On the Border, the Best of Both Worlds

TIJUANA — An international border stands between Norma Ojeida and her job.

Every morning, Ojeida drives from her suburban San Diego home to Baja California, where she heads the social studies department at a Rosarito think tank.

She’s got plenty of company. Her U.S. border community, Chula Vista, is jokingly dubbed “Chulajuana,” because it is becoming a de facto suburb of Tijuana.

Ojeida is one of the tens of thousands of people who commute to work across the San Diego-Tijuana border every day. They are among the most affluent and socially mobile of the region’s fronterizos--”borderlanders”--whose personal, professional and educational lives transcend the uninviting corrugated steel fence that slices through the gullies and canyons of the border badlands.

These upscale fronterizos lead rich, complicated lives. They live in Tijuana and send their children to San Diego private schools, some as far north as La Jolla. Some live in San Diego and enroll their children in Tijuana schools.

Children graduate from high school on one side of the border and go on their first date on the other. They have the traditional nochebuena supper on Christmas Eve in Tijuana and unwrap their gifts the next morning in San Diego.

Far from seeing it as a hassle, many fronterizos feel they get the best of both worlds.

“You have the luxury of living where you want, working where you want, having the identity you want,” Ojeida said. “It allows us to take what we want from both sides and ignore the rest.”

A Portent of the Future

In an era of increasingly global trade and cultural ties, these bilingual cosmopolites represent the border vanguard, analysts say.

“The ability to negotiate the two worlds is where the future of the region lies,” said Chuck Nathanson, the executive director of San Diego Dialogue, a policy center that favors cross-border integration. “Those with these demographic advantages have career advantages and leadership advantages.”

If the cross-border fronterizos belonged to one country, the bustling Tijuana-San Diego metropolitan sprawl would be their capital.

About 40,000 people commute from the Tijuana area every day to work on the U.S. side of the border, according to a study by San Diego Dialogue. Tijuana is home to many Mexicans who hold U.S. citizenship or visas granting them free or regular entry to the United States. Thousands more operators of maquiladora assembly plants, entrepreneurs and executives head south to work in Tijuana.

The high level of trans-border mobility is tied to the relative prosperity of both cities. San Diego is the most affluent city on the U.S.-Mexico border. Tijuana is the only Mexican border city that is more middle class than lower income.

That means many Mexican fronterizos come to San Diego with plenty of cash to spend--an estimated $2.8 billion a year.

“This really does stimulate the creation of a regional San Diego-Tijuana society as well as economy,” said Peter Smith, the director of Latin American Studies at UC San Diego. “This . . . will mean more pressure for cultural integration at all social levels.

“That means bilingualism in the workplace, increasing acceptance of Mexican workers, and in some way rethinking San Diego’s place in the regional and world economy.”

The sprawling Tijuana-San Diego urban area is one of eight major twin cities that dot the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, a dynamic binational region of more than 11 million people.

“Historically, the border has been viewed by central Mexico as the barbaric north, a frontier where civilization had not been established,” said Maria Sobek, a Chicano studies professor at UC Santa Barbara. “Now . . . in the popular imagination, there is a fascination with the border. It’s simmering with energy.”

For impoverished Mexican fronterizos, crossing into the United States legally is generally not an option. Illegal crossings are tougher than ever.

For the wealthier fronterizos, straddling two worlds can mean difficult lifestyle decisions. Even seemingly simple choices raise highly personal identity issues, shaping families’ traditions, values and daily lives.

First, fronterizos must decide where they live. Some, like playwright Gabriela Johnston, never quite make up their minds.

Johnston is a U.S. resident--but not yet a citizen--who is a production manager at Radio Latina, which has offices in Tijuana and a studio in Chula Vista.

She is married to sculptor Kim Johnston, an Anglo U.S. borderlander who speaks working Spanish.

They shuttle between a house in Playas de Tijuana--a Mediterranean-style beach community of clay-tile roofs and flaming sunsets--and a residence in San Diego.

