Because of this, the campaign to lure capital to San Diego met with mixed results. Some clean-growth tech firms were brought in, but three years after the initiation of large-scale recruitment efforts, San Diego finished last in outside investment in California, only pulling in less than 8 percent of the state’s total. ²⁰

A prime example of the drag of populist ire on industrial recruitment efforts was the backlash to the city’s effort to create a General Plan in 1964. Numerous cities passed, or revised existing, General Plans in the 1960s as a prerequisite for participation in Great Society redevelopment programs. Often, it was a perfunctory procedure handled by city councils. General Plans were important because they quantified need and viability for municipal development. For the city’s investor class, matching federal funds for various land development projects made their wildest booster fantasies seem within reach. ²¹ There were numerous programs, but Urban Renewal funds were often the easiest to get and came with the fewest strings. But, it was also the topic which sparked the greatest volume of backlash from San Diego’s middle class.

By 1964, the term “Urban Renewal” sparked racial anxiety in white homeowners across the country. Even though in reality the program was far more likely to displace people of color, many white residents feared that its programs forced cities to racially integrate majority white communities. In San Diego, homeowners organized against the General Plan and forced it to a city-wide referendum the following year. The weekend before the scheduled vote, thousands of homeowners woke up to “Eviction Notices” posted on the front of their houses with what appeared to be the official seal of the city. They read,

You are hereby ordered to vacate your home . . . your house will be occupied by an underprivileged minority race family now living in a slum area . . . In a recent survey of your area it was found that there are no negro families living within 300 feet of your property, therefore “racial discrimination” is presumed to exist and the San Diego urban Renewal Authority has determined that you are in a blighted area and your house is subject to condemnation and seizure.

On Election Day, San Diego became the first city in the country to vote down a General Plan. While racism was front and center, it often seamlessly integrated with resentment toward developers. As one anti-plan broadside posited, the committee that drafted the plan was “loaded with bankers, big property owners and others who favor using federal funds to rebuild San Diego to increase the value of their property at no expense to themselves.” ²² For San Diegans, racial integration and development were interchangeable processes, both of which undermined the quality of life they had come to expect. Federal money did not just represent big government and social engineering, it was simultaneously big business and big growth. Although a General Plan was passed three years later, city leaders scrubbed any mention of urban renewal or federal funding. The shot across the boosters’ bow was unmistakable. San Diego’s attempts at redevelopment had to be managed, planned, and negotiated with a conservative voting base dedicated to no-growth policies.

This brand of conservatism was born of a paradox at the core of a postwar liberalism whose economic consensus held unflinching economic growth was the magic elixir to widespread prosperity, a means by which all could access “the good life” as defined by a middle-class suburban existence. But, by any objective measure, economic growth threatens “the good life” with pollution, traffic, and resource depletion. In addition, growth requires a laboring class, and the physical and political presence of a working class inspires social conflict, yet another threat to the tranquility promised by postwar liberalism. In short, capitalism gives, but it also takes away.

This paradox was not lost on the San Diego Chamber of Commerce. In a study funded by the Chamber entitled “Challenges to San Diego,” sociologist Herbert Fredman laid it out:

. . . disquiet about the quality of life is largely a middle class and upper middle class phenomenon . . . Therefore community leaders must continue to weigh two largely conflicting demands—one for more growth to allow the poor to improve their lot; the other for less growth, to allow those who have achieved material success to enjoy more tangible values. ²³

From the 1960s onward, white middle-class San Diegans never shied away from utilizing their political power to protect their ability to enjoy more “tangible values.”

To avoid this political obstacle, the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, by 1968, looked to its neighbor south of the border for new opportunities at development. San Diego was no stranger to the idea of cross-border development with Tijuana; a century of economic codependence had necessitated these kinds of linkages. As early as 1954, the Chamber of Commerce “recognized the marketing possibilities in this great and rapidly developing area to the south . . . interested in mutually profitable trade relations.” ²⁴

Drawing on its history of economic interdependence with Tijuana, San Diego prepared itself for an innovation in that relationship: creating a system that overtly divided the process of production through a division of labor achieved by straddling production across an international boundary. Concurrent to the leadership shifts in San Diego that increased the palatability of internationally integrated markets, major political changes in Mexico were in the process of doing the same.

