Abstract
The images people hold about any city affect its ability to attract tourists, shoppers, and investment. This study of urban image in Tijuana examines institutional place promotion efforts in two vital sectors: industry and tourism. It also explores a diverse set of efforts to shape city image from the bottom-up, through blogs, grassroots organizations, and entrepreneurialism. This analysis of differently positioned actors working to shape perceptions in a time of crisis illustrates how “urban image work” comprises a broader phenomenon than urban branding or place promotion, and one that better captures political contestation over rival city images.
Introduction
This is a study of urban image crisis and the work associated with image recovery. A city undergoes “image crisis” (Greenberg 2008a) when widespread negative publicity undermines its economic prospects, compelling urgent work to repair its reputation. An emergent literature has documented official efforts in postindustrial cities to recover from image crisis with promotional campaigns targeting external audiences, particularly tourists and investors (e.g., Gotham 2007b; Greenberg 2008a, 2008b).
That literature offers a point of departure for our focus on the city of Tijuana, which entered a period of image crisis from 2008 to 2010, when cartel violence and travel warnings dominated international news coverage about the city. A place that had long billed itself as “the world’s most visited city” suddenly lost most of its cross-border visitors. 1 Tijuana’s image crisis knocked the pillars out from underneath the inherited narratives that defined the city’s identity, creating an opening for cultural contestation over urban image. Strikingly, it impelled action not only by economic and political elites but also by a variety of actors with no stake in tourism or external investment, who focused instead on morale and alternative visions of the city’s future.
We found that existing concepts of place promotion and urban branding did not fully capture the range of symbolic responses to image crisis that we witnessed in Tijuana. This paper offers an alternative concept, “urban image work,” that builds upon and contributes to the place promotion literature, broadening the analytical scope to include grassroots and noninstitutional actors involved in the work of representing the city and defining its identity, for outsiders and among themselves. This concept also helps us to track cultural contestation over urban image, which we understand as an eminently political process through which differently positioned actors offer rival visions of the city, with different stakes in whose vision prevails.
In Tijuana’s period of crisis, what range of strategies for transformation and reinvention came into play from institutional elites and from the grassroots? How did they differ in goals, favored images, and target audiences? To what extent did the crisis generate pressures to remake the city for external consumption as opposed to prioritizing local interests and values? While the existing literature on image crisis focuses on cities in advanced economies, Tijuana offers a case from the developing world with limited capital resources to lend to crisis recovery. How did this city’s location in the global economy—as a border city in a developing state—shape or constrain the options available for image work?
To answer these questions, we conducted 20 qualitative interviews (2009-2012) with leaders of state, municipal, and private organizations in Tijuana centered on tourism promotion, industrial development, cross-border commerce, or cultural economy, and with private entrepreneurs, bloggers, and the heads of grassroots organizations actively promoting particular visions or futures for the city. We also conducted participant observation at events related to image work and evaluated organizational websites and blogs about city image. 2
Our analysis explores image work in three main sectors: (1) manufacturing and trade organizations, (2) tourism organizations, and (3) noninstitutional actors aspiring to transform Tijuana’s image from the bottom-up. We found that image-making activities targeted both internal and external audiences, and that noninstitutional actors differed substantially from elites in their goals and framing of the city. Contestations over city identity proliferated, and this fragmentation has opened opportunities for those outside traditional halls of power.
Image Crisis and Image Work
Scholars have identified several forms of urban image crisis. Some find it rooted in deindustrialization, when unemployment, capital flight, and urban blight fueled media images of decline in cities like Detroit, New York, and Glasgow, further exacerbating their economic crises (Greenberg 2008a; Neill, Fitzsimons, and Murtagh 1995; Paddison 1993). A second category associates with disaster recovery, such as New York after 9/11 or New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (Gotham 2007a; Greenberg 2003). Immediate material devastation and human suffering were accompanied by media coverage that displaced carefully curated reputations with graphic negative imagery. A third category of image crisis has followed highly publicized periods of crime, rioting, or violence, such as Detroit in 1967, Los Angeles in 1992, or Medellín, Colombia in the 1990s.
Tasci and Gartner (2007) argued that news media have especially critical effects on image when they report on events such as natural disasters, riots, crime, terrorism, or wars in places not otherwise well known. Widespread negative publicity exacerbates any direct economic effects of disaster or violence, as tourists stay away, businesses locate elsewhere, and real estate suffers. Recovery from such crises is challenging, requiring new investments to transform realities on the ground and semiotic intervention to supplant negative media imagery (see Gotham 2007a; Greenberg 2008a, 2008b; Neill, Fitzsimons, and Murtagh 1995; Paddison 1993; Tilson and Stacks 1997)).
Of course, cities recovering from crises are not the only ones who must engage and curate their urban image (Zukin 1995). In a globalized, mass-mediated era, the mental images people hold about cities have substantial economic consequences, affecting where people are willing to visit, invest, live, shop, work, or play (Holcomb 2001). Such images do not merely reflect objective circumstances; instead, cities are places “which we all, differently empowered and socially positioned, actively construct and invest with meaning” (Morgan 2004, p. 174). The connotations of any city shift over time, reflecting shifting realities on the ground and changes in the ways that actors from different social and political positions frame that reality.
