COLUMN ONE : Tijuana Battles for Respect : The city fights to shatter its image as a lawless tourist trap. Residents celebrate a cosmopolitan culture, history and a frontier spirit they claim outsiders fail to see.

Young writers haunt the gritty cantinas of this border city’s historic red light district, the Zona Norte , soaking up material, scribbling ideas on paper napkins.

Artists find refuge at the cheerfully eclectic Cultural Center of Tijuana, which offers Picasso exhibits, Tito Puente concerts, a classical orchestra of Russian expatriates and paintings inspired by both Baja California folk drawings and East Los Angeles murals. The globe-shaped edifice dominates the downtown landscape--but eludes the attention of thousands of U.S. visitors, whose knowledge of Tijuana is limited to the garish tourist strip that embodies the border culture of old.

Stereotypes about Tijuana and other Mexican border cities endure on both sides. They are seen as tawdry, artificial outposts whose Mexican identity has been diluted by a longtime bombardment of U.S. culture: television, McDonald’s and rock music. And economic integration accelerated by the North American Free Trade Agreement has intensified fears that these ills are spreading south.

Tijuana has been further battered by the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio last month. The ensuing worldwide headlines depicted once more the traditional sinister images of lawlessness and violence.

“Tijuana does not deserve this,” said the city’s youthful mayor, Hector Osuna Jaime, 36.

Indeed, the city is trying to shatter such stereotypes. Most strikingly, a boom in the arts celebrates a culture that residents say is cosmopolitan, not crass--one that blends Mexican frontier spirit with the most vibrant parts of life on both sides of the border.

Tijuananses also say their city has a secret identity that many outsiders do not see: While acknowledging problems with poverty and crime, they say Tijuana is a lively urban melting pot stoked by migration from throughout Mexico, the variety of regional cultures fusing with longtime Anglo and Chicano influences.

On the street, this is reflected in people’s politics, language and everyday life, in the attitudes and accents of elegant chilangos (transplants from Mexico City), itinerant vendors from southern Mexico and the hip clientele at trendy hangouts with names such as Baby Rock and Yuppie’s Sports Bar.

“They say this city is frivolous, a way station, a no-man’s-land. Nonetheless, we are here,” said Fernando Lopez Mateos, director of the Cultural Center’s new professional theater school, one of the few programs of its kind in Mexico.

The quest to establish a distinct identity, both for themselves and for the outside world, shapes the work of artists and intellectuals who are exploring the new culture of a frontier of change. This emerging generation is impatient with the old arguments about whether Tijuana is sufficiently Mexican.

“It’s not a question of which culture dominates the other,” said magazine editor Leobardo Saravia Quiroz, 36, who recently compiled “In the Line of Fire,” a book of border crime fiction. “Each of the cultures has its value and they influence one another. The fear that Mexican culture is being diluted at the border is a tired, Byzantine discourse of government officials that leads nowhere.”

The cultural offerings of the border have gained increasing prominence after years in which the government in Mexico City regarded northern regionalism suspiciously. The federally run Tijuana center, for example, is preparing a major exhibit dedicated to the history of the city and the state of Baja California, according to Pedro Ochoa Palacio, until recently the center’s director.

“The history of Tijuana had been hidden, limited,” said Ochoa, an urbane, engaging man who left the post recently for a government job in Mexico City. “Poetically, we are seeking to unite the two cultures of Baja California and Mexico, the shared histories. . . . In the past, the driving objective was to reaffirm the national Mexican culture at the border. The regional culture was ignored.”

The center tries to nurture local artists, partly in response to years in which the powers that be dictated a steady diet of mariachis, charros and other icons of the interior. In a basement workshop that resembles an industrial grotto, Alvaro Blancarte paints murals that are inspired in form and content by the mythology and rock drawings of the Cumiai, an Indian tribe native to Baja California.

Down the hall, aspiring writers, actors and directors attend classes in a rigorous professional theater program that started last year, attracting an internationally known faculty in what was viewed as a coup for Tijuana. The students hope to build a theater scene that will ultimately rival that of Mexico City, the country’s artistic mecca.

Actress Norma Bustamante, 24, wants to resist the lure of the capital when she graduates.

“Tijuana is a place to create a new circle, new works and ideas,” she said. “There is a lot to say right here. At the border, there are a thousand stories to tell.”

Some border stories have won national recognition. In the play “The Journey of the Minstrels,” award-winning Tijuana playwright Hugo Salcido dramatized a real-life incident in which 18 illegal immigrants died in a sealed boxcar in the West Texas desert.

The writings of Rosina Conde explore a nostalgic Tijuana from a feminist perspective; she describes the drunken U.S. Marines and down-and-out go-go dancers of 1960s-era Avenida Revolucion, the heart of the city’s tourist strip, in poetic memoirs titled “Revolutionary Vignettes.”