Increasingly, San Diego rejected industrial growth in favor of managerial and technological enterprise. At the same time, changes in Mexico were encouraging industrial development along the border. The year 1968 marked a sea change in Mexican politics. The dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, had for decades been backing away from its opposition to foreign investment; but, this retreat required a delicate balancing act with the dearly held principles of the Mexican Revolution which, at their core, rejected capitalist exploitation of Mexican labor and resources. The strong economic growth in Mexico from 1940 to about 1968, dubbed the “Mexican Miracle,” had been achieved through a combination of strong public investment in education and manufacturing as well as coordination with outside capital. But by 1968, the aggregate gains in wealth were belied by the uneven nature of capitalist development. As a robust middle class formed in some areas, especially in the border regions, much of the Mexican interior faced economic hardship. Over time, the PRI’s “overriding emphasis on modernity and economic progress” moved it further and further “away from its revolutionary roots.” To maintain credibility, the PRI engineered a mass media-based cultural nationalism meant to mask their increasing lack of revolutionary credentials. ²⁵

By 1968, as Mexico prepared to host the Olympic Games, the routine wore thin. For the PRI, the Olympics represented an opportunity to showcase Mexico’s urban and industrial modernity to the world. In the lead up to the games, grassroots protests challenged the priorities of a PRI government no longer beholden to the democratic desires of the people. For these protestors, the Olympic Games and its attendant costs represented their government’s commitment to outside developers and financial interests. On October 2, over 5,000 student protestors assembled in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City. During efforts to disperse the crowd, government agents opened fire. Hundreds of students were killed, marking the end of any meaningful connection between the actions of government and the principles of the Revolution. This violent consolidation of state power signaled to the rest of the world that Mexico was open for business. Development projects, particularly along the border, accelerated. ²⁶

In 1961, the Mexican government had initiated the National Border Program (PRONAF) to more seamlessly integrate the northern “frontier” region with the larger Mexican economy. As the Mexican middle class grew after 1940, officials in Mexico City realized that much of the resulting purchasing power in the border regions was being spent in the United States. This was particularly true in Tijuana, where cross border consumer spending rose a staggering 6 percent in a single year from 1967 to 1968. ²⁷

This scale of binational economic interdependence had been, at least partially, an accident. In 1934, at the heights of the Great Depression, Mexico had declared much of its northern frontier a Zona Libre, or Free Trade Zone. ²⁸ The federal government had lacked the will, and often the ability, to adequately aid the border regions during the prolonged period of economic hardship in the 1930s. As a response, the Free Trade designation pushed frontier citizens to procure everything from groceries to manufactured goods from U.S. urban centers. San Diego profited from this arrangement. As the spending power of a nascent Mexican middle class rose from the 1940s forward, this became only truer. Cross-border trade numbers were greatly inflated by this phenomenon, rising from $198.4 million in 1950 to $2.3 billion by 1974, with San Diego being the largest market on the border. ²⁹ In fact, some U.S. businesses in San Diego accepted pesos, putting stickers in their windows which read “Aceptamos Pesos Mexicanos.” The central goal of PRONAF was to build the retail infrastructure to stifle this precipitous outflow of capital in the form of consumer spending. As historian Lawrence Douglas Hansen summarizes, PRONAF amounted to a nationalist project “aimed at building a sufficiently powerful commercial and industrial base in the Mexican borderlands.” ³⁰

Another aspect of PRONAF, the Border Industrialization Program (initiated in 1966), targeted outside capital by removing tariffs on imported materials necessary for the construction of new facilities. The underlying motivation of these inducements centered on the creation of industrial centers aimed at soaking up the excess labor supply at border urban centers. Displaced by economic privatization in the Mexican interior, tens of thousands of migrants made their way to border cities like Tijuana and Juarez throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In the case of Tijuana, 47.5 percent of its population consisted of interior migrants by 1976, with an annual growth rate during the previous decade of 4.56 percent a year. ³¹

This ever-collecting pool of cheap labor enabled the full-scale implementation of what became known as the Maquiladora, or twin-plant, system. In it, the labor-intensive segment of production is located on the Mexican side of the border, where labor is cheap, and the Mexican government underwrites construction and maintenance cost. Meanwhile, management and skills-oriented production is located on the other side of the border, where quality of life is protected and acts as an inducement for recruiting talent. Another enabling factor in this system is taxes are only levied on the value-added to the product when exported back to the United States. Mexico was quick to realize the long-term potential of this program. ³²

