New Museum in Tijuana to Showcase Baja California Heritage

When it comes to marking history, you could say Baja California just hasn’t had time.

Helter-skelter economic growth and a tidal influx of job-seekers from Mexico’s interior have lent the border region an intoxicating urgency, but left its cultural past largely unremembered.

Now the Mexican government, which has long worked to remind denizens along the U.S. border of their homeland’s heritage, is opening a museum that will underline instead Baja California’s distinct identity.

The Museum of the Californias, tentatively scheduled to open Thursday, is the first devoted to the history of the Baja California peninsula. Arrayed over a floor of the federally run Tijuana Cultural Center, the upstart museum is an attempt to acquaint residents and tourists with a past often more closely tied to California to the north than to Mexico’s geographically distant capital.

Sponsors also hope the display of artifacts--from a 12,000-year-old mammoth tusk unearthed near Ensenada to a Prohibition-era slot machine from a Tijuana casino--will ignite a broader preservation movement in an area that typically has kept its eye on the future.

Scarce research funds and the region’s relative youth have been partly to blame. Baja California, which covers the northern half of the peninsula, achieved statehood in 1952. Baja California Sur became a state in 1974.

“This is a young region that doesn’t have a lot of cultural infrastructure. It’s very important that the museum serves to create and strengthen elements of local identity through its own history,” said Alfredo Alvarez Cardenas, director of the cultural center.

Museum visitors can trace the peninsula’s tale, in Spanish and English, from the age of prehistoric healers to Spanish colonialism--the latter period shown in replicas of 1700s-era church missions and original paintings.

Antique tools represent the peninsula’s reliance on mining and ranching. Also shown is how Baja California’s geographic isolation shielded it from Mexico’s bloody revolts but fed threats of invasion, real and imagined, from U.S. soil.

A mock U.S.-Mexico border monument--modeled after the westernmost marker between San Diego and Tijuana--represents the boundary that severed contemporary California from Mexico after the end of the war between the two nations in 1848.

Displays of clothing and family portraits highlight the role of foreign immigrants, from French settlers in modern-day Baja California Sur to Russian and Chinese migrants who created ethnic pockets in northern Baja.

The final stretch of exhibits conveys the high-rolling glory of Tijuana’s former Agua Caliente Casino and depicts huge construction projects, such as an aqueduct from the Colorado River and Tijuana that modernized the area in the 1970s.

A boom in foreign-owned assembly plants and a mushrooming population transformed the once-quaint border zone into a bustling and modern area, though Baja’s interior is dotted with sleepy villages.

The museum doesn’t deal with the factory trend or more current issues, such as the flow of undocumented immigrants and drugs into the United States, that have made the border a scene of both promise and tension.

Museum officials say they lacked space for up-to-date exhibits. A section on the environment, for example, will be presented in video form.

As for immigration, “people who live here already see that and know that. We want to show them a part of the history they don’t know,” said museum manager Claudia Basurto. “If you want to know about immigration, all you have to do is open the newspaper every day.”

The idea for the museum came in response to residents’ outcry when the cultural center closed a popular exhibit called “Mexican Identities” five years ago. A citizens committee was formed and began discussing a Baja California museum.

“There was a great demand for regional history,” said Alvarez, who became the center’s director in 1995.

The museum, built in a space formerly used as an exhibition hall and storage rooms, got $2 million from the Mexican government, plus some private donations. More contributions are being sought for the purchase of artifacts.

Admission to the museum on Paseo de los Heroes will be $2 for adults and $1.20 for students.

Museum planners came upon items through hunting and sheer luck. The National Archaeology and History Institute supplied crucial advice--as well as the 5 1/2-foot mammoth tusk--and other museums in Mexico and the United States lent items. The San Diego Museum of Man provided pots, baskets and ancient tools made in Southern California by Indian groups that lived throughout the region.

Finding artifacts in Baja was difficult because household items were thrown out over the years. “We have to foster a culture of conservation,” Basurto said.

Doug Sharon, director of the Museum of Man, said the Tijuana museum will complement the work of San Diego museums that long have collected artifacts from Baja California’s indigenous groups and nature. (The San Diego Natural History Museum recently opened a show of Baja California nature photographs.)

“It’s welcome. It’s necessary,” Sharon said of the museum.

The artifacts are certain to convey to tourists an artistic heritage far richer than the gaudy Bart Simpson figurines and cheap jewelry peddled at border crossings.

As opening day neared, museum crews prepared the final exhibits and readied an educational children’s area featuring a mock ship. Planned throughout the museum are interactive video consoles.

Organizers hope visitors will gain a sense of how Baja California has scribbled into the Mexican narrative its own striking subplots--and a complex legacy born of newcomers and nearness to the U.S.

“There is a Baja California identity,” said Rogelio Ruiz, a historian at the museum. “Baja California is an area of constant migration. It’s diverse and hybrid, a chaos of identity.”

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Visitor Information

The Museum of the Californias is at the Tijuana Cultural Center, Paseo de los Heroes and Avenida Fco. Javier Mina. Hours will be Tuesdays through Sundays, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Opening is tentatively set for Thursday. For information, call the center at (011) 52 66 87 9600.