New View Sees San Diego, Tijuana as One Metropolis

In the old days, maps used by television meteorologists and urban planners in San Diego stopped suddenly at the U.S.-Mexico line, as if there was no weather in Mexico, as if southbound crossers had entered an uncharted wilderness.

But a new demographic atlas of the San Diego-Tijuana region goes a long way toward rebuffing the accusation that America’s Finest City lives with its back to the border.

The atlas tells a tale of two cities that the border joins, as well as divides. Together, they form the largest, wealthiest and best-educated metropolis of the entire 2,000-mile borderlands--an economically dynamic, culturally fascinating region that has been called “ El Tercer Pais’ ‘ (The Third Nation).

The unprecedented 101-page volume charts surprising similarities along with stark contrasts, helping to explain San Diego and Tijuana to each other and to the outside world.

“San Diego has always been slow to look south,” said sociologist Charles Nathanson of UC San Diego, which compiled the atlas. “It has thought of Tijuana as a place of services, legal and illegal, rather than as a partner in economic development. Now we have a way of showing the world what we are, and showing ourselves as well. The atlas gives San Diego a language for talking about itself as part of the border.”

Some of the copious demographic data culled from Mexican and U.S. census reports counters stereotypes fomented by the problems of illegal immigration, crime and corruption at the border, said developer C. Samuel Marasco of San Diego. He is building a shopping center aimed at cross-border clients in the San Ysidro area just north of Tijuana.

“The atlas helps U.S. companies who have not yet ventured into Mexico,” Marasco said. “It starts to de-emphasize a lot of the stereotypical myths: lack of home ownership, absence of a middle-class. The most significant contribution is it shows you the number of legal trips across the border is far greater than those that are illegal. Yet our headlines seem to dwell on that one really small problem.”

The collection of full-color maps provides a tool for leaders trying to promote San Diego and Tijuana to Asian manufacturers and other investors as a single market, academics and business executives said. The two governments should work more closely to realize the region’s potential as a natural gateway between the Americas and the Pacific Rim, said Tijuana executive Raymundo Arnaiz, chairman of a cross-border economic planning group.

“The important point is the vision of a single economic region, where more than competing, one side complements the other,” Arnaiz said.

A Parallel Existence

The cross-border parallels come to life in Playas de Tijuana, a coastal neighborhood familiar to tourists for the imposing bullring that overlooks the beach at the westernmost end of the border. The atlas shows that, within the context of Mexican society, Playas resembles census tracts in two of San Diego’s well-heeled beach neighborhoods, La Jolla and Point Loma, in categories such as income distribution. More than two-thirds of residents are defined as wealthy or middle income and the rates of schooling are among the city’s highest.

Despite the image of Mexico as a society divided between a small, rich elite and poverty-stricken masses, Playas is a bastion of the striving middle and professional class that has taken root in northern Mexican cities, particularly in Tijuana.

“Tijuana has the best economic indicators of the country,” said Roberto Ham Chande, a population studies and public health expert at the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana. “It has the lowest unemployment. It is a very special phenomenon. If the rest of the country were like this, it would be much better off.”

At the entrance of the Playas neighborhood, big expensive homes adorned with cupolas and Ionic columns and equipped with satellite dishes flank the border highway. The modern business district features shopping centers, an English-language school, a new health club and hip eateries such as El Yogurt Place. The quiet streets near the coast are dominated by condominium towers, sturdy, walled townhouses and driveways filled with sport utility vehicles.

In one of those townhouses, Sergio and Blanca Millan live comfortably, if not luxuriously. Their three children, ranging in age from 11 to 17, go to a nearby private school run by Catholic nuns. The family has two cars and a motorcycle and makes frequent cross-border shopping excursions for clothes and groceries.

“I would say we are in the middle,” said Blanca Millan, a gracious and youthful 40-year-old, who manages a store in Playas that sells school uniforms. “We are not in need of anything. We can live well.”

Commuting

Sergio studied law and Blanca studied psychology in Mexico City. Both left their studies to go to work, Blanca at a bank and Sergio as an independent credit appraiser, and did not complete their degrees. They moved to Tijuana 17 years ago and bought their two-story home in the beach neighborhood, which is a magnet for federal bureaucrats and university-educated professionals fleeing the smog, crowds and stress of the capital’s monstrous metropolitan sprawl.

The ponytailed Sergio, 46, now works as a truck driver in San Diego, joining the daily legion of Tijuana commuters who endure jaw-grinding, hourlong waits at the port of entry to reach jobs north of the border. Sergio uses the motorcycle to make it bearable, zipping through the stalled traffic.

In the eight years he has worked in San Diego, Sergio said in his gentle, unassuming way, he has met quite a few Americans with a distorted view of Tijuana, especially Anglos whose knowledge is limited to tourist traps and television images.

“The Hispanic people know Tijuana pretty well,” he said. “Not the Americans. I had the opportunity to bring a friend to the house and he was surprised. He expected to see a wooden house on a hill somewhere. . . . Tijuana is not all corrupt police and crime.”

Conversely, Sergio says he finds U.S. society to be very stratified.

“Either I see really big houses in rich neighborhoods or I see very poor neighborhoods,” he said. Sergio belongs to the 7% of the Tijuana work force that crosses the border, bringing in a fifth of the Mexican city’s wages. The cross-border flow of dollars also thrives thanks to tourism; 2 1/2 million cross-border visits are made between family members each month in addition to 250,000 southbound visits to Tijuana doctors and pharmacies.

As a result, Tijuana has been partly insulated from the disastrous financial crisis unleashed by last year’s devaluation of the peso. Sergio’s salary has gained buying power, but Blanca’s has been cut in half. She is more likely to shop in Tijuana than San Diego now, though until the crisis, groceries and electronic goods were more affordable north of the border.