A survey of the region, conducted by the Bank of Mexico in 1967, found that despite its small scale, the maquila industry had “grown so much in such a short time” and “no other industrial branch has such a broad immediate potential.” Border area firms participating in the maquiladora system were seeing capital returns of 27 percent. The Mexican government possessed no illusions regarding what underwrote such success. As the same report pointed out “given wages and salaries in Baja California are markedly inferior to those prevailing in the United States, the function of the Maquiladora industry is essentially to export relatively cheap labor.” ³³ Undercutting the cost of doing business elsewhere was to be Mexico’s niche. As Julio B. Trevino of the Mexican American Review wrote in 1969 “the Mexican government is succeeding in making the Mexican border area competitive with Formosa, Hong Kong, Puerto Rico and other locations.” He continues “. . . establishing a manufacturing or assembly operation in the Mexican border area is still very attractive to U.S. manufacturers in view of the high labor costs in the United States.” ³⁴

One such manufacturer, Union Carbide, established one of the largest twin-plant facilities on the border in 1968 near Tijuana. The location focused on consumer electronics, thus fitting the mold of the kind of operation best suited to utilize the cross-border production model. Relegating unskilled labor to a low wage existence in a 17,000 square foot facility south of the border enabled the company to maintain its management and technology operations in San Diego, where quality-of-life acted as an inducement for skilled laborers. According to vice president of electronics at the company, Ward F. Moore, north of the border operations represented “the real magic in what we do.” ³⁵

While initially, Mexico acted as the driving force incentivizing this kind of economic model, by 1968, the city of San Diego threw itself into cooperating with its foreign neighbor to create not only stand-alone twin-plant operations, but a full-fledged international nexus of production/consumption. An economic report prepared by Louise Mortimer, the first woman to be a member of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, recognized the scope of potentialities and laid out the stakes: “The potential for the future development of the border region is exciting and virtually limitless.” Acknowledging the challenges of breaking down the international divide, Mortimer concluded: “The kind of planning for—and accompanying encouragement of—industrial development is crucial to the economic growth of communities on both sides of the border. The large labor supply in Baja finds employment in such enterprises and, as a result, expands the purchasing power for the Mexican domestic market and for the American market across the border.” ³⁶

Mexico took notice of this new opening in relations and the increasing potentiality for cross-border cooperation. Ignacio Garcia Batista, General Director of Economic and Industrial Promotion of the State of Baja California, initiated a speaking tour on behalf of border zone development. In a speech at San Diego State University he promoted the potentiality of an alliance between the Mexican state and U.S. capital: “Baja Californians, ladies and gentlemen, are thinking of new ways, and we are constantly renovating . . . We extend our arms to all those men of good intentions who would like to support us not only with capital but with experience and vision within our laws, in an atmosphere of mutual respect.” ³⁷ Denied the elixir of traditional postwar growth by a population hostile to industrial development, San Diego’s business class forged a new international solution.

Like the style of development facilitated by postwar liberalism, the transnational vision emerging from the San Diego Chamber of Commerce in the 1970s did not consist solely of factory production. In the resulting utopian imagining, the Chamber’s border of tomorrow included a broad range of development projects that would further integrate the region. Mortimer’s report, for example, expressed interest in a University of the Americas to be constructed on 500 acres of land adjacent to the border. A “bilingual and bicultural” space, the University of the Americas would serve communities on both sides of the border with facilities that stretched across the international boundary. ³⁸ San Diego wanted to be the educational and cultural center of a vast area extending far south of the border.

In addition to the university, there were also talks and negotiations between the United States and Mexico concerning a $1 billion nuclear power plant doubling as a water desalination facility. The massive structure, to be built east of Tijuana where the Colorado River empties into Sea of Cortez, and capable of producing a billion gallons of water a day and 2,000 megawatts of electricity, projected to serve all the water and power needs of southern California and much of northern Mexico. This herculean level of production would enable limitless growth within this newly envisioned international urban space. ³⁹

Representative of the sheer scale of this vision and its erasure of the border as a boundary for the purposes of capital, in 1974, the San Diego Chamber of Commerce pushed hard for the creation of a San Diego/Tijuana international airport. In the eyes of the Chamber, the project presented “a unique opportunity for this region” to create the world’s first international airport “to physically cross the borders of two nations.” The same report also advocated that more be done to make such cross-border developments more seamless. Referring to the entirety of this new borderland economy as a complex, the report argued “the growing interrelationship between northern Mexico and the San Diego region demands that the entire complex be treated as a single unit in addressing many of our common regional problems.” Similarly, the Chamber, in its proposals considering a transnational airport noted the allure of Mexico’s new commitment to outside capital: “modern Mexican government to be an enlightened government fully cognizant of the need for cooperative attitudes and conditions to prevail in the border area over the long term.” ⁴⁰ Before these large-scale binational projects could be realized, San Diego and Tijuana needed to work out several logistical obstacles.

