I recently put this WTF blurb over at technorati.
Tijuana has for the past several years been a constant source of talk. If it’s not politics, police, music or arts Tijuana is doing what it tends to do best, get wasted.
Tijuana is a city which lies on the furthest northern area of México. It borders the USA and i’s neighbor is San Diego. It faces the Pacific Ocean. There is an incredible amount of business going on around Tijuana both legal and illegal but its usually the illegal sort of business that tends to attract the limelight. Specially the drug related kind which is so powerful that it tends to corrupt every form of institution on both sides of the countries, the US of A and México.
Native population of Tijuana is rather small. We are referred to as tijuanenses and tijuanenses tend to be bilingual, that is, we speak English and Spanish though this might be lopsided as there is an incredible amount of Mixtecos, people from Oaxaca, México, native to Tijuana too and whose own language is preserved so tijuanenses can be and are probably trilingual as well.
It has a population of about 2 million with a floating population of 500, 000 give or take.At the present time Tijuana is governed by a notorious person whose reputation is questionable, Jorge Hank. This man of politics belongs to one of México’s richest families and has several dark rumors always following him. It is rumored that he has mafia ties and that he is the intellectual mastermind behind the assassination of a journalist from Tijuana. May people dislike him and one can imagine he is getting a bad rap. He will soon leave office to run for governor of Baja California.
Tijuana recently became a bit of world wide news because the federal government in México ordered the military to take the town by storm, and that they did. They came and attacked the police! That’s right, when the federal government sent the men in green they didn’t go after the bad guys they went for the local police. They disarmed them, had them fingerprinted and left the city without a police corps for nearly a month. The police decided to ridicule the federal forces so they started to fight with rocks and slingshots …. Funny thing is that for a while not having the police armed proved to be a sort of blessing in disguise, crime went down and the city was calm. The federal police are still in Tijuana but the bad guys seem to have grown restless so everything is back to the same smut as always.
Tijuana has always been a little clandestine for puritan güeros from the US. Americans have been coming to Tijuana since the prohibition era to get shots of tequila down south and the stream of gringos hasn’t let up since then.
Tijuana, however, has also been getting loads of news from an unusual front, its arts.
As always, the cultural duality that permeates its citizens is the source of admiration both abroad and at home. There are writers whose lingo is well admired and a source of admiration for many. Many Chicanos hail from the city, Luis Alberto Urrea and Lalo ALcaraz are some of them. The tijuanenses which tend to embrace its mexicanness tend, however, to ignore its American side due to indoctrinated ideology of refusal for anything gringo. Spanish writers from Tijuana are the likes of Federico Campbell and Luis Humberto Crosthwaite. Yes, with last names like that they still insist in being an all mexican or nothing lot.
Some L.A artists have said best:
we’d like to proclaim the Mexican City of Tijuana as the new “center of the art world”. Henceforth, we think that all trends in contemporary art should be set by those artists residing in Tijuana, and that international artists should trek to the city along the U.S./Mexico border in order to find inspiration, make connections (and of course sales), and study and work with some of the finest artists in the world.
There is Yonke Art as well.
Musicallywise there is world acclaimed Nortec, Julieta Venegas and a host of other people which escapes my mind now.
There is a blog culture as well but seems quite dormant these days.