Respectable Tijuana

Life in Tijuana has moved in cycles. During the Prohibition era, the Baja California town glittered as a south-of-the-border oasis for thirsty Hollywood movie stars and horseplayers at Agua Caliente Racetrack; Alex and Caesar Cardini invented Caesar salad one evening to feed the throngs at their beleaguered restaurant. But by World War II, U.S. servicemen in California came to know Tijuana as a bawdy border appendage of San Diego where sidewalk hustlers peddled a startling variety of sexual activities and mainstreet bars offered grinding nudes within tactile distance of the audience. The town's foul old jail became infamous as a place where unwary tourists might find themselves held incommunicado for so much as a traffic ticket. Even in the 1960s, when the city was already popular as a bullfight mecca, one of its few flattering U.S. notices was the appropriation of its name by Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass.

Now the cycle has turned again.

Last week Tijuana was parading a newfound reputation as a respectable, commercially solid city, frocked out in its Sunday best for a three-week international trade show called Mexpo. On hand to open the show was President Luis Echevarria Alvarez and almost the entire Mexican Cabinet. They stayed as the first guests at the $2,000,000 El Conquistador, a plush colonial-styled resort hotel (complete with a swim-up bar), built from handmade bricks and Guadalajara stone, and decorated with Mexican touches like hand-painted porcelain in the bathrooms.

The El Conquistador--built and financed by Tijuana Entrepreneur Alfonso Bustamante Jr., the son of a local bottled-gas millionaire--is the second major luxury hotel to break the Tijuana mold. The initial gamble was made by Hotelier Mauro Chavez Cobos and a partner, Miguel Barbachano, who in 1970 opened the modern 92-room Palacio Azteca, which has rooms ranging up to a $94-a-day Imperial Suite. The hotel drew so many sound-citizen tourists that Chavez plans to add 250 more units and a 1,200-seat convention hall next year.

What has changed Tijuana so dramatically? For one thing, competition. Tougher Mexican laws and more liberal U.S. attitudes shrank the market for "attractions" such as divorces, abortions, prostitution and sex shows. "We simply could not compete with upper California," says one Tijuanan, only partly in jest. Also, the town grew rapidly in size (from 160,000 in 1960 to 450,000 today) and in civic pride, which could not tolerate the sincity image.

The Mexican government helped, too. A special border-zone agreement with the U.S. allowed American manufacturers to assemble components in Mexico at a cost low enough for them to match overseas competition. An extension of Tijuana's duty-free port status encouraged shopkeepers to expand their inventories of French perfumes, Pucci and Cardin fashions, Limoges china and English woolens.

Tijuana's new selling point to U.S. tourists is that it is, as a San Diego billboard blurb for the El Conquistador puts it, "So near but yet so foreign." Some Americans pop across the border simply to fuel up on flavorful Mexican food and beer. Also, despite the lure of duty-free foreign goods, merchants have learned that American visitors are even more interested in Mexican handicrafts: Taxco silver, Oaxaca peasant clothes, Tlaquepaque tiles. Ironmongers are doing a brisk business in wrought-iron chandeliers and mock-Tiffany lamps. Cabinetmakers and carpenters have set up dozens of prosperous furniture stores selling ready-made Mexican colonial.

To enhance the new image, Mayor Marco-Antonio Bolanos and other city fathers are inducing shopowners along the Avenida Revolucion to redecorate their storefronts in colonial style. Even the city's new jail, at last replacing the old hulk, looks like a Franciscan mission. As for the bawdy old nightclubs, the few remaining are pale shadows of their former infamy. A visiting American who recently wandered into one of his old haunts found himself the only customer eying the bored, bikinied go-go girls.

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