“The stereotype of the city does not necessarily bother us,” said editor Saravia, who recently oversaw the translation of “The Golden Horseshoe,” a hard-boiled detective story by Dashiell Hammett set in 1920s Tijuana. “In fact, we take it as a point of thematic departure.”

The Americanized “sin city” image persists despite the dramatic changes of the 1980s. The rise of maquiladoras --as trans-border factories are known--construction and other industries propelled dizzying economic and population growth. The city now boasts more than 1 million residents. About half of the illegal immigration to the United States occurs in the Tijuana area.

The newly arrived work force represented an unprecedented cross-section of Mexico. The migrants included not just rural laborers hoping to cross to the north one day, but also business people and professionals.

A current-day tourist in Tijuana probably perceives the U.S. influence more readily than the Mexican mix. The latter manifests itself in everything from the variety of restaurants--seafood from Vera Cruz, the Chinese cuisine of Baja’s early Asian settlers--to the popularity of the raffish cowboy music of Sinaloa, a prime “sending state” for migration. Although they are often immigrants, exasperated “natives” also blame Sinaloans for drug-related crime and Mexico City expatriates for undesirable customs such as parking cars on the sidewalks.

“It has become a regionalist laboratory,” said Saravia. “The dynamic is distinct from the rural migration of the past. In the 1980s, the composition of the migrants takes on a middle-class aspect.”

Diversity and prosperity have fomented a hunger for arts and entertainment beyond nightclubs, which had mainly cultivated a music scene, said entrepreneur Humberto Araiza. Two years ago, he opened Frida’s Chapel, a cafe-gallery-bookstore named for artist Frida Kahlo, to promote books by local authors and about regional issues.

“It was a city that for 50 years was all stores and bars,” Araiza said. “But then you have more of a middle class, more people going to the university. And people begin to ask, what about culture? People in Los Angeles and Mexico City are used to cafes, for example. Here it is something new.”

The historically uneasy relationship between border cities and the Mexican capital is symbolized by the Tijuana cultural center. Although the monumental, 12-year-old center attracts more than 1 million visitors a year, many Tijuanans initially stayed away, perceiving it to be an ostentatious imposition by imperious federal rulers.

In fact, it was built as part of a concerted federal campaign along the length of the border to promote traditional customs and arts, defend the correct use of Spanish and otherwise steep young people in nationalism.

“They wanted to teach us how to be Mexican,” said a sardonic Willivaldo Delgadillo, a journalist in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso.

The government’s motive: deep-rooted fears of cultural, and ultimately political, colonization. After the United States wrested California and other territories from Mexico, the international boundary was established in 1848. The remote border towns remained economically dependent on their northern neighbors’ vices and appetites, providing gambling, prostitution, night life and liquor during Prohibition.

Tijuana’s isolation from the rest of Mexico was particularly pronounced. In the early 20th Century, forbidding mountains and deserts prevented Mexican travelers from reaching Baja California by land except through the United States. U.S. dollars were the dominant currency until the 1970s. Fronterizos worked, shopped, studied and even gave birth north of the border. Like today, they sprinkled their Spanish with terms such as bye instead of hasta la vista , and hybrid concoctions such as yonke (junk) and raite (ride.)

Opposition politics also have prospered in the independent-minded, urban north. The strength of the pro-U.S. National Action Party (PAN) in Baja California, Chihuahua and elsewhere intensified the worries of the long-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

“The bias was that border people would be more prone to (give in) to the U.S. instead of resisting,” said Samuel Schmidt, director of the border studies program at the University of Texas at El Paso.

These fears have provoked a bemused and resentful response. Miguel Escobar, a novelist from the border state of Sonora and press attache at the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles, says that the Mexican self-image at the border is demarcated and accentuated by the “permanent confrontation with that which is not Mexican.”

“The desert culture of northern individualism prevails over the southern collective culture,” Escobar said. “But there are few frontiers as Mexican as that of Tijuana.”

Despite the misperceptions of outsiders, one of the most striking features of the border mentality is this ability to move between two cultures without losing a sense of identity, said Isaac Artenstein, a filmmaker who grew up in Tijuana and lives in San Diego.

“It’s a surprising phenomenon,” he said. “People from Mexico City are a lot more willing to be Americanized. In Tijuana, there’s a real consciousness that goes back to the 1930s and 1940s of defending the culture, drawing the line, representing the last frontier of Mexico. People go back and forth, but they are not as easily overwhelmed by it.”

Tijuana at a Glance

* Population: More than 1 million, based on estimates of rapid growth and migration.

* History: Developed around the Rancho de Tia Juana, the largest of six cattle ranches that merged into a village in 1840. In the 1920s, during Prohibition, it began to attract tourists from the United States with the availability of liquor and gambling, and a racetrack on the outskirts of town.

* Economy: Dominated by trans-border manufacturing plants known as maquiladoras , making electronics, textiles and plastics. The tourist industry is also a major economic force.