Rising to these challenges, a new transnational capitalist class took shape. According to scholar Leslie Sklair, this new class consisted of local professionals on both sides of the border working together, adapting, and sometimes creating, institutions within both the U.S. and Mexican state apparatuses. Consisting of lawyers, politicians, and business executives in border cities, this new transnational class sought to transcend the economic confines of the border that hampered development. To do so, they formed binational border commissions including the U.S.–Mexico Commission for Border Development in 1967. Both the San Diego and Tijuana Chamber of Commerce proved instrumental in forming the first Border City Association in 1964. These new border institutions provided a space for cross-border cooperation among local actors within the transnational class. Without this space and dialogue, coordinating the utilization of resources provided by two distinct national governments, as well as those from state and local resources, would have proved impossible for area-business interests. ⁴¹

Even though this transnational capitalist class sought to gain control of state resources on both sides of the border, the asymmetry of the region’s politics proved an obstacle that could not be overcome. Projects greenlighted south of the border proceeded quickly with national resources but local control. In San Diego, homeowner resistance ground efforts at greater border integration to a halt. The best example of this: binational attempts by the transnational capitalist class to channel the Tijuana River.

In 1970, two Mexican officials rode across the hillsides of Tijuana on horseback, surveying the area to determine the extent of its untapped economic potential. Robert de la Madrid, the U.S.-born former actor and soon-to-be director of economic development for the state of Baja California, often boasted of his close relationship with John Wayne. That day, he invited his friend José López Portillo to join him for a morning ride. From their vantage point atop the city’s surrounding hillsides, they gazed down on Tijuana and saw it not for what it was, but what it could be: a “New Tijuana” freed from the unsightly existence of its destitute populations and reborn as a highly developed cosmopolitan cultural hub. Portillo, later the president of Mexico, shared a close relationship with de la Madrid, which proved essential in facilitating their collective goal of bringing Tijuana “up to par with the neighboring cities of Southern California.” ⁴²

The Tijuana River sat as an intractable obstacle to these shared ambitions. A mostly dry riverbed, the Tijuana River’s unpredictable nature caused logistical headaches for residents on both sides of the border. Stretching for miles on the eastern outskirts of the city, the Tijuana River cuts west toward Tijuana’s downtown right along the international boundary before eventually crossing it, and then continuing in San Diego County for five miles through the undeveloped Tijuana River Valley before joining the Pacific Ocean. Prior to development, it commonly flooded and damaged surrounding Tijuana neighborhoods. More than just its natural challenges, the river also presented a social conundrum. Unable to meet the needs of a rapidly increasing population, Tijuana faced severe housing shortages. Large homeless communities began forming in the riverbed in the mid-1960s. Known as Cartolandia, this collection of cardboard hovels sheltered thousands of people who made livings by selling food and trinkets to tourists. Most famous of these were papers flowers which became their own symbol of Tijuana. For government officials, Cartolandia represented an embarrassment, a constant reminder of the failings of Mexico’s revolutionary promise. Striking poverty levels and the propensity of the river to flood made Cartolandia an ever-present social crisis. ⁴³

More threatening to the interests of San Diego, run-offs from flooding in the Tijuana River often contained untreated sewage collected from the gutters of Tijuana. The river’s flow deposited this refuse into the ocean adjacent to popular beaches and surfing locations. Thus, both cities possessed incentive to green light a rechanneling project. Because the Tijuana River crossed the border, such an undertaking required unprecedented coordination between the two cities and an equal commitment on both sides to see the task through to completion. In 1967, the United States took the first step in crafting a solution to the problem of the Tijuana River by pledging $17 million to flood control on the American side of the border. The Mexican government agreed to also act. In the words of U.S. senator Thomas Kuchel of California, the United States and Mexico would “work closely together to operate and maintain the project for our mutual benefit.” Still, the project lagged on both sides of the border. ⁴⁴

The continued rise in prominence in Mexican politics of both de la Madrid and Portillo got things off the ground. In 1972, as part of the largest redevelopment project in Latin American history, the Mexican government committed $90 million, much of it borrowed from foreign creditors and the International Monetary Fund, to the channeling of the Tijuana River. ⁴⁵ Christened “Rio Tijuana,” this project consisted of the construction of hundreds of miles of underground concrete channels for the river and its potential overflows, reclamation of thousands of acres of land, and redevelopment of nearly thirty-two city blocks. ⁴⁶ The beginning of construction required the physical relocation of almost 50,000 people who had made the riverbed and some of its surrounding communities, including Cartolandia, home.