Local authorities and entrepreneurs have long engaged in “selling” the image of a city “so as to make it attractive to economic enterprises, to tourists and even to [its] inhabitants” (Kearns and Philo 1993, p. 3). Place promotion entails a strategic engineering of images (Holcomb 2001) that attempts to reach its target audiences through various media, such as websites, commercials, brochures, or lifestyle magazines (Greenberg 2000), or through film or television (Holcomb 1999). Urban planners also contribute to place promotion with development projects like riverwalks, sports stadiums, or iconic monumental architecture (e.g., Sydney Opera House) that help establish a niche in a regional economy or raise the city’s stature (Pagano and Bowman 1995). Such projects—as well as the promotion of cultural economy (Walker 2007)—are part of what makes a city symbolically distinctive.
Urban place promotion has become institutionalized in Economic Development Corporations (EDCs), planning departments, convention and visitors bureaus, and sometimes in specialized organizations dedicated to urban branding (e.g., NYC & Company). Compared with the more disparate activities by elite urban boosters, urban branding comprises a centralized, monolithic campaign (Greenberg 2008a) to represent a place in a way that “is geared to adapting, reshaping, and manipulating (i.e., simulating) images of the place to be desirable to the targeted consumer” (Gotham 2007b, p. 829). Branding campaigns may mix a particular logo with economic development plans to make the city physically conform to the image of the brand, a space “for capital investment and profit-making, and a commodity for broader consumption” (Greenberg 2008a, p. 36). Scholars debate whether elite place promotion in a global economy ends up homogenizing a city into a set of expected spaces of consumption and tourism (Urry 1995), or whether it can simultaneously inspire local introspection, a more coherent community identity, and a more diverse local economy (Gotham 2007a, 2007b).
Place promotion campaigns that commoditize or reshape a city for external consumption prioritize the “standpoint of the out-of-towner” at the expense of the perspectives, needs, and priorities of residents (Greenberg 2008a, p. 7; Holcomb 1999). For this reason, some scholars note that elites promoting a particular city image or brand need to secure a certain amount of buy-in from local residents. Tourism promotions, in particular, benefit when residents “live the brand” or become “genuine, unsolicited ambassadors for their communities” (Gotham 2007b, p. 840; Tilson and Stacks 1997, p. 113). Tourism interests are also served when locals adopt the consumption practices of tourists in their own town (Gotham 2007b). More generally, Kearns and Philo (1993, p. 3) argued that places engaging in self-promotion undertake a
subtle form of socialization designed to convince local people, many of whom will be disadvantaged and potentially disaffected, that they are important cogs in a successful community and that all sorts of “good things” are really being done on their behalf.
Not all residents internalize such messages, accept officially promoted city images, or embrace the neoliberal development plans that accompany them. A few scholars explore cases in which residents have rejected elite campaigns on any number of bases: for how they ignore some populations and cultures, draw resources away from the areas that are not part of the promoted urban commodity, exacerbate existing inequalities, physically displace and police residents living in tourism districts, or undermine “authentic” social spaces through corporate investment (Birch 2001; Gotham 2007a, 2007b; Greenberg 2003, 2008a, 2008b; Holcomb 1999; Mitchell 2003). These cases focus primarily upon countermovements reacting against elite machinations. For instance, Greenberg (2003) discussed police, firefighters, and graffiti writers who waged symbolic warfare on the terrain of New York City’s brand image; she characterized their actions as a form of “counter-branding.” Similarly, Gotham (2007a) examined struggles over the commercial branding of Mardi Gras and the French Quarter, in which centralized tourism agencies clashed with networks of local entrepreneurs, heritage organizations, arts councils, and neighborhood coalitions. He identified the activities of these latter groups as “tourism from below,” constructing new, hybrid or “glocal” cultures and place identities to promote local tourism (Gotham 2007a).
Such studies have demonstrated that urban images are “plural, conflicting, contested, and power laden” (Gotham 2007b, p. 828), with actors outside the expected tourism-promotion and branding institutions producing alternative symbolic representations of the city. At the same time, these authors conceptualize grassroots action within the existing frames of urban branding and place promotion, mainly in the forms of resistance against neoliberal elite campaigns or the articulation of alternative narratives to promote local tourism.
We argue that a broader concept is warranted to encompass the diversity of actors involved in the production of urban image, who may vary substantially in their goals, target audiences, and interests. There are potential divisions among different economic sectors; for instance, not all commercial elites vested in urban image will inherently share priorities with tourism officials. Variation is also possible among grassroots actors: not all their engagements with urban image are motivated by resistance to elite branding, and not all “glocal” cultural production targets tourists. We suggest that the heuristic “urban image work” better captures a full range of possible actors and activities. Different actors deliberately adopt narrative frames that reflect their particular agendas and locations, targeting various public audiences as part of an ongoing process of contestation over city identity. This process is inherently political, as any particular city image renders some locales and residents invisible and serves some interests more than others (Gotham 2007a, 2007b; Greenberg 2000, 2008a; Paddison 1993). As a result, urban image is a terrain fraught with contestation over “who we are” and whose visions and interests come into play. Not all actors engaged in urban image work enjoy the same resources or tools of persuasion (Greenberg 2000), such that the politics of urban image necessarily reflect broader urban inequalities. The struggle for image recovery in Tijuana’s moment of crisis illustrates these politics in action.
Context: Image Crisis in the “City of Vice”
Tijuana’s economy and image have long been shaped by its location on the United States–Mexico border, which opened opportunities for businesses to take strategic advantage of differences in taxes, regulatory regimes, labor costs, prices, and perceptions of cultural difference. Such differences underlay its early reputation as a city of vice and shaped the ways that various actors promoted the city as a destination for tourism, manufacturing, and commerce.