And neighbors who earn only pesos have been hit harder.

“We have friends who are really worried,” Sergio said. “The impact has been strong.”

Indeed, the landscape not far from the Millans’ home jumbles together prosperity and poverty: dusty vacant lots, tenement-style apartment houses shrouded by clotheslines and stained by graffiti, abandoned businesses along the coastal boulevards. The mix typifies contrasts within Tijuana, and the authors of the survey caution that demographic terms become slippery when trying to compare U.S. and Mexican societies.

The term “middle income” exemplifies this problem. The atlas defines 45% of Tijuana’s population as middle income, compared to 53% of San Diego’s. But the atlas calculates that income as between $25,000 and $75,000 for U.S. households. In Tijuana, meanwhile, the range is two to five times the minimum wage--$3 a day.

Obviously, residents of neighborhoods such as Playas de Tijuana make more than that in order to live as they do and to spend millions of dollars in San Diego, said Ham of the College of the Northern Border. The reality is that middle-class people often underreport their income to census takers, he said.

“Everybody lies to the census,” Ham said. “‘There is a middle-class and it has a capacity to spend dollars in the United States. You can see that in the statistics from businesses on the other side.”

As the authors point out, the Mexican census also tends to underestimate because it records only the salary of the head of the household, not the full household income.

As basic a fact as population size is murky in Tijuana, where opposition-controlled local governments argue that the federal officials appointed by the ruling party intentionally underestimate the population, thereby shortchanging Baja on funding and services. Tijuana’s enormous and impoverished “floating population” of northbound migrants further complicates the estimates.

The city is generally believed to have between a million and 1.2-million residents, said Millicent Cox, author of the atlas.

Growing Pains

The differences between the societies can be as dramatic as the collision between First and Third worlds at the U.S.-Mexico border. San Diego’s aging population occupies a sprawling, orderly urban grid. Tijuana’s population is younger and crowded into a much smaller, sometimes chaotic geography. Freewheeling growth has outstripped Tijuana’s infrastructure.

Many of Tijuana’s poor are migrants drawn by low-wage manufacturing plants and the allure of the United States. The atlas found comparable proportions of low-income people, with 38% in Tijuana and 35% in San Diego. But in Tijuana, poverty takes the form of haunting beggar children and precarious hillside shack towns.

Other statistics are trickier. San Diego has a 53% rate of owner-occupied housing, while Tijuana’s share is 70%. Ironically, the Tijuana numbers are higher partly because scores of its most desperate citizens, the squatters who build themselves wood and cinder-block houses on the edges of the city, are considered homeowners.

Similarly, the combined San Diego-Tijuana corridor has the second-lowest rate of unemployment on the border. Tijuana reports an unemployment rate of 2.3%, lower than San Diego’s 5.9%. But a full 42% of Tijuana workers, twice as many as in San Diego, work less than full time.

Beyond the comparisons, contrasts and stereotypes, academics and laymen alike conclude that the atlas represents an effort to map the future: the two cities are inextricably and increasingly connected.

“A lot of people don’t want to believe that,” said Carlos Baltasar, a bookstore clerk at a Playas shopping mall, making a chopping motion with his hand. “They think we are cut in half.”

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On Both Sides of the Border

A new atlas takes an in-depth look at the California/Baja California border area, highlighting demographic and housing information by treating the San Diego and Tijuana areas as one unit, known as the San Diego/Tijuana corridor. With 32 color maps, 89 charts and 33 tables, the atlas lists 1990 census data for the region. It also compares the five other largest cross-border pairs of U.S. and Mexican counties to the San Diego-Tijuana corridor. Here is a sample of the types of information provided: Metropolitan San Diego: 1.2 million Metropolitan Tijuana: 1.2 million ****

Population breakdown 736,566: Camp Pendleton, Oceanside, Escondido, Rancho Bernardo, Del Mar 950,354: La Jolla, Lakeside, El Cajon 695,978: Point Loma, Coronado, Chula Vista, Otay Mesa, San Ysidro, Imperial Beach 698,752: Playas, Libertad, Hipodromo, Jardines de la Mesa, Colonia Pradera de la Mesa, Guaycura ****

Population of the U.S./Mexico border

The San Diego/Tijuana corridor is the largest such region on the 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico. San Diego/Tijuana corridor El Paso, TX/Juarez Imperial County, CA/Mexicali McAllen, TX/Reynosa Brownsville, TX/Matamoros Laredo, TX/Nuevo Laredo Remainder of the border ****

Population by Area of Birth

The population of the San Diego/Tijuana corridor is more likely to be from “someplace else” than are residents of the entire border region as a whole.

Percentage of population born in the state where they now reside, state/Mexico border, 1990 San Diego/Tijuana corridor U.S. border counties Mexican border counties Border, except San Diego/Tijuana area All border counties ****

Highest Income

The San Diego/Tijuana corridor is the wealthiest on the border.

Percentage in the middle and highest income categories San Diego/Tijuana corridor El Paso, TX/Juarez Imperial County, CA/Mexicali McAllen, TX/Reynosa Brownsville, TX/Matamoros Laredo, TX/Nuevo Laredo ****

Lowest Income

The San Diego/Tijuana corridor has a lesser share of the low income group than the rest of the border.

Percentage in lowest income category. Tijuana (corridor) San Diego (corridor) U.S. border counties Mexican border counties U.S./Mexico border ****

Income by Population

Percentage of population by income category.

Source: Demographic Atlas San Diego/Tijuana Atlas Demografico