The rechanneling of the river and downtown redevelopment represented only a single part of the plan. In addition to a high-end downtown scene, industrial parks to the east of Tijuana became a fixture of the overall area development. Located right on the border, the existence of these parks later necessitated the need for a second border crossing to the east at Otay Mesa. These sites cemented the foundation for funneling migrants from Cartolandia and Tierra y Libertad into new roles as an industrial proletariat. ⁴⁷ What ensued showcased a Mexican government far afield of its stated revolutionary purpose.

Routine population displacements, like those that took place at Tierra Y Libertad came to define the massive redevelopment projects undertaken in Tijuana in the 1970s. Abandonment in rural Mexico was a common experience, but it was not the only one. Part of the PRONAF redevelopment efforts centered on offsetting the physical destruction of these communities with the creation of public housing. ⁴⁸ But more than a genuine effort at addressing poverty, PRONAF housing ventures were extended experiments in social control. In an effort to funnel labor into the twin-plant system, construction of housing occurred adjacent to newly christened industrial parks east of the city, far away from the proposed upscale commercial district envisioned by “Rio Tijuana.” ⁴⁹ At first, residents of the cardboard cities were excited by the prospect of being provided public housing, so much so that residents from other parts of the city relocated to the Tijuana Riverbed in hopes of gaining eligibility. ⁵⁰ But those initially relocated in 1972 were left wanting.

First and foremost, the homes proved to be half the size initially promised, in addition to being poorly made. Particularly problematic, the government, in a shortsighted bid to promote “personal responsibility,” required these new homeowners make payments and keep up with property taxes. Far removed from their established means of income, the people of these public housing projects could not meet these new demands. One year after the first relocation, half of the public homes sat abandoned, their occupants opting for the streets once again. Few residents that stayed made their payments. As Martín Hernández Murillo, one of the relocated, summarized in 1978, “For some people, the resettlement has become more of a problem . . . they promised us a whole house . . . they gave us half. I have not paid them a cent.” He continued

in Cartolandia, we did not have to pay for bus service, because we lived in the center of the city, where we could find work selling tacos or flowers. We did not pay for electricity because we had none. We did not pay for gas because we had no gas stoves to cook on. And we did not pay for potable water. Now we must pay for all those things. ⁵¹

This attitude greatly frustrated government officials overseeing the housing projects. Tijuana’s director of Internal Relations believed it was “wrong for them to not pay. They were living like rats in that garbage dump before.” Echoing these sentiments, de la Madrid posited that these people were being afforded “a chance to develop a new outlook on life and incorporate themselves into the social structure of the community.” By 1974, this paternalistic frustration boiled over, making the rural abandonment of communities like Tierra y Libertad a common approach. ⁵² Unlike on the U.S. side, community and neighborhood resistance did not stand in the way of the project. So even while small acts of resistance continued to foil the social engineering aspect of “Rio Tijuana,” physical construction continued unabated leading de la Madrid to conclude that, in the end, “the resettlement plan is working.” ⁵³

Organized resistance to employer exploitation in the maquiladora system often met swift rebuke. Not only did these workers live tenuous existences that made the distance from gainful employment and street living incredibly short, but to the extent there were unions, they were government controlled. For U.S. businesses, such as Union Carbide, to remain interested in Mexico, worker dissent had to be curbed by the Mexican state. Detailing the need for this cooperation, Trevino’s 1969 Mexican American Review piece mentioned “some Manufacturers have experienced labor difficulties in some of the border areas” whenever independent unions got involved. He concluded, these worker’s organizations “failed to understand the philosophy of the program which is based on low-cost labor.” Such unions were “dealt with individually with satisfactory results” and “border unions will cooperate with the federal government to make the program a success.” ⁵⁴

Taken together, the Mexican government’s disciplining of grassroots protest, as well as organized labor, solidified the potentiality of the cross-border nexus imagined by business and city leadership on both sides of the San Diego/Tijuana corridor. While San Diego prepared itself for various investments by beginning to recruit outside capital by selling itself as the management city of tomorrow’s economy, Mexico took very real and concrete investment in remaking itself to fit the corollary of that equation. Millions of dollars were spent to give Tijuana’s downtown a facelift, increase industrial capacity, and discipline the excess labor streaming into the city.