Tijuana first boomed during Prohibition (1919-1933), when entrepreneurs moved bars and brothels south across the border to create an “extraterritorial American enclave” and the beginnings of a vice economy (Arreola and Curtis 1993, p. 102). For decades it was a pre-Vegas entertainment zone, drawing Hollywood celebrities to its resorts and casinos. Promotional materials from the era represent Tijuana as glamorous and legally looser than its puritanical neighbor, though early boosters were primarily American capitalists with investments in the vice economy (Vanderwood 2010). The boom ended abruptly as Prohibition lifted and the Mexican government terminated legal gambling in 1935. Over time, Tijuana tourist ventures became increasingly reliant on exploiting price differences, reinforcing an expectation to offer inexpensive goods and services.
Cost differentials also generated opportunities in manufacturing, beginning with the 1965 Border Industrialization Program, which offered economic incentives for foreign “maquiladora” assembly plants to locate along the border in export processing zones. Industry became the dominant engine for growth, but the economy has also diversified into wholesale and retail commerce, as well as a complex service sector (Anderson and Gerber 2008). By 2004, Tijuana’s commerce and services combined were equal to its manufacturing sector, each comprising about 46.5% of the city’s gross annual product of $6 billion. 3 Rapid economic growth attracted so much internal migration that Tijuana’s population more than tripled from 1980 to 2010. 4 The booming migrant population has outstripped the city’s capacities to provide adequate infrastructure or housing, and it struggles with untreated sewage, pollution, and water quality. Concurrently, Tijuana is one of Mexico’s wealthier cities, particularly among those segments of the population well integrated to global capital.
Despite Tijuana’s growth and economic complexity, its vice economy remained—until recently—the defining feature of its image both north and south of the border. While interior Mexicans historically saw Tijuana as corrupted by U.S. influence and lacking Mexican identity, Americans historically saw Tijuana as a lawless space of immorality (Beruman 2003; Insley 2004). Many of those who crossed for entertainment in recent decades were U.S. military men and underage drinkers, since prostitution remains legal and the drinking age is 18. However, some of the draw was grounded in the historically-constituted imagination of what the borderline represented: a “limit between the ‘civilized’ but boring society of white North America and the teeming areas of the dark, mysterious South, both a threat and a lure” (Insley 2004, p. 101).
Tijuana’s municipal government has had to negotiate these inherited images to construct a place identity attractive to tourists and investors. The 2005-2007 municipal plan tried to incorporate its “fabled lawlessness” into an edgy image of a Bohemian, vital space for art and experimentation; at the same time, the city represented itself to international capital as a “safe urban space with advanced infrastructure” (Walker 2007, p. 195). Partly to attract a more diverse mix of visitors, the central business district (Zona Río, or River District) was redeveloped in the 1980s with broad tree-lined avenues, shopping malls, hotels, and office towers. The Tijuana Cultural Center opened there in 1982, in part “to promote cultural tourism incoming from the United States” (www.cecut.gob.mx/en/history.php). Its striking spherical architecture immediately became an urban landmark. Another iconic architectural image came with the Millennium Arch that has towered over the first block of the pedestrianized Revolution Avenue tourist zone since 2001. Both structures figure prominently in promotional images of the city and in its tourism logos. Despite these investments, state-level data showed that the flow of tourists as of 2005 remained overwhelmingly from the United States (96.2%), especially from Southern California (64%) (Baja California Secretary of Tourism [SECTUR] 2005, pp. 14-16), indicating the continued prominence of “day-trip” tourism.
As the last decade drew to a close, the opportunities and obstacles of Tijuana’s persistent image as a city of vice were overshadowed by a new narrative of insecurity that discouraged visitation and profoundly reshaped its image and economy. In the aftermath of 9/11, day-trip visitation began a notable decline (see Note 1). Increased U.S. deportations of “criminal aliens” to Tijuana’s port of entry contributed to a 300% increase in petty crimes in 2007 (Santana 2007). In addition, criminal organizations branched into kidnapping for ransom, striking fear in the hearts of residents (Dickerson and Sanchez 2008). However, nothing did more damage to Tijuana’s external image than sensationalized intercartel drug violence. President Felipe Calderón’s military campaign against drug trafficking organizations unleashed a turf war in Tijuana between two cartels, with homicides nearly doubling from 2008 to 2009 (Baja California Secretary of Public Security). From 2008 to 2010, U.S. media coverage highlighted gun battles, murders, and dismemberment. The U.S. State Department responded with a series of travel alerts warning of “imminent risks to the security of US citizens.”
Criminal events alone do not produce an image crisis without media framing to give them visibility and drama. While U.S. media represented Tijuana as besieged by war, we found broad consensus during our 2009-2010 fieldwork that media representations and travel alerts greatly exaggerated actual risks. Cartel violence primarily targeted drug rivals and military agents, while daily life went on in mundane ways. Indeed, we note a disjunction between narratives of violence and actual crime rates: Several U.S. cities in 2009 had higher murder rates than Tijuana’s without comparable stigma. 5 Tilson and Stacks (1997) noted that Miami tourism suffered greatly from a few high-profile murders of several European tourists in 1992-1993, even as its overall crime rate fell. Harriott (2007, pp. 104-105) argued that visitor perceptions of risk have less to do with objective indicators than with the general reputation of a place and its criminal justice system, all of which can suffer from media selection for “the most scintillating, bizarre, and seemingly ‘senseless’ cases” of violence. This imagery can reinforce perceptions of irrationality and authoritative incompetence, especially in a developing country facing existing prejudices, and with limited means to influence its international image (Harriott 2007; Kokkranikal, Cronje, and Butler 2011).
