Tijuana Trying to Redeem Its Reputation

Pity the poor city of Tijuana.

Since Prohibition put it on the map, Tijuana has been known for drinking too much, partying too late, and embracing hedonistic strangers. But like an aging wild child, it wants to be known for more.

Tijuana is trying to change its image. If the city pulls it off, it will be its biggest reinvention since a Tijuana nightclub dancer named Margarita Cansino morphed into sultry Hollywood legend Rita Hayworth.

Behind the effort to improve public perceptions is the Tijuana Image Committee, which meets regularly to strategize how to showcase things the city would rather be known for: restaurants with inexpensive nouvelle cuisine, an internationally recognized modern arts scene, and the manufacture of more television sets -- 8 million a year -- than anywhere else in the world.

The committee invites foreign press members to events like the unveiling of a monument to victims of Sept. 11. It invited sculptors worldwide to loan some 60 sculptures that have been erected on Tijuana avenues. The committee backs things like the cleanup of Tijuana’s iconic Avenida Revolucion, where shopkeepers are being warned to stop displaying drug-smoking pipes.

“We want the perception of the city to be the real one: a city of industry, of hard-working people who have found something here that was denied to them where they came from -- opportunity,” said Jose Galicot, president of the Comite de Imagen.

It was Galicot who persuaded Tijuana to run from Mexican producers who wanted to set a soap opera, “Tijuana,” in the city in 1998. Drug cartel violence was already earning the place comparisons to Al Capone’s Chicago.

Televisa producer Raul Arauza protested that 20 movies about Capone “didn’t ruin Chicago’s reputation.” But he conceded defeat when city officials protectively registered Tijuana as a trademark.

Tijuana’s image make-over has made city leaders, once known for an exuberant lack of self-consciousness, touchy and circumspect.

“We’ve had enough of the identity of the city and its inhabitants being soiled because of a foreign group,” said a letter from Mayor Jesus Gonzalez distributed at a U.N. development conference in Monterrey.

But the road to redemption is never easy. And for Tijuana, it’s been a minefield.

Tijuana’s most recent indignity is a radio hit by French pop singer Manu Chao with the Spanish-language chorus of “Welcome to Tijuana, tequila, sex and marijuana.”

There was the attempt to curse Tijuana with an area code, 666, whose numerology engendered Satanic connotations. Officials demanded reassignment. Tijuana got 664.

There are still jokes at Tijuana’s expense over its mayor’s summer flirtation with a now-fizzled proposal to join in sister cityhood with Medellin, Colombia -- a place known as the General Motors of cocaine cartels.

A Medellin link would have brought a lot of baggage for a city whose leaders have tried to persuade U.S. journalists and Mexico City officialdom to replace the term “Tijuana drug cartel” with the more geographically vague “Pacific cartel.”

Even Mexican President Vicente Fox has slipped, invoking the “Tijuana cartel” in a speech a few months ago.

One thing all the notoriety has generated for Tijuana is name recognition. And after all, it was “Miami Vice” that restyled that beige city of sunbaked retirees into a sin-baked pastel kingdom of cool.

Galicot realizes Tijuana’s electric ambience has its own risque Wild West charm. He’s not trying to turn Rita Hayworth into Doris Day. He just wants to inject some propriety into the aura of a city whose brothel-strewn past is referred to locally as a “black legend.”

“Part of the change of image is self-esteem,” Galicot said. “People here have to accept that they are in an excellent city.”

In some ways, Tijuana is lucky.

People don’t talk much anymore about the 1994 assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, which took place in a Tijuana slum under still unexplained circumstances.

“They killed Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles,” Galicot said. “They killed JFK in Dallas. A city is not defined by a crime committed there.”

But Tijuana was also tainted by the gangland murders of drug prosecutors in the mid-1990s. It was during that tumultuous era that Galicot began his campaign by painting flowers and butterflies on freeway overpasses.

His 20-member Comite de Imagen debuted at the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego, buttonholing reporters and generating what he estimates were 25 positive articles about Tijuana in the U.S. press.

The good news was quickly overshadowed by the kidnapping of a Japanese businessman. Such setbacks -- often tied to drug feuds -- still dog the image effort. There were the two state policemen found dead in a car trunk last month, covered with blood and dollar bills. There was the young woman’s head discovered this month in a bag at a shopping center.

But no one ever said this would be easy.

And Galicot, 65, who says his father was once a croupier at a Monte Carlo casino, seems uniquely well-suited to the ups and downs of his task.

Galicot came to Tijuana as an 8-year-old with his family from Chihuahua in 1946. He arrived well after the city’s Prohibition heyday. When he was a boy, the nightclubs and bordellos were filling up with a less-glamorous clientele: U.S. servicemen.

He grew up to become the owner of Tijuana’s most famous disco, the “OH!” It was a swinging hot spot Galicot modeled on Studio 54 and is mentioned in sealed U.S. court files as the place where drug lord Ramon Arellano Felix got into a fistfight over a girl.

“Everyone went there,” Galicot shrugged, “the good and the bad.”

Don’t think the image campaign has gone unnoticed. Even academics have waded in.

“If Tijuana is to be a catalyst for the emergence of the binational region,” wrote Lawrence Herzog, a member of the executive committee of the Institute for International Security and Conflict Resolution, “then it must first overcome its own negative image.”

And Tijuana’s image is changing. A recent PBS documentary cast it as a hip post-modern destination. Newsweek magazine effusively baptized Tijuana (along with post-Taliban Kabul) as one of the world’s “culture meccas.”

Galicot’s Image Committee has swelled to 120 members. He plans to get artists to paint 15 new murals. Galicot would like to see a Tijuana “Walk of the Stars” to commemorate onetime residents like Carlos Santana.

He is even pushing a proposal to create a bilingual tourism police composed exclusively of female officers, who are believed to be less likely to shake down American visitors for bribes.

Because, while it’s important to change outdated stereotypes, Galicot acknowledged, “You can’t change an image without changing reality.”

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Staff researcher Robin Mayper contributed to this report.