Border Crossings: Tijuana/San Diego

摘要

Tijuana is a city of about 1.5 million people just south of the border at San Diego, which has roughly twice its population. Occupying some 280 square kilometers, it has growr rapidly in recent decades, first as a way station on the migration route to the north and more recently as place of employment in manufacturing and assembly plants spawned by liberalized trade agreements. Population growth, which approached 7% annually in the early 1990s, has now dropped to about 2.5% as job growth in the border industries-maquiladoras-has slowed. About 13.5% of Tijuana's population lives in informal settlements, which occupy roughly 10% of its area. Tijuana/San Diego is the busiest border station in the world, with over fifty million people passing through the checkpoint each year. The city presses hard against the frontier, while a large no-man's land occupies the area to the north. Teddy Cruz extends the analysis of the boundaries between the formal and the non-formal to the international frontier. He sees San Diego and Tijuana as examples of the global geography of conflict between the First and the Third Worlds or between what the Pentagon has termed "the functioning core" and "the non-integrating gap." San Diego/Tijuana in this view represents the metropolis as battleground, where control and evasion, formal and informal, legal and illegal, collide. The border itself, Cruz says, exists from the north to exclude and from the south to be transgressed.