Insecurity was not the only thing affecting visitation or investment in Tijuana across these years. The global economic recession beginning in 2008 compounded the crisis in Mexico. In 2009, the H1N1 influenza outbreak dealt another blow, inspiring another U.S. travel advisory. Finally, in June 2009, the United States began requiring a passport to return from land crossings, which surely discouraged visitation. The convergence of all these elements created an economic crisis intertwined with an image crisis, as the specter of violence eclipsed all other historical city identities. The moment was ripe to examine how various actors in the border region were reacting to the crisis and to identify some of the contestation over place identity that came out of different structural positions.
Contending Images of Tijuana
A wide range of actors were involved in promoting various images of Tijuana; here, we focus on three main sectors: institutions promoting manufacturing and trade, institutions promoting tourism, and a collection of noninstitutional and grassroots actors. 6 All of them envisioned a city with tremendous potential, but their goals, image frames, and target audiences differed (see Table 1). 7 In this section, we evaluate the image work occurring in each of these sectors, examining how they spoke to internal versus external audiences, and how they represented conflicts of interest and vision.
Goals, Images, Audiences, and Locus of Action in Three Sectors of Image Makers.
Note. EDC = Economic Development Corporation.
Manufacturing and Trade
Organizations involved in promoting manufacturing, trade, and economic development (see Table 2) largely represented Tijuana as part of a “Binational Region” along with Southern California, with great potential for industry and high technology. Some targeted investors with images of Tijuana’s comparative economic advantages, highlighting proximity to San Diego’s amenities, while others promoted Tijuana as a “world-class city” to a more general international audience.
Glossary of Institutions.
Leaders of organizations targeting investors blamed their ties to recession-ridden California for most of their sector’s losses in 2008-2009; however, negative press had dampened prospects for new investment. The problem, they said, was not that executives feared for their own safety. Executives heard from other investors that business was good and their operations continued to expand,
but still, somewhere up above somebody says, “oh no, Tijuana.” It’s like they’re afraid to go to church and say to their neighbors, “oh yeah, we sent our production to Tijuana” . . . Maybe they think it won’t look good in the press and their stock will be affected if they come to Tijuana. (DEITAC [Tijuana EDC] Interview, August 20, 2010)
This obstacle was particularly true for U.S. investors exposed to negative coverage about Tijuana. In contrast, the representative of the Tijuana Ministry of Economic Development (SEDETI) said that in 70 trade meetings in Germany, “not a single one asked me about the security issue” (Interview, June 28, 2010).
This sector did not preside over a centralized, coordinated branding campaign. While one leader of the Tijuana Economic Development Council (CDT) was working with a European consulting firm to develop a monolithic brand under which all economic and social sectors could coalesce (offering the “B” for Barcelona as a model—Interview, August 24, 2010), other organizations with different agendas expressed skepticism. DEITAC instead spoke directly to investors about Tijuana’s advantages. They had hired a consulting firm in San Diego to develop promotional materials to counter the “damaged product” that came from the perception of cartel violence (Interview with consulting firm, October 14, 2009). The campaign featured a glossy publication aimed at the statistically-likely investor, a middle-aged white man from the United States. The brochure encouraged potential investors to take advantage of “near-shore production” in “The Tijuana–San Diego Mega Region.” Images of white male professionals in immaculate, high-tech factories accompanied information about Tijuana’s assets for manufacturing: a highly-educated, affordable workforce; access to U.S. markets; and especially, proximity to San Diego. The publication charted out a perfect day in the life of a multinational executive, flying in and out of the San Diego airport, spending several hours at the manufacturing and distribution centers in Tijuana, enjoying a fine meal and flying home by evening. The publication invited him to enjoy the “Southern California—Baja way of life,” though it did not suggest that executives would wine, dine, or stay in Tijuana (DEITAC 2009). This representation tied Tijuana’s image firmly to San Diego, jointly comprising a skilled, binational economy on the cutting edge of biotech, medical, and aerospace technologies. Affordability was a barely-spoken, implicit undercurrent.
A different image-making effort in this sector represented Tijuana as a cosmopolitan city of world-class stature, independent of its border location. An ambitious, two-week international event called Tijuana Innovadora (Innovative Tijuana), October 7 to 21, 2010, featured many urban points of pride as well as leaders of industry, government, sports, arts, and culture, including CEOs of high-tech companies, the founders of Wikipedia and Twitter, and internationally-known figures such as Al Gore and President Calderón. Its impetus came from the head of Tijuana’s “Image Committee” within the CDT, who initially described the primary audience as “the people of Tijuana,” and its purpose to “create self-esteem.” However, the event was also intended “to create a positive image of Tijuana in the community, in the country, and abroad that would bring in new investments” (Interview, March 2, 2010). Some displays and rhetoric at the event reflected the themes in DEITAC’s publication about high-tech manufacturing, but without its emphasis on strategic proximity to San Diego or any hint of the appeal of affordable labor. The main images promoted at Tijuana Innovadora reflected excitement about the city’s universities, arts, and culture, in addition to advanced technology and a robust manufacturing sector that has moved far beyond mere assembly.
