Tijuana: Border, Migration, and Gated Communities

Tijuana: Border, Migration, and Gated Communities Brisa Violeta Carrasco Gallegos Northern Mexico’s border cities have experienced the most accelerated demographic growth of any region in the country as a result of internal migration. Many among this migrant population arrive at the border looking for an opportunity to cross into the United States. But, when faced with the difficulties that this entails, they end up settling temporarily in border cities, eventually taking on work and other commitments there. What was to be a temporary stay thus becomes permanent . Government initiatives, such as the 1942 Bracero program and the 1965 Border Industrialization Program (BIP) figure prominently in the diverse range of factors stimulating the mass migration of workers into northern Mexico (Zenteno 1993: 15–19; Verduzco, Bringas, and Valenzuela 1995: 88). This paper analyzes the most recent trend affecting demographic change: Tijuana’s real estate and construction boom, its effects on the rapid expansion of the city’s surface area, and the relationship of such expansion to the growth of gated communities. It takes as a point of reference data generated in a field study conducted in Tijuana during October 2004 and March 2005.1 Tijuana evinces all of the processes of big border cities: large-scale population growth and expansion of its urban surface area, increased opportunities for work, and fast-paced exchange of goods and services. The city developed much later than many other cities in Northwest Mexico, but its growth has been explosive. In 1900 Tijuana had 242 inhabitants (Zenteno 1993: 13). By 2005, this number had skyrocketed to 1,448,944 (CONAPO n.d.). Within these dynamics of population growth the border city becomes a context of multiple realities and multiple lifeways, a place expressing the restlessness and fears of its diverse inhabitants. For many of those residents native to the border cities, or at least with deeper roots there, the floating population seems dangerous, Brisa Violeta Carrasco Gallegos is a Ph.D. candidate in social sciences at the Universidad de Guadalajara. Journal of the Southwest 51, 4 (Winter 2009) : 457–475 458 ✜ Journal of the Southwest problematic, and harmful. Long-term residents understand the latter as temporary inhabitants poised at a point of crossing. Migrants are thus often blamed for the urban problems, traffic jams, apparent misery, delinquency, and insecurity experienced every day in cities like Tijuana. This association becomes part of the urban imaginary and, indeed, the built environment: different social groups struggle to maintain some semblance of community, creating spaces within which they are able to identify with and understand their peers. In the border cities, we thus see a proliferation of restricted or gated housing developments, creating places only social equals have the right to inhabit. They are based on an ideal of security within a carefully delimited space. While the phenomenon of the gated development is not specific to the border, it nevertheless takes on greater meaning in cities with high indices of insecurity like the border cities. For residents of gated communities , the car is critical for managing the family’s security and its property. Social segregation is a characteristic of the border urban zones, with the housing and service districts characterized by social groups of similar income levels and ethnic background, among other things. “The reality of each city, its urban history, has generated both mixed areas and other areas of homogeneity” (Borja and Muxí 2000: 63). The novelty that this model presents lies in the physical materialization of distinct boundaries separating peer groups, the meticulous vision of the future in housing choices, and the tacit limitations to access. As J. Blakely and M. G. Snyder argue, Economic and social segregation are not new. In fact, zoning and city planning were designed, in part, to preserve the position of the privileged with subtle variances in building and density codes. But gated communities go further in several aspects than other means of exclusion. They create physical barriers to access. They also privatize community space, not merely individual space. Many gated areas also privatize civic responsibilities like police protection and communal services such as street maintenance, recreation and entertainment. The new developments can create a private world that need share little with...