COLUMN ONE : Heading to El Norte--to Shop : From the Bernini boutique to Price Club, Mexican visitors spend billions each year in the San Diego area. The super-rich seek safety and luxury. The middle class just want to find bargains.

At the Paladion mall, a sleek downtown citadel patrolled by well-dressed guards with earphones, a customer from Mexico walks in and buys $60,000 worth of designer suits at the Bernini boutique. He pays cash.

At Price Club 10 miles to the south, a suburban bastion of U.S. consumer culture, the bustle of Spanish-speaking families and cars with yellow Baja California license plates resembles a Mexican marketplace. About three-quarters of the customers drive up from Tijuana, which has the largest middle class among Mexican border cities.

The two businesses have one thing in common: Their survival depends on customers from Mexico. Particularly during the holidays, hundreds of thousands of legal Mexican border-crossers descend on San Diego and spend money. They contribute more than $2.8 billion a year to the U.S. economy, mostly in the San Diego border region, according to a recent study. Tuesday’s devaluation of the peso will reduce Mexican spending power, but it is not expected to seriously affect cross-border buying patterns, analysts say.

In California, the vehement dispute over illegal immigration and Proposition 187 centers relentlessly on working-class immigrants, obscuring the beneficial influx of wealthy and middle-class Mexican visitors. But the political acrimony has not altered a fundamental border reality: This city has profound economic and cultural ties to Tijuana and the rest of Mexico.

“These people coming here to shop, to work, to go to our movie theaters, have legal documents,” said Millicent Cox, a researcher at UC San Diego who oversaw this year’s border study. “They aren’t coming here to take advantage of us. They are coming here because it is part of their community.”

San Diego holds a special allure for Mexicans from the interior as well, combining climate, a convenient location and a glamorous, resolutely American image. It is a de rigueur stop in the orbit of the Mexican ruling class, along with country homes outside Mexico City, the beaches of Acapulco, and U.S. destinations including Houston, Miami and the ski slopes of Colorado.

“In the summer, I see more of my friends here than in Mexico City,” said former diplomat Marcela Merino, a human rights researcher at a Tijuana think tank, who lives in La Jolla.

Tycoons, former presidents and future cabinet ministers own vacation homes in La Jolla, Coronado and other outposts of a voraciously ostentatious lifestyle satirized by the foremost chronicler of the Mexican elite, Guadalupe Loaeza, in her 1992 book, “I Shop, Therefore I Am.” You hear patrician Mexico City accents in yacht clubs, exclusive restaurants and hip cafes. San Diego is both a playground and a refuge from Mexico’s smog, crime and political violence.

“They feel safe here,” said Shirley Muller, who owns a bilingual bookstore in Coronado where her fellow Mexico City natives sip espresso and browse through newspapers and novels from home. “Here they wear their jewels. You have the most beautiful boutiques in Mexico City, you can find anything you want. But the attitude still is, ‘Let’s go up to the States.’ There is still that thing that if it’s made in the States, it has to be better.”

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Although not as flashy as the millionaires, Tijuana’s expanding middle class is central to San Diego’s prosperity--the mirror image of the Southern Californians whose dollars drive Baja’s tourism and service industries. Tijuana government officials, factory managers, entrepreneurs and professionals flock north to the movies, the zoo, Sea World, supermarkets, outlet stores, swap meets and football and soccer games.

Nonetheless, the benefits remain largely invisible to many residents of San Diego, whose views are often shaped by problems such as illegal immigration and drug violence.

“The average San Diego resident has no conception of the economic benefits that Tijuana brings to San Diego because they have an out-of-date view of Tijuana as an impoverished place,” said Charles Nathanson, a UC San Diego border expert. A recent focus group led by Nathanson toured the Mexican city and was “amazed that Tijuana had grown into a thriving industrial and commercial center.”

The massive legal flow from Tijuana includes about 40,000 workers who travel to jobs in San Diego using “commuter alien” work permits granted to applicants from the Mexican border region. An estimated 27% of northbound crossings are by people who have green cards granting permanent residence in the United States; others are U.S. citizens by virtue of immigration history or birthplace. And tens of thousands obtain “border-crossing cards” that, based on proof of financial stability, allow stays of 72 hours within 25 miles of the international line.

Travelers from the Mexican interior, meanwhile, tend to use tourist visas that permit repeat extended visits.

The cross-border network of interdependence seems largely impervious to activists’ calls for Mexicans to use economic power to punish California for perceived anti-immigrant politics. Several retaliatory boycotts of San Diego have drawn lukewarm support.

“For many people in Tijuana, a sustained boycott would create a real hardship,” said Cox of UC San Diego. “They might respect a one-day boycott. But would they realistically stop crossing? I can’t imagine someone who works here giving up their job.”

Khaled Richani, manager of the Bernini and Versace boutiques at the Paladion mall, said Mexicans still account for half of his sales. But Richani has noticed a decline since the bitter November election.

“Proposition 187 has affected Tijuana (clients). I can feel it,” he said. “I’m worried that it might have a permanent impact. These people can shop anywhere they want.”

When the Paladion opened two years ago, the marble-and-glass atrium mall targeted the Mexican market with opulent stores, valet parking and a pianist performing beneath an art nouveau statue of a nymph.

“Everyone in San Diego recognizes that Mexicans are a vital aspect of our economy and they all have marketing programs for them,” said Jonathan Bailey, the mall’s marketing manager. “The market continues to grow. They have been extremely helpful in keeping these businesses successful.”

Well-off Mexicans have gravitated to San Diego for years. After the traumatic devaluation of the peso in 1982 sent Mexican capital fleeing abroad, an expatriate colony of sorts flourished in Coronado, a bay-side oasis of stately homes and serene streets. So many of the newcomers bought condominiums in the commanding Coronado Shores beachfront development that some mean-spirited neighbors dubbed it the “Taco Towers.”

