An Urban Laboratory for the Nation: Tijuana after 1971

• In Event: Mexican Cities: New Approaches to Urban History

Abstract

In 1972, President Luis Echeverría declared that success in assuaging Tijuana’s problems would result in similar schemes across Mexico. The city had just become a laboratory for federal urban regeneration. Mexico City’s envoys battled the illegal land market, built public housing, attended to community petitions, and relocated entire neighborhoods away from flood zones. The result of this crusade was the emergence of a planned modern center at the site of former shantytowns. Just ten years after Echeverría’s declaration, the federal government accelerated its transfer of urban management to local authorities. The economic crash of 1982 made devolution a promising option for a financially constrained bureaucracy. Federal ministries, hastily built up during the previous decade, yielded their roles to local actors and agencies.

This paper examines the role of Tijuana as an urban laboratory in the aftermath of the crises of 1968 and 1982. It argues that the peripheral boomtown served as a testing site for evolving models of urban management that reflected the political and economic constraints of the ruling regime. Tijuana became a model for direct federal urban management as the government sought to demonstrate its usefulness and might in the aftermath of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre. Conversely, the bordertown served as a laboratory to test new approaches to divest the federal government from urban management and redevelopment after the 1982 economic crisis. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that the contingencies afflicting Mexico’s post-revolutionary order inevitably shaped federal urban policies during the last third of the twentieth century.

Author

• Christian Rocha, University of Chicago