The New York Times declares this in a headline today: “It’s Hot. It’s Hip. It’s Tijuana?”
The NYT travel story takes a look at the Tijuana that lies beneath the cheap-beer, easy-women, illicit-drugs stereotype:
This is a Tijuana you don’t know. Most Mexicans, who don’t cut Tijuana much slack – dismissing it as a provincial backwater, a border badlands – don’t know it either. … Tijuana is developing a new identity that is bringing it out of the shadows of its own reputation. Its fabled lawlessness has become a kind of freedom and license for social mobility and entrepreneurship that has attracted artists and musicians, chefs and restaurateurs, and professionals from Mexico and elsewhere.