Border Report: Candidate’s Remarks Reignite Tijuana’s Image Debate

“The truth is that Tijuana is not pretty like Cancun,” Xochitl Gálvez, Mexico’s top opposition candidate said last month.

Those few words casually tossed into a speech quickly made national headlines. In Tijuana, it generated some fierce pushback, and the return of an age-old question: Can Tijuana shed its notorious reputation – characterizations that link the city to vice, violence, corruption and urban decay?

The issue for decades has confounded civic boosters, public relations firms, tourism promoters, business groups, politicians and ordinary citizens eager to cast a positive light on the city – or at least a more balanced one. It has been the subject of academic study on both sides of the border.

How it started: Gálvez, candidate for a broad coalition of opposition parties, was addressing a crowd in Cancun when she made the following statement: “I was just in Tijuana and they told me everything that was happening in gastronomy. The truth is that Tijuana is not pretty like Cancun. But it’s becoming a tourism destination because of its gastronomy.”

Baja California governor responds: The following day, an indignant Baja California Gov. Marina del Pilar Avila Olmeda, a member of Mexico’s ruling MORENA Party, issued a statement expressing “profound disagreement” with Gálvez, and in the process misquoting her. Gálvez “disrespectfully said Tijuana is ugly… It’s a beautiful city, vibrant, rich in culture, history and diversity. I reject derogatory comments that denigrate our city and Tijuanenses.”

The governor’s rebuttal got its own pushback, from Gálvez and others. “If Tijuana is so pretty, why does the mayor of the city prefer to live in a military barracks?” one Galvez supporter wrote on X.  “Listen, Tijuana is ugly, and furthermore, it’s collapsed. Its public transportation is deficient, streets full of potholes, and beaches for most of the year are considered unsuitable for swimmers,” wrote a Tijuana journalist.

Efforts to change the image: In his recently reprinted 2003 book, “Tijuana La Horrible,” Humberto Felix Berumen, a critic and university professor, examines the myth of Tijuana as a center for crime and vice, one that has for decades failed to reflect the city’s reality. Tijuana “is today an imaginary construction that exists beyond the real city,” he writes. 

As long as I’ve covered Tijuana – since 1994 – there have been efforts to change its image. 

In 1997, Tijuana City Hall attempted to copyright the city’s name, to prevent a proposed soap opera focusing on the underworld of illegal immigration  from being named “Tijuana”. The producer eventually abandoned the project.

Worried that negative U.S. news stories about the city’s drug violence and their effect on tourism, the state government has on more than one occasion turned to U.S. public relations and marketing firms.

Among the most ambitious efforts to change Tijuana’s reputation was Tijuana Innovadora 2010, a mega-event spearheaded that featured famous speakers, numerous exhibits, a fashion show and other events over a 10-day period. 

Businessman Jose Galicot, a longtime defender of Tijuana’s image, was one of the event’s co-creators; he now leads the nonprofit that emerged and bears the name Tijuana Innovadora. “I think everyone perceives beauty as they care to,” Galicot told me last week when I sought him out for a reaction to the candidate’s comments. “It’s a city that’s growing, a city that’s economically powerful, a city with a future.”

An ongoing debate: “There are constantly negative comments, and constantly groups that speak up in defense of the city, that people work hard, that this is a land of opportunity, etc, and I suppose that’s right but urbanistically, Tijuana has big problems, Marco Antonio Samaniego, a historian at the Autonomous University of Baja California, told me. “The city draws the attention of the world or of the person looking for information precisely because of its paradoxes, its contradictions.”

Gálvez’s “not pretty” phrase was poorly chosen, especially given that she’s running for national office, Samaniego said. But it hit on a truth about the city, he added: that it suffers from lack of planning, and an array of urban issues that make life difficult for many Tijuanenses. “She should have just said the same thing, but in another way.”

In Other News

Could cartel rivalries be crossing the border? A shooting incident last month  at a Chula Vista apartment complex that left one man dead and another injured is being linked by Tijuana media to a dispute between members of the Sinaloa and Arellano Felix criminal organizations. The March 27 incident at an Otay Ranch Apartment Complex led to the arrest hours later of two 15-year-old boys, according to Chula Vista police. The dead man and both teens have been tentatively linked to the Sinaloa Cartel, the Tijuana newsweekly Zeta reported, citing an unnamed government official. The man injured in the shooting is allegedly a member of the Arellano Felix Organization known as “Apache,” whose group was linked to the killing in 2022 of Tijuana journalist Lourdes Maldonado.

Migrant drownings: A rip current created by the final stretch of  U.S. border wall that juts into the Pacific Ocean compounds the danger for migrants attempting to swim from Tijuana to San Diego, and lifeguards on both sides of the border report rising numbers of rescues and drownings, according to KPBS-News.

Smuggling boat in Imperial Beach: The U.S. Border Patrol detained seven people, including one minor, around 6 a.m. Tuesday when a suspected smuggling boat landed off Seacoast Drive in Imperial Beach. 

Conditions at makeshift camps: Migrants waiting in an unofficial U.S. holding area west of the San Ysidro Port of Entry are struggling to obtain emergency medical care, inewsource reports. 

Children at the U.S. border: A federal district judge in Los Angeles ruled Wednesday that children waiting in makeshift camps on U.S. soil must be quickly processed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and placed in facilities that are “safe and sanitary.”

Vaquitas: A new report by the international nonprofit Environmental Investigations Agency has found that continued Asian demand for the bladders of protected totoaba fish is threatening the survival of vaquitas, a critically endangered marine mammal found in the Upper Gulf of California. Despite years of international campaigns, and enforcement actions, vaquitas for decades have ended up as bycatch in and drowned in the gillnets used to catch totoaba fish whose swim bladders are highly prized in the Asian black market. Only ten vaquita individuals are currently believed alive.

The EIA report, “On Borrowed Time,” states that totoaba bladders are advertised on social media platforms such as the Chinese app WeChat, “indicating that wildlife traffickers have resumed business as usual since the COVID-19 pandemic.” Mexican vaquita expert Lorenzo Rojas Bracho discussed the report’s findings in an EIA podcast released last week.