The couple pays close attention to Tijuana television border-crossing updates, the fronterizo’s equivalent of Los Angeles freeway reports. Three years ago, northward crossings could take an hour or two; today they take less than 20 minutes.

When U.S. border inspectors ask Gabriela Johnston where she lives, “I tell them I live in the region--in Tijuana and San Diego. It annoys them, but it’s true.”

With their children, the Johnstons were more decisive: They opted against enrolling their children in San Diego schools. Her son attends a private high school in Tijuana; her Mexican-educated daughter will begin earning her master’s degree in Mexico City this fall.

Well-to-do families can send their children to private schools on either side of the border.

The Johnstons worried that their children would have faced too much peer pressure--to join gangs, have sex or use drugs--in American high schools.

“It’s so easy for a kid to get a pistol there,” Gabriela Johnston said.

Academic Ojeida decided to send her son to a public school in Chula Vista. Still, she worries about ethnic stereotyping in the United States.

When her son was in second grade, for example, a white administrator assigned him to a bilingual class even though he tested as high in language skills as white children, Ojeida said. She demanded that he be reassigned to an English-only class.

Then, when he was in third grade, Ojeida said, a Latina teacher again tried to put him in a bilingual group. Ojeida told the teacher she wanted her son to develop English-language skills before tackling Spanish. The teacher was offended by her choice, viewing it as a denial of the boy’s Mexican heritage, Ojeida said.

“They automatically classify kids in categories, and then they become trapped in them,” she said. “The trans-border life allows you to get around that.”

Changing Economies and Cultures

Exactly how the cross-border ties will shape culture remains to be seen. Oscar Martinez, a history professor at the University of Arizona, says the traditions and lifestyles adopted by borderlanders are partly linked to economic clout.

Mexican fronterizos are most likely to seek cross-border ties and learn English, Martinez said. Americans are less likely to learn Mexico’s language and traditions.

“Few who reside on the Mexican side are able to escape the overwhelming influence of the United States, and consequently most Mexican borderlanders have direct or indirect ties to the U.S. economy and to American culture,” he said, in a published study.

Nevertheless, subtle shifts are taking place in San Diego County, whose 2.7 million inhabitants are now 23% Latino.

Some are business-driven. City leaders who lost defense dollars to Cold War budget cuts, are reaching out to new markets south of the border. U.S. merchants flood Tijuana television stations with ads inviting consumers there to shop in San Diego discount drugstores, new and used car lots, and furniture stores. The Padres baseball team is so eager to woo Mexican fans that it has arranged cross-border busing to Sunday games in San Diego.

There is an emerging fronterizo youth culture. Seventy-four percent of Tijuana residents are under 35, and nearly half are under 18. San Diego’s Latino population also is relatively young.

That means there is a transnational audience big enough to draw some of Mexico’s most popular bands--whether they play banda, corrido or rock-en-espanol music--to both sides of the border.

New themes are appearing in the fine arts as well. Cross-border symphony performances and arts festivals are allowing arts communities on both sides to get better acquainted.

Many San Diego Latinos have moved to border communities like Chula Vista and maintain close ties with friends and family in Mexico.

In reality, the modern fronterizos are reinventing a trans-border tradition that has existed since the days when the U.S.-Mexico border was sparsely populated.

The oldest Tijuana fronterizo families still recall when going to the United States was as simple as crossing La Marimba, a wooden bridge over the Tijuana River whose creaking planks reminded people of the Latin American xylophone.

Today, the Clinton administration is redesigning the border as a barrier against illegal immigration and drug trafficking that still allows the legal flow to nourish the economies on both sides.

“The border was superimposed on an existing community just as the freeways were superimposed on existing communities,” said Sylvia Enrique, a board member of San Diego’s Centro Cultural de la Raza. “What’s complicated it now is the political climate and anti-immigrant sentiment.”