Framing the Neighbors

How does photojournalism in San Diego represent Tijuana and its residents? This chapter analyzes both articles and photographs in the San Diego Union-Tribune over the course of a decade (2000–2010), using visual methods and a broad heuristic to capture four dimensions of stigmatizing narratives about Tijuana. On one hand, the analysis finds a complex portrait of Tijuana that encompassed not only the expected images from the drug war but also stories from business and daily life that would feel familiar and empathetic to San Diego readers. On the other hand, themes of violence and disorder pervaded much of the content, even on topics unrelated to crime, particularly in headlines and captions. This chapter demonstrates how bordering and debordering representations in local media can coexist in paradoxical ways and how they shift scales from local to national, depending on the topic and framing.

The Look of Tijuana

This chapter uses photographs to analyze how ordinary people in San Diego visualized the neighboring city of Tijuana in relation to their own. In qualitative interviews, forty-five people sorted a set of photographs from the Tijuana–San Diego borderlands, evaluating them according to how much they thought the images resembled Tijuana and discussing which visual cues led to their conclusions. This process brought to the surface dimensions of a bordered geographic imaginary that reflected implicit, mundane forms of social knowledge that they may not have thought to articulate otherwise. Three overarching and interrelated themes arose inductively from the interviews: dirt, disorder, and economic deprivation. Each of these themes reinforces the border as a marker of inequality, either in terms of class distinction or as part of a neocolonial imaginary about a socially distant “Third World.”

The Making (and Unmaking) of a Bordered Imaginary

How has the notion of a line marking San Diego and Tijuana as unequal neighbors been produced and challenged over time? This chapter examines three dimensions of regional history. The first lays out the histories of tourism and commerce that developed out of the asymmetry of the international border. These sectors thrived on a border that was fluid yet premised on inequality. The second part focuses on industrial production and trade, sectors that both reinforced and blurred borders. The final part turns to the US government’s hardening of the borderline through policing and inspections, which have played a large role in making the asymmetric border psychologically “real.” Bordering practices also appear at the local level, as do many debordering challenges to the notion of a line demarking unequal places.

Urban Folklore, Urban Legend

Everyday talk is central to how places become stigmatized and how asymmetric borders enter the popular imagination. This chapter explores the tales about Tijuana that proliferate in neighboring San Diego, based on a set of forty-five qualitative interviews conducted in six San Diego County communities between 2006 and 2008. The analysis finds that people seldom repeated positive stories they heard, whereas they traded liberally in negative tales, many of which came from remote or untraceable sources. These latter stories constituted a kind of urban folklore that cast the neighboring city in a dark light. This tendency was much stronger among those who had little firsthand experience in Tijuana, revealing the reach and importance of an abstract bordered imaginary.

Images of Place and Race in Historic Tourism Promotion

Tourism has played an important role in shaping the economies and reputations of San Diego and Tijuana. This chapter draws on archival research—including materials such as tourism brochures, maps, guidebooks, and postcards—to examine how tourism boosters have represented Tijuana, especially in relation to neighboring San Diego. This analysis identifies five thematic narratives that emerge, disappear, and reappear over the course of more than a century, as different actors draw upon different meanings of place and race to suit their current needs or agendas. Once created, these narratives live on and remain available for different purposes over time.

Bordering Places

This chapter explains and illustrates four core arguments that contribute to literatures on borders, territorial stigma, and geographies of inequality. They are presented in an accessible way, with stories and illustrations from this region as well as other parts of the world, and they are relevant to any circumstances in which people have mental geographies that divide “good neighborhoods” from “bad” ones. First, the stigmatization and valorization of places are relational processes that contribute to spatialized inequalities. Second, place stigma plays an important role in producing and maintaining asymmetric borders. Third, asymmetric bordering occurs wherever people construct spatial lines demarcating distinction and inequality, at any scale. Fourth, asymmetric borders generate particular dynamics of crossings and contact zones that serve to protect and reinforce inequalities of status.

Imagining the Border-City Relationship

Many alternative visions of the border-city relationship between San Diego and Tijuana circulate among local actors. Some visualize an egalitarian, integrated future. Others have various stakes in reinforcing a bordered imaginary that exaggerates asymmetries and obscures complex economic realities on the ground. Bordering can create local opportunities for profit and contribute to the availability of marginalized labor on both sides of the line. Bordering discourse also provides an identity foil for San Diegans who have come to define themselves as superior, in contrast to a Tijuana stigmatized as impoverished, disorderly, corrupt, dirty, and dangerous. The place images of these cities are intertwined, such that more positive representations of Tijuana will require a reimaging of San Diego. Ultimately, this chapter examines the promise of and constraints on developing a more equal shared regional future, a reduction in Tijuana’s place stigma, and a less bordered imaginary.

Image Work in Tijuana

This chapter examines efforts to reinvent Tijuana’s reputation during and after a period of image crisis. From 2008 to 2010, cartel violence dominated international news coverage about the city, with devastating economic effects. Drawing on a set of twenty interviews conducted in Tijuana from 2009 to 2012, the chapter explores cultural contestation over how to represent the city during that time of image crisis and in its aftermath. Actors with stakes in industry promoted substantially different place images than those involved in tourism and cross-border commerce. A third, diverse set of actors worked to shape the city’s image from the bottom up, through blogs, grassroots organizations, and entrepreneurialism, which showed potential for shaping place narratives within and outside the city. Finally, the chapter takes a closer look at the transformation of the former tourism district and finds promising signs for a debordering future stemming from ongoing image work.

Introduction

In San Diego, the neighboring city of Tijuana has a reputation for vice and violence, yet there are many other possible narratives about Tijuana as a place. This introduction lays out the questions and summarizes the main arguments for the book, which examines the ways that Tijuana has been stigmatized over time and how that stigma reinforces local inequalities and borders. More broadly, this case study contributes theoretically to literatures on border theory, territorial stigmatization, and spatial inequalities. The introduction offers a brief discussion of methods and data (including the analysis of archival materials, qualitative interviews in San Diego and Tijuana, and photojournalism representations), as well as an overview of the book.