Yet, as the “impossible dream” took shape between the years 1968–1978, it did so under intense pressure from below, pulling it in different, and often contradictory directions. While Mexico accelerated direct and indirect investment in the Maquiladora system and the creation of the cross-border nexus, it faced increased protest domestically. Additionally, the same conservative-minded San Diego homeowners that had pushed industrialization south of the border, came to reject the cross-border model predicated on increased international integration. As it became it became a more salient political pressure point, a new class of conservative politicians staked their careers on vilifying the border and immigration. Soon, the international boundary and its perceived permeability transformed into a quality-of-life issue, thus tapping into the political toxicity that had been brewing in San Diego. Whether it was drugs, pollution, or the presence of immigrants, Mexico became the embodiment of all three. In this environment, cross-border economic development came to be seen as a threat to quality of life.

In 1971, resistance to the Tijuana River project north of the border came from two sources, both rooted in different but overlapping forms of homeowner politics. The first, and most vocal, came from the San Diego Chapter of Zero Population Growth (ZPG). ZPG represented a dogmatic opposition to growth and owed its origins to a eugenicist framework that held growth, particularly from immigration, posed a major threat to the environment. The San Diego chapter of ZPG issued a statement outlining its opposition to the Tijuana River Project: “We are opposed to additional development of this area which will add to the already rampant urbanization of the San Diego region. We are opposed to excessive population growth and in-migration which threatens to decrease the environmental qualities of our lives.” ⁵⁵

Another group, Citizens Coordinate for Century 3, represented San Diego’s generational upper-crust and focused on concerns over beautification and the need for open space, issues that were rarely far removed from issues of race and class. CCC3 insisted the project would be “a mistake and plans for it should be abandoned.” In addition to fears over increased urban development, San Diego residents wanted the area, an uncontrollable flood hazard, to serve the “vital role as open space between the San Diego and Tijuana metropolitan areas.” ⁵⁶ This idea of a “green belt” separating the two cities became highly romanticized: Claims were made that the Tijuana River Valley was a natural preserve of rare and unparalleled ecological importance.

While both groups presented border integration as an issue of environmental concern, their opposition existed in a larger anti-growth context, quickly becoming a virulent brand of politics in San Diego. Elected on an anti-growth platform in 1971, the decision as to whether San Diego would participate in such a historic program of international integration fell to new mayor Pete Wilson.

Wilson had cut his political teeth working on the 1962 gubernatorial campaign of Richard Nixon and the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. As a young California Assemblyman out of San Diego, Wilson had been ushered in by the same statewide conservative wave in 1966 that established Ronald Reagan as governor. Hailing from a largely isolated suburban district that included communities such as Clairemont Mesa and Santee, he built a brand around hardline stances on crime, the border, and drug trafficking. ⁵⁷ He emphatically supported President Richard Nixon’s 1969 “Operation Intercept” which helped to initiate the United States’ War on Drugs. It consisted of a period of increased border inspections and had originated from a Nixon campaign promise to Southern California suburbanites to curb the drug flow across the U.S. border. ⁵⁸

Area business leaders had opposed Operation Intercept, seeing it as a detriment to cross-border economic development. Deeming it “absolutely foolish,” the San Diego Chamber of Commerce demanded that more federal agents be provided to reduce any wait times that may arise from increased inspections. ⁵⁹ The chamber’s support of a porous border became another flashpoint between local homeowners and the city’s business establishment. A local radio editorial dramatized the concerns of homeowners: “The Mexican border is a sieve. Drugs can and do pour across it in a flood. They land in the hands of addicts who must commit all kinds of crime to pay for pills or weed. The victim of those crimes is you.” It continued by calling for the closing of the border and casting “the merchants of San Diego” as threats to border security. ⁶⁰

Similar to the General Plan protests of 1964, fights over the Tijuana River seamlessly blended worries of growth with fears of nonwhite populations. Broadsides against the plan leveled charges of corruption and developer greed while also decrying a closer embrace of Mexico. San Diegans’ view of Tijuana as a “cesspool” or “stink-hole” had historical roots despite the inter connectivity of the two cities. ⁶¹ But this sentiment had been recently invigorated by Richard Nixon’s extensive efforts to provoke a national culture war. A key tool in this process was the Drug War. In the same way that the drug war criminalized and demonized nonwhite populations in the rest of the country, it was equally effective at demonizing Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican immigrants in San Diego. ⁶²

Sensing opportunity to shore up his base as well as his antidevelopment credentials, Wilson withdrew San Diego from the Tijuana River redevelopment project. Echoing the rhetoric of white homeowners, Wilson focused on quality of life in his rebuke claiming that concrete channels would be “unsightly” and that such improvements would open the Tijuana River Valley to “unwanted urbanization.” He concluded that “the city would be better off if that area remained a greenbelt.” This move incensed the project’s boosters on both sides of the border. ⁶³

