Sex Work and the City: The Social Geography of Health and Safety in Tijuana, Mexico

Chapter One. Tijuana’s Origins

CHAPTER ONE Tijuana’s Origins American culture values progress.We seem to believe that new is better, and as a nation, we seem to think that progress is our most important product.We expect most change to be improvement, which means, most of the time, increased production, profits, and material possessions. As a society we are rich, but in what ways are we better off? (baRlEtt anD bROWn 1985: 25) Long before Las Vegas emerged from the desert as a glittering haven for gambling and sex work, Tijuana, Mexico, had established itself as a frontier version of Sin City. Located on the western hemisphere’s only first world/ third world border,Tijuana is estimated to be the busiest international border crossing in the world (Ganster 1999). Like its border cousins, Ciudad Juárez and, on a smaller scale, Nogales, Mexico, Tijuana draws from a vast network of migrant labor, college students, tourists, and the U.S. armed services in providing demand for sex work labor at the border. In Tijuana, for example, fiftyfive million northward-bound migrants and tourists from the United States flow through the city each year (ibid.). Because of its proximity to San Diego, Los Angeles, and other West Coast cities, Tijuana is also a popular crossing ground for those who come from as far away as China, Russia, and the Middle East. Its geographic importance has stimulated substantial growth in tourism, services, and manufacturing. In its thriving transnational diversity and as a major contender in the globalized manufacturing sphere, Tijuana is a postmodern city and tourist mecca. The city welcomes the world’s consumers with open shops, restaurants, and night clubs.Tijuana caters to young and old, and its downtown streets pulsate with music, voices, and laughter. The city supplies need fulfillment on every level: food, beer, liquor, voyeurism, sex, and 1 Chapter One recreation. Yet it remains a place that is virtually untouched, ethnographically speaking, until now. The story of Tijuana goes beyond its current demographics, containing a variety of seemingly unrelated elements, from sombreros and serapes in the 1920s to sex tourism to televisions and the decline of the contemporary family farm. Combined, these factors form the patchwork quilt of supply and demand for the sex industry in Tijuana. Many facets of the political economy of the border have shaped the industry one finds today, from the macroeconomic forces shaping immigration to today’s increasingly globalized sexual landscape. Creating the U.S.-Mexico Border From the beginning, social relations along the U.S.-Mexico border were formed through social inequity: The creation of the U.S.-Mexican boundary is best understood as a long historical process that began in the sixteenth century when England, Spain, and France competed for control of North America and that ended in the mid-nineteenth century when the United States absorbed large portions of the Mexican northern frontier through annexation, warfare, and purchase. . . . Americans now had a vast domain that extended from coast to coast, substantially boosting internal and external trade. The Mexican cession also yielded additional fertile lands and abundant gold, silver, copper, and other valuable resources. Thus, for both nations the making of the boundary proved to be a determining factor in their development. (Martinéz 1996: 1) The boundary line ensured that the United States would remain resource rich, while still in a position to extract labor resources from south of its border.This asymmetry continues to characterize the border today. Early Northward Migrations The planned use of labor from south of the border began in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when employers in the United States were actively seeking inexpensive labor to support economic growth, especially in the newly emerging American Southwest (Cockcroft 1986). This labor force Tijuana’s Origins 19 was involved in agribusiness, cattle, felling trees, mining ore, and laying down railroads. Despite fluctuations in the U.S. economy, the number of workers from Mexico and Central America that are employed in the United States has increased with every successive generation: Mexican labor became fundamental for the development, survival, growth of much U.S. agribusiness, as well as for the garment and electronics industries, select sectors of heavy industry such as automotive and steel, and the restaurant , hotel, and other service industries. Today, the substantial presence of Mexicans in an ever-expanding and ever more international reserve army of labor facilitates economic recovery and potential expansion for industry as...