The event also intended to impress and energize the local population: an elaborate pep rally that mythologized the city to factory workers and busloads of schoolchildren, whose inclusion suggests a socialization function. Clearly, not everyone in Tijuana bought into the intended message, as evidenced by biting editorial criticism in local newspapers and online forums. One writer panned Tijuana Innovadora as “elitist entertainment,” deploring the squandering of resources, which in his view was akin to a poor family with hungry kids and a dilapidated shack going deeply into debt on a shiny new pickup truck (Luna 2010).
All spokespersons for this sector emphasized the cutting edge technologies of Tijuana’s manufacturing sector, as well as its rich integration into the economies of California, the U.S., and the world. Despite the pressures of recession, advocates were determined to break with stereotypes of low-wage, unregulated production. Instead, the binational megaregion framing painted Tijuana’s fortunes as comparable to those in the first world. However, efforts to obtain domestic buy-in fell short, creating openings for the grassroots efforts we chronicle below.
Institutionalized Tourism
Negative publicity was hardest on the tourism sector dependent upon day trips across the border. In late 2008, the San Diego Union Tribune reported that at least half of the businesses on Revolution Avenue had shut down, with surviving shops reporting sales down “as much as 80% to 90% since 2001” (Dibble 2008). One downtown businessman estimated that prior to the crisis, the district hosted 3,500 shops, providing jobs to 15,000 workers; by early 2012, he asserted that 90% of the shops had closed, including the near-total shuttering of stalls in the covered shopping passageways (pasajes) (Hoslin 2012). In response, tourism organizations were working mightily to tackle the image crisis. Rather than targeting the traditional tourist base with even cheaper alcohol and curios, they identified an opportunity to attract a diversified base of higher quality, more sophisticated tourists. However, tourism organizations (see Table 2) held different ideas about how to achieve that shift, fragmenting these image-making activities. One line of division focused on the future of the Revolution Avenue tourism district. A second division resembled what we found in the previous section, between those capitalizing on the opportunities that arise from the border location and others presenting Tijuana as a city rising to world status on its own.
People invested in the traditional tourist district were working in myriad ways to keep it relevant and vital. Municipal and tourism officials directly engaged the city’s reputation for danger with a tourist hotline and improved policing to provide a “secure zone” for visitors. The president of the downtown merchants’ association (Mexican Business and Tourism Committee [CETURMEX]) focused instead on regulating merchandise quality, developing a “distinguished host” program to provide selected businesses with a placard that would serve as a guarantee of quality to a more discriminating clientele. This organization had also worked to push strip clubs down to the red light district, trying to ensure that only morally upstanding businesses could inhabit the Avenue (Interview, June 24, 2010). The municipal government had invested in a beautification program during the crisis in the hope that a visual face-lift might increase tourist appeal. However, some leaders expressed skepticism, instead emphasizing the need for professional planning:
We’re beginning to see market studies. Before, why bother? There was no need; we were full of buyers, no? We just sold them whatever, Mexican cowboy hats that they wore on their way out and never wore again. We sold thousands. But, well, things change . . . So now we’re doing a study to determine what potential visitors want us to offer in Tijuana. (CANACO [National Chamber of Commerce, Services, and Tourism of Tijuana] Interview, August 23, 2010)
Many officials wanted to shift Revolution Avenue to a better-integrated space of consumption that would cater to tourists and a local clientele. The CANACO director complained that the old Revolution was an American enclave; in his view, the hallmark of a “world city” was the provision of public spaces where residents and international tourists could intermingle (Interview, August 23, 2010). Similarly, the president of the Tijuana office of the National Restaurant Chamber (CANIRAC) aspired to see the area redeveloped as a center of culinary excellence for tourists and Tijuanans alike, building on the success of the gastronomic zone in the River business district. He noted the recent openings of upscale restaurants on Revolution and their instant popularity with the Tijuana upper classes that formerly never considered dining in what they saw as a tacky tourist zone (Interview, August 23, 2010).
All tourism agencies except the downtown merchants’ organization (CETURMEX) adopted a vision that would also draw tourists into other areas of the city and state. In 2009, the Tijuana Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (COTUCO) hired a San Diego consulting firm to develop promotional materials targeting the Southern California market. They developed a calendar and website called “120 Things to Do in Tijuana” that steered potential visitors to museums, galleries, upscale restaurants, and cultural attractions: “Eat beet and blue cheese carpaccio at La Querencia”; “Sip on fresh coffee and enjoy independent film showings, art exhibitions and concerts at La Casa de la 9 Art Cafe.” The list evoked Tijuana as a place with cosmopolitan appeal for people with refined tastes.
The Baja State Secretary of Tourism (SECTUR) also aimed beyond Revolution Avenue, promoting coastal attractions, rugged backcountry, and picturesque wine-growing valleys to Mexican tourists. SECTUR’s 2010 promotional campaign “Be a Tourist in Your Own State” encouraged Baja Californians to adopt the perspective and consumption practices of tourists, selling “tourist cards” for discounts at restaurants, hotels, services, and attractions. The Secretary explained that the campaign appealed to state pride and encouraged domestic tourism, and that further development of adventure tourism, ecotourism, gastrotourism, and wine tourism would also draw a more cosmopolitan international audience (Interview, June 28, 2010).