The Cramer Corporation, a likely recipient of government development contracts associated with work in the Tijuana River Valley, spoke for the business community when it took out a full page ad lambasting San Diego’s reluctance: the nearly 5,000 acres, if left undeveloped, would not be a “greenbelt” but instead a sewage disposal area, an unaesthetic wasteland—strewn with waste paper and beer cans, old tires, you name it. Additionally, such an area would also act as a “great wall of China, separating us from our Mexican friends—keeping us further apart than ever, instead of closer. Fencing San Diego in and the Mexicans Out.” ⁶⁴

Following the withdrawal, the Mexican state pressured the U.S. government to do something to maintain the international treaty obligation of 1962 promising joint-development of the region. ⁶⁵ Not only had the Mexican states run up millions of dollars in debt to complete the project but the failure of the project posed immediate backflow hazards from the uncontrolled riverbed on the U.S. side. At the very least, San Diego needed to commit to some form of flood control. Wilson, under pressure from the federal government, relented to the construction of a single mile of concrete flood dissipaters. The devolution of cross-border cooperation from visions of shared universities, airports, and communities to nothing more than a few concrete blocks incensed members of the Tijuana Chamber of Commerce still dedicated to the impossible dream of only years before. As Salvador Camarena, a prominent Tijuana advertisement executive, put it, “in recent years we have advocated several very important joint venture projects which are vital to the development of Tijuana and Baja California. San Diego area officials chose to ignore these projects or frustrated them entirely.” Withdrawal from the Tijuana River project drew the ire of spurned Mexican officials. With such a heavy financial commitment, much of it drawn on external creditors, the largest development project in the history of Latin America was doomed to fall short of its goals because “a small group of complaining Americans in San Diego.” ⁶⁶

While the Wilson regime opposed the Chamber of Commerce’s more explicit projects of binational economic integration, it did not entirely oppose development. Realizing the potential role San Diego could play as the headquarters of management in a bifurcated economic system, Wilson supported the development of corporate facilities such as hotels and convention centers. If Tijuana was to be the new hotbed of growth, San Diego could offer management the “American Way of Life” north of the border. ⁶⁷ In this vein, Wilson’s managed growth agenda borrowed from the pages of San Diego’s past and embraced a clean growth focus on “City-beautiful.” By focusing on areas of the city that embarrassed locals, such as San Diego’s much maligned downtown, Wilson pushed through a Model Cities proposal that brought in federal funds for high-end redevelopment.

Under the umbrella of San Diego’s new self-styled identity as “America’s Finest City,” the Wilson agenda included a new convention center, a new open-air shopping mall in the heart of downtown and a light transit system that would connect the heart of the city and some of its surrounding areas to Tijuana. Yet voter approval for these items, if they were not proposed properly and with a delicate touch, was unlikely. To gain political traction required constant emphasis on the “clean-growth” character of these industries. Another strategy was to demonstrate the ways in which a lack of facilities hampered the city’s reputation. As Wilson put it, if “America’s Finest City” wanted to play in the “big leagues” it needed to make the necessary investments and not rely on outdated convention space “comparable in size to that of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.” ⁶⁸ While these appeals created political space for these projects, the headwinds of homeowner populism once again threatened their enactment.

In 1978, the paradox of liberalism, in which growth is weighed against quality of life, boiled over across the entire state of California. The Tax Revolts, represented most prominently by Proposition 13, a statewide ballot initiative which cut and capped property taxes and required a two thirds majority for any future increases, were a direct result of quality of life debates. Sprawling mostly white suburban expanses heavily burdened local services and the cost passed on to homeowners proved stifling. For elderly homeowners with fixed incomes, rising property values threatened their ability to continue to live in the homes in which they raised their families. In this way, Proposition 13 represented protection from the ravages of capitalist development on existing white communities. As had been the case in San Diego’s growth debates, the argument blended racial social expectations with antidevelopment rhetoric. Historian Robert Self argues in American Babylon that much of the rhetorical animus surrounding Prop 13 fixated on the idea that the taxes of white communities were being used for undeserving nonwhite populations in inner cities. ⁶⁹ Business interests invested in large-scale development were a secondary target, and Chambers of Commerce across the state rallied to oppose the measure. ⁷⁰

