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ABSTRACT.
Images of Mexican border cities have become fixed in North American minds.Four particularly resilient perceptions persist: a Gemini complex which insists that Mexican border communities are "twins" of their American cohorts; a demographic mirage in which the populations of Mexican border towns are regularly inflated; a Cyprian supermarket reputation which exaggerates the unsavory adult-entertainment districts of these cities; and a faux-locus mentality which refuses to acknowledge that border towns are "the real Mexico." Latin American geographers can combat these myths and exaggerations and contribute to a richer understanding of cities in the region through field studies that interpret the personalities of urban places. Keywords: border cities, borderlands, Mexico.Tijuana is one of those places that almost everyone has heard of Mention the city's name and vivid images come to mind: the Tijuana jail, raunchy cantinas and strip joints, prostitutes, drugs, sad-eyed donkeys painted to look like zebras, and taxi drivers selling pictures of their "sisters." Everyone knows about Tijuana.
-Ernst C. Griffin and Larry R. Ford,"Tijuana:Landscape of a Culture Hybrid," 1976
(IVhile everyone knows about TJ, it is also true that few indeed know Tijuana be-yondAvenida Revolucion, its sometimes revolting but never dull tourist strip. Essayist Richard Rodriguez correctly observed that "Tijuana is... a metropolis crouched behind a hootchy-kootch curtain .. .: The Tijuana that Americans grew up with was a city they thought they had created. The Tijuana that has grown up is a city that willre-create us" (Rodriguez 1987, 42).Today Tijuana is nearly the largest of the many bustling urban nodes that crowd the Mexican side of the border where Latin America abuts Anglo-America (Figure 1). The image of the place as a tawdry tourist destination is still common among North Americans and is, by blanket extension, the image they have of all Mexican border towns (Curtis and Arreola 1989). In fact, the tourist caricature of the Mexican border city is only one of several distorted, yet persistent, illusions we sustain of these places; places we think we know but actually only know about. Our ideas about these places have become fixed, immutable in our collective consciousness.
GEMINI COMPLEXOne of the strongest impressions of Mexican border towns is that they are "twin communities," where an American counterpart complements the Mexican place and where each closely straddles the borderline (Kearney and Knopp 1995). This compulsion to see the places as twins is not surprising, becaus...