A second line of division emerged between those who continued to focus on the opportunities provided by the international border, versus those who represented Tijuana as an emerging world-class city. One group seeking to profit from border opportunities was medical tourism, an institutionalized “cluster” of government agencies, chambers of commerce, EDCs, entrepreneurs, and hospitals. Tijuana has long offered affordable medical and dental care as well as experimental therapies. These industries emerged precisely because of differentials in price and regulatory systems; despite the crisis, advocates portrayed medical tourism as the subsector with the greatest potential for long-term profit (Kiy and McEnany 2010). This industry was also expanding into services such as plastic surgery, laser eye surgery, and day spas, promoted as luxuries that their clients might not be able to afford at home.
Officials also sought opportunities by marketing Tijuana as a border city to tourists from other parts of Mexico. In a form of reverse day-tripping, the municipal tourism agency was initiating a campaign to attract wealthy Mexicans from the interior for organized day outings to San Diego boutiques and shopping centers (COTUCO Interview, June 28, 2010). The convention business in Tijuana has also advertised the option for excursions to San Diego as a point of competitive advantage over other cities in Mexico. 8
Just as in the Tijuana Innovadora event described earlier, some actors in tourism promoted Tijuana as a world-class city irrespective of its location or border neighbor. We saw this image reflected in the “120 Things to Do in Tijuana” campaign, in the “Be a Tourist in Your Own State” campaign, and in the restaurant sector. Over the previous decade, a “Gastronomic Zone” of elegant, high-end restaurants hosting celebrity chefs had flourished, catering largely to business travelers and Tijuana’s upper classes. City and industry officials sponsored numerous initiatives to expand the city’s reputation for culinary excellence, inviting U.S. urban food bloggers and television chefs to explore Tijuana, and hosting an annual “Baja by the Sea” event in San Diego.
In sum, most tourism officials framed the image crisis as an opportunity to shift away from the whims of border-crossing day-trippers looking for cheap goods and entertainments. Those capitalizing on the border location shifted their sights to new audiences, such as Americans seeking affordable luxuries or Mexican tourists drawn by the appeal of day trips to San Diego. Others had abandoned border-centered strategies in favor of promoting Tijuana as a dynamic city attaining world-class status on its own. Given the lack of a unified strategy about the city brand, Tijuana’s institutionalized tourism sector was not positioned to strongly challenge negative media images nor to enact the kind of focused recoveries that we saw in New York in the late 1970s (Greenberg 2008a) or in New Orleans after Katrina (Gotham 2007a). However, that fragmentation may have left more space for small entrepreneurs and image-making from the bottom-up.
Not the Usual Suspects: Independent and Grassroots Image Workers
Most scholarship on place promotion has trained its lenses on well-resourced institutional elites who target external audiences. The broader concept of urban image work permits us to also examine a diffuse, diverse, and decentralized set of groups and individuals we found engaging city image from the bottom-up, through blogs, grassroots organizations, and entrepreneurial activities. Despite their comparative paucity of resources, these independent image workers were clearly engaged in cultural contestation over the image of the city. Although their work was not principally about resisting elite projects, they were largely skeptical of institutional efforts, which many saw as either ineffective or irrelevant to their own agendas. Independent image workers fell into two categories: (1) those speaking to an external audience, working to defend Tijuana as a wrongly maligned city, and (2) those focused instead on generating pride and a sense of community to an internal audience of Tijuana residents.
Participants in the first group promoted the city through weblogs, online social networks, and conventional media. They were working to redeem Tijuana by challenging prevailing negative stereotypes, countering misunderstandings, showcasing their favorite aspects of the city, and making it more accessible to outsiders. While their interests and audiences overlapped somewhat with those of institutional tourism, they framed the city differently, focusing on youth, arts, and other subcultures, as well as spaces outside of the established tourism and business districts.
One of the most salient locations for such image work was the blogosphere, particularly among English or bilingual bloggers. We identified 26 English or bilingual blogs about Tijuana geared primarily to an external audience. Among the most clearly dedicated to urban image were seven blogs written by Americans living in Tijuana, speaking to people in the United States who they thought misunderstood the city. One blog writer (The Real Tijuana) had been living in or near Tijuana for 50 years. His site originated in large part as a reaction against negative coverage from bloggers and journalists in California “who think they know more about Tijuana than we do.” He claimed that he and his fellow bloggers “are not remaking the image of Tijuana so much as we’re telling the truth” (Interview, June 15, 2010). The blog introduced topics from history, business, and contemporary culture, in part to dispel negative stories and in part to encourage Southern Californians to give Tijuana a fair shake.
In general, Americans blogging from Tijuana portrayed an adopted city that they found complex, dynamic, and coming into its own. The author of a photojournalism blog (Tijuanalandia) emphasized excitement in the air as the old model of tourism collapsed, creating an opening for Tijuanans to “construct something for themselves.” He predicted that as Tijuana becomes more interesting in its own right, it will attract visitors from high-culture places like San Francisco and New York, “people that are our age [20s and 30s], a little more savvy, a little more adventurous, urbanites” (Interview, July 1, 2010). Some bloggers focused on the resilience of Tijuana residents in the face of adversity; others highlighted local creativity in art, architecture, music, fashion, and cuisine. Indeed, a grassroots variation on the “world-class city” narrative appeared in many of the English-language blogs, as writers sought to break through the prevailing images of fear and vice.