In San Diego, the potential impact of Proposition 13 was catastrophic. The Chamber of Commerce estimated that the City of San Diego would lose $27 million in tax revenue if Proposition 13 was enacted. For decades, the city had taken to issuing bonds to fund new projects that catered to recreational facilities for the wealthy, most recently the construction of a new Marina, and the proposition threatened the city’s abilities to meet its obligations. Because Proposition 13 would devastate local budgets, California municipalities faced lower credit ratings and increasing servicing fees for their debt. For this reason, the “amateurish” and “ill-informed” Proposition 13 enraged local business leaders. Even more damning than increased financing costs was that such extreme budget shortfalls lowered the city’s ability to provide matching funds for federal redevelopment projects, a requirement to participate in federal programs such as Model Cities. The passage of Proposition 13, in the eyes of the Chamber, would “severely weaken if not entirely break” the “necessary link between public and private improvement.” ⁷¹

On June 6, 1978 Proposition 13 passed with a 62 percent majority statewide. In San Diego’s suburban districts, its enactment netted 66 percent support. ⁷² Pete Wilson’s convention center and downtown mall were put on hold. ⁷³ Once again, the politics of homeowner pushback to development, powered as it was by race-based entitlement, upended or delayed the goals of capitalist development.

Despite the local pushback and statewide upheaval, the demand for increased development on the border continued unabated nationally. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter made expansion of border industrialization a key component of trade talks with Mexico. To that point, the Mexican government had taken on over $28 billion in foreign debt in attempt to make itself a major player among the capitalist countries developing a new international order. ⁷⁴ Conditions on these loans included IMF implemented austerity, which amounted not so much to cuts in overall spending as a redirecting of public spending away from services for people and toward development. The result was a continued deterioration of the Mexican interior. While unofficial settlements like Cartolanida and Tierra y Libertad had been destroyed, the number of makeshift settlements proliferated on the edge of the city. By 1979, 40 percent of Tijuana’s population consisted of economic migrants providing an army of industrial workers prepared to man the assembly lines increasingly pumping out consumer items such as electronics, furniture, sports products, and textiles. This work force, 75 percent of which consisted of women (because they could be paid less), produced cheap products which benefited the kind of white American middle-class families living just miles away in San Diego. ⁷⁵

The number of migrants to Tijuana, drawn to the potential work of maquiladoras, far outpaced the factories’ need for labor. This created a reservoir of sorts for U.S. employers to tap as needed particularly in domestic, agricultural, and construction trades. The number of green card laborers in San Diego alone was north of 10,000. ⁷⁶ These workers, as well as the tens of thousands of undocumented laborers, became the life-blood which made San Diego’s “quality of life” a sustainable feature. Instead of being funneled into public housing programs and the forced dependency that came with it, many chose to look north for opportunity. This dynamic accelerated as Mexico’s economy, built on debt and the faithlessness of foreign creditors, descended into a cycle of instability. ⁷⁷

Despite the best efforts of businessman north of the border to achieve insulation, resistance continually forced them to accommodate the expectations of homeowners. Each challenge north of the border helped solidify the system south of it. In this way, uneven development in the border region represented a negotiated equilibrium that promised the continued elixir of growth for business while also ensuring a high quality of life for the region’s homeowners.

Yet even as this cross-border solution emerged, the international integration of the New Economy continued to produce friction in the conservative voting coalition. After the passage of NAFTA in 1994, California once again provided a rebuke from the right to such efforts at integration. As governor of California, Pete Wilson that same year backed Proposition 187 which denied public services to undocumented immigrants. Key to the rhetoric which powered Proposition 187 were the same quality of life arguments that had made border integration so unpopular in San Diego in the 1970s. The former mayor of “America’s Finest City” left no stone unturned in his efforts to tie illegal immigration to rises in crime, the proliferation of drugs, increased traffic, and even environmental degradation. The surge in his popularity garnered Wilson another term as governor and he tried to parlay the momentum into a 1996 presidential run. ⁷⁸

In this way, the arc of resistance to border integration in America’s Finest City, and the politics surrounding it, represents a precursor to the impacts of a system of economic globalization that emphasizes finance/service industries in the continental United States and the segregation of low-wage manufacturing in developing countries. One of the more virulent effects, the rise of modern nativism, in which the presence of immigrants is recast as a threat to quality of life, continues to dominate the national stage. In part, this is because the paradox of mid-century growth liberalism, repeatedly identified in San Diego’s postwar development efforts, has yet to be solved, leaving a shrinking class of white homeowners to continually intensify their demands for accommodation from economic elites to maintain their expected quality-of-life.