Today, the Mexican elite visit during the Easter and Christmas seasons, the summer, holidays and for weekend getaways. They go to the doctor and elderly Mexicans spend months here for state-of-the-art medical care. They buy products considered better or cheaper than those available in Mexico. They go to the bank. They unwind.

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a leftist opposition leader and two-time presidential candidate, has been seen relaxing in jeans in the tasteful lobby of the La Valencia Hotel overlooking the La Jolla cove.

The wife of a fugitive Tijuana drug lord was spotted strolling through Nordstrom at the Fashion Valley mall last year, days after her husband’s gunmen allegedly killed a Roman Catholic cardinal in Guadalajara.

Mexican television personality Nino Canun visited Tijuana to host a talk show in which the guests lambasted alleged racism in the United States; then he made a cross-border foray to a Chula Vista drugstore and bought a cartload of goods.

“You see someone in here today and tomorrow you see them on television,” said saleswoman Beyka Salman of Cartier at the Paladion. Salman, a U.S.-educated Tijuana native, is one of many mall employees selected for their impeccable Spanish.

Mexicans represent about 35% of sales at Cartier, according to store manager Shohreh Parvin. Although the clients may speak the English of the Ivy League, they like to do business in Spanish. They prefer large and glitzy items such as a gold Panther watch that sells for $11,500.

“They love to shop when they are away,” Parvin said. “They don’t like to shop when they are in Mexico. There’s a safety factor. They don’t want to be seen buying jewelry at home.”

Across the atrium at Tiffany, prominent Mexico City families arrive with entourages of bodyguards and spend up to “six figures” on crystal and china, employees said.

The ironies have not been lost on Mexican literary observers; for decades, this insular plutocracy has provided them with abundant material. In “I Shop, Therefore I Am,” Loaeza explores an era in which the rich got richer. As then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari oversaw a dramatic drive to open the economy and privatize state enterprises, the ranks of billionaires swelled from one in 1987 to at least 24 today.

Following well-heeled women on jet-set shopping excursions, Loaeza’s book skewers their ultra-mannered slang sprinkled with English, their obsessive appetite for designer labels. These excesses are a grim counterpoint to the poverty endured by an estimated 40 million Mexicans.

Former diplomat Merino of La Jolla moves between both worlds, dedicating two days a week to social work among the Mixtec Indians of Tijuana’s shack town periphery. With mixed resignation and amusement, she said Loaeza paints a basically accurate picture.

“My friends can spend $5,000 in a day at Neiman Marcus,” Merino said. “They don’t believe the poor exist. They think I invent them.”

Moral considerations aside, Mexican money represents a rare opportunity for growth on San Diego’s barren economic landscape. Merchants work to keep cross-border shoppers happy and woo them from aggressive competitors such as Houston and Dallas. Paladion management joined a city delegation on a recent promotional trip to Mexico City and sponsors classical concerts at clients’ palatial homes.

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Because of northern Mexico’s modernizing, predominantly urban economy, Tijuana’s income distribution resembles San Diego’s to a surprising degree, according to sociologist Nathanson.

“As you map the census tracts of the two cities, there’s an enormous similarity,” he said. “So there’s increasingly an interdependence of equality.”

The study generated compelling numbers: There are 6 million northbound crossings from Tijuana to San Diego each month. Shopping is the primary purpose of about 1.6 million visits, primarily to Chula Vista, a border-area suburb, and the malls of southern and central San Diego.

“Some stores in San Diego have a greater variety of goods,” the study said. “Auto parts stores . . . benefit from customers who like to take advantage of the quick distribution of parts from the main warehouse instead of waiting two weeks in Tijuana for a $20 item. Perceived quality is an important part of the purchase decision: High-quality meat, fresh produce without pesticides and good quality toilet paper, for example, are more readily available in San Diego.”

The $2.8 billion spent yearly in the area by Mexicans generates $120 million in California sales tax, the study found. Those estimates are decidedly conservative, Cox said. Researchers did not cover air arrivals and they believe that some people understated spending because the official--if intermittently enforced--Mexican customs limit on duty-free goods is $50 per person.

The top consumer destinations: Ralphs, Vons and Price Club, which has waged a membership campaign at Tijuana factories and professional associations.

In fact, PriceCostCo. opened its first Tijuana outlet--the ninth in Mexico--this month. But executives expect that the Chula Vista Price Club a few miles north will not suffer.

Shopping is an ingrained ritual based on more than just acquisition or convenience.

“It’s as much a day or weekend trip as it is a shopping trip, and Price Club is just one of the destinations,” said Bob Hickok, a Price Club vice president. “It’s part of the culture to come to San Diego to visit family and friends.”

Hector Cordoba, a Price Club member for seven years, personifies the emerging Tijuana middle class. A dignified, down-to-earth businessman in a suede jacket, he recently emerged from the cavernous Chula Vista store burdened with provisions for holiday feasts. He runs a business that delivers potable water to Tijuana homes and lives in Playas de Tijuana, a pleasant coastal neighborhood. But he spends a lot of time and money in San Diego. “It’s cheaper and it has more to offer,” Cordoba said.

He does not take issue with the California crackdown on illegal immigrants.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s all right that they deny services if people were taking advantage of them,” Cordoba said. “Everybody should work for a living.”

For all the vocal Mexican criticism of U.S. immigration policies, Cordoba’s attitude reflects the sentiments of other Tijuanenses who endure long waits at the freeway ports of entry. Although illegal immigration occurs on their doorstep, they do not feel that the issue affects them personally. And border-crossing is part of the fabric of their daily lives.

“I think this Price Club survives purely because of Mexican people,” Cordoba said. “I don’t think people are going to stop buying here.”