Most English blogs also attempted to demystify the city for potential visitors. Bloggers targeting U.S. readers tended to position themselves as cultural interpreters, akin to docents, whose mission was to help reveal the richness and vitality of the city that a novice viewer would otherwise miss. To entice visitation, they offered an array of suggestions for possible exploration—shops and galleries, parks and plazas, underground art and music venues, and various quirky or hidden charms. Recognizing how daunting the city can be for a newcomer, they typically posted maps and transportation instructions with their activity recommendations.
One of the “gringo bloggers” took his roles as a champion of Tijuana and a cultural interpreter even further, organizing tourist events on Facebook under the name Turista Libre (Free Tourist). Every few weeks, he hosted several dozen people who wanted to explore Tijuana. They typically rented a bus and day-tripped to an event, an offbeat attraction, or a distinctive slice-of-life experience. It began as an extension of outings he had arranged for U.S. friends who had visited and enjoyed the dynamism of the city: “They would leave, and one, they’re not dead. Two, they’re not terrified. And three, they’re amazed that this was so close and they had never tapped into it before” (Interview, July 1, 2010). Whereas official tourism was trying to shape Tijuana’s image to attract tourists, Turista Libre attracted tourists to enrich and complicate their image of Tijuana.
The second group of independent image workers was also reacting to negative press coverage, but targeted an internal audience to address the low morale that many Tijuana residents felt when criminal violence dominated the news. They focused on promoting pride of place among residents, attempting to strengthen communities and to reclaim physical spaces in the city for the enjoyment of residents.
The most compelling demonstration came from a network of grassroots organizations laboring at the neighborhood level to instill a sense of ownership, pride, and efficacy. We found a proliferation of groups, many networked on Facebook, generating an image of Tijuana as a city of resilience and possibilities. 9 Emblematic in this category was Reacciona Tijuana (Tijuana Reacts), an association of activists and civic boosters that was engaged in several forms of community building across the period of our study. Inspired by a group with a similar tactic in Monterrey, Mexico, Reacciona Tijuana had splashed vividly onto the scene at the height of the violence, posting billboards and unfurling large banners with positive, poetic messages in highly visible locations throughout the city (such as “Tijuana deserves to be healed—do something good for her today”). According to one of the founders, the messages were intended to make people “conscious that a change in the city had to start with ourselves” and to motivate action, because government and investors were “not doing anything” (Interview, June 24, 2010).
The messages drew media and popular interest, and an all-volunteer grassroots organization ensued. Reacciona Tijuana worked closely with several youth organizations that saw the transformative potential of young people assuming responsibility for addressing the challenges facing the city. The groups set up a variety of street-level projects to overcome alienation, and organized programs for cross-border experiences. They spoke of their work as a “platform for action,” seeking not just personal transformation, but also the involvement of friends and neighbors in the process of making their city a more desirable place to live (Tijuana Somos Todos [We Are All Tijuana] Interview, July 1, 2010). Reacciona Tijuana was also engaged in neighborhood beautification in the working-class community of Camino Verde. Activists secured government funding to provide paint and materials for an ambitious street art project, which drew the participation of muralists and artists from both sides of the border.
In addition to activist community-building projects, we witnessed grassroots image work with entrepreneurial roots, centered on reclaiming former tourism spaces for the enjoyment of Tijuana’s residents. One such development was the transformation of Sixth Street, which abruptly sprouted dozens of trendy bars and nightclubs and became a magnet for local young people. In 2009, the young owners of one of the pioneering bars discovered a vacant storefront with cheap rent on a Revolution cross street. They decided to open a mescal bar like those they enjoyed in Mexico City “for our friends, basically . . . And suddenly after we opened, 25 bars opened after us . . . We didn’t believe it” (Interview, August 2, 2010). The area immediately bustled with nightlife in a way Tijuana had not seen for several years, now populated with residents who previously seldom stepped foot in the former gringo tourist district. The bar owners viewed their generation of Sixth Street entrepreneurs as a model for the rest of downtown, since the previous nightlife model offered only “dirty music for a type of crowd that’s not coming back.”
At the same time, other entrepreneurial developments were transforming other downtown spaces. For an art event in late 2009, a group of artists had rented a set of deserted retail stalls in a covered passageway between two main streets (Pasaje Rodriguez). Afterwards, they made a deal with the property owners for reduced rent in exchange for renovation work. By fall 2010, 12 small businesses were operating—art galleries, bookstores, coffee shops, clothing boutiques—catering to a class-diverse, artistic crowd of young locals. These entrepreneurs were working together, hosting exhibitions, live music, and theater and dance performances. The owner of a bookstore was optimistic about potential future cooperation with municipal agencies, since “in the end, we are all aspiring to the same things. We are trying to recuperate a space that is a very important zone here in Tijuana. We are trying to bring culture and art to the people” (Interview, August 19, 2010).
The Spanish-language blogosphere was another site of activity targeting Tijuana residents. We found 28 Spanish blogs about Tijuana, 10 of which were clearly engaged in image work. Most celebrated the reclamation of spaces around the city, such as the rebirth of the former curio-shop passages, or the explosion of street art. One blog offered itself as “a campaign in favor of forgotten spaces,” describing Tijuana as “complex and valiant . . . difficult to understand . . . authentic,” and characterized by a dynamic and creative citizenry. 10 Other image workers dedicated their blogs to instilling pride of place, documenting urban renewal and neighborhood restoration projects, or boasting of the city’s cultural richness. The Tijuana blogosphere was also a site of debate over Tijuana Innovadora, with one blogger praising the city’s coming-of-age, and another denouncing its neoliberal agenda and contrived images of modernity.
The Tijuana case suggests a few patterns that we might anticipate seeing in future studies of urban image work outside of branding institutions. While officials promoting tourism and economic development often work to sell a “clean and green” image of trophy architecture and smiling, middle-class people who do not resemble the city’s demographics (Holcomb 2001), those doing image work from the bottom-up are likely to promote a complex, countercultural place identity in which their own demographics are more at home. Whereas elites promote particular spaces and structures as iconic, those working outside of traditional institutions may adopt different architectures or geographies as definitive. Independent image workers may also complicate the efforts of official and institutional image workers to stay on message, since imagery that emanates from the base may also reflect different goals, oftentimes critical of official designs. Rather than conscious resistance to elite campaigns, the Tijuana case suggests that bottom-up actors may simply be promoting alternative visions and adopting different goals, at times with little attention to the priorities of officials and institutions. Thus, we interpret independent image work as part of a larger process of cultural contestation over city identity.
Conclusion: Urban Image Work amid Crisis
This study introduces the idea of “urban image work” to encompass official promotional campaigns and diffuse, noninstitutional efforts to shape perceptions. Many official and grassroots image workers attempt to influence outsiders, though they also may target internal audiences to secure buy-in, raise morale, build community spirit, reclaim city spaces, or promote particular stories about urban identity. Broadly speaking, urban image work is the terrain on which the cultural politics of city identity take place, as official and independent actors work to define the city, adopting contesting narrative frames that reflect their different agendas, interests, perspectives, and visions. In this regard, it need not be conceptually limited to cases of image crisis and recovery.
Existing literatures tend to focus mainly on tourism or represent urban branding institutions as monoliths of unified interests. In contrast, the Tijuana case highlights the varied landscape of interests among urban elites that produced the differing priorities, audiences, and narrative frames that they adopted. For example, some manufacturing interests attempted to sell Tijuana in terms of the border’s opportunities for affordable manufacturing on one side with first-world amenities and lifestyle on the other. That binational framing worked against the image promoted by tourism interests of a world-class city offering its own refined amenities and lifestyles. We see similarly conflicting agendas among tourism institutions. Merchants in the traditional tourism district fought to keep it vital, while city and state agencies promoted the movement of tourist consumption to other spaces. While some actors in tourism still sought to take advantage of differences in culture, goods, prices, or regulation across the border, others had given up on the cross-border clientele, and instead promoted the city’s cosmopolitan appeals to residents and visitors from other regions of Mexico.
Official tourism had a partial ally among some of the entrepreneurs and bloggers doing independent image work, particularly those who positioned themselves as cultural interpreters for an English-speaking audience. However, grassroots boosters projected more eclectic and socially-complex images than those officials were selling to middle-class leisure tourists. In general, we could expect decentralized grassroots boosters to counteract elite efforts to present any kind of unified brand or identity for a city. While those working from the bottom-up lack many of the resources available to institutional elites, they are able to use the Internet and social media as low-cost tools for organizing and for reaching a broad audience. Such independent players have growing potential in the game of framing urban image.
Although it is beyond the scope of this study to measure the efficacy of image-making strategies, we see some preliminary evidence that Tijuana’s grassroots image workers have found a mainstream audience in the United States. For instance, a search among major U.S. newspapers revealed nearly as much coverage of Facebook-organized Turista Libre outings as for the well-funded, highly-orchestrated 2010 Tijuana Innovadora event. 11 The arts collectives in the pasajes on Revolution Avenue have been featured in the New York Times (September 12, 2012), and the nightlife on Sixth Street has been covered in the Washington Post (October 8, 2011) and National Public Radio (December 6, 2010). This rough parity may reflect the limited capacity of elites in a less-developed state to command attention abroad as well as opportunities arising from new media. The fact that grassroots activities sometimes capture even international media attention reinforces the value of broadening the study of urban image-making beyond the traditional elite focus.
Another contribution of this study is its geographic location outside the postindustrial cities of the global North that have figured so prominently in the existing image crisis and place promotion literatures. As a beneficiary of Northern deindustrialization, Tijuana presents a case in which the manufacturing sector remained as vitally invested in urban image as the tourism sector. In addition, we saw some evidence that Tijuana’s global position added pressure for cultural homogenization. The “world-class city” frame many actors adopted was a double-edged sword: While promoting Tijuana as an equal to the best cities internationally, it also entailed the adoption of neoliberal Western standards about what it means to be cosmopolitan. Elite efforts to put Tijuana on the map required capital investment to produce the expected spaces for consumption as well as promotional campaigns highlighting only the parts of the city that fit the global ideal.
Meanwhile, grassroots image-making generated alternative frames that celebrated Tijuana’s quirks, charms, and talents, reorienting the gaze of insiders and outsiders to spaces and subcultures that would otherwise have remained invisible. The very fragmentation among images of the city undermines the capacity of elites to establish a single hegemonic brand; it generates openings for residents to shape and represent their own spaces in the city.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the helpful advice and feedback from Sandra Dibble, Paul Ganster, Jim Gerber, Robert Biddle, Norma Iglesias Prieto, Margath Walker, Nick Batt, Jorge Carrillo, Rosio Barajas and other colleagues at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, as well as three anonymous reviewers. We are grateful to Elizabeth Sáenz-Ackermann for assisting the fieldwork, and to all those who generously offered their time for interviews.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
Fieldwork expenses for this article were provided by funds from a University Grants Program award from San Diego State University.