The Image of the (Failed) City: Third World Imagineering

Although El Paso del Norte (the gate to the North) was an old colonial settlement, Juárez only became a city proper and really began growing after the American Southwest had. Juárez —like the rest of the Mexican border cities— is a product of the twentieth century. Like many other fronterizo towns, Juárez grew as a sort of a joyride appendix to its cross-border counterpart, El Paso, during Prohibition.

In Mexican bordertowns, the centro, the city center, isn’t really a center. As Daniel Arreola and James Curtis have noticed in their fantastic book on urban archeology and border building culture, titled The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality, “the most evident discrepancy between these cities and others within Latin America is that their shapes are abruptly truncated along their northern edges by the international boundary.” Juárez was split in half by the border and extended in half-moons starting at the international crossing. The centro has traditionally catered to U.S. consumers, particularly the tourist districts located alongside the border. Visitors from El Paso cross over to Juárez and find themselves surrounded by the materialization of their narrow expectations, of their prejudices, their romantic idealizations and their cheap tastes—all turned space.

Mexican border city tourist strips are heirs to Prohibition-era architectural follies: brothels topped by red windmills, bullrings, racetracks, and fancy casinos that popped up in the flat, dusty settlements. Along with the “dirty” buildings came paved roads, waterworks, bottling plants, distilleries, warehouses, curio shops, restaurants and basic service-oriented infrastructures. The Great Depression and Nationalist reformism seemed to put an end to the era, but the border vice economy gained strength with the outbreak of WW2. Contraband flourished across the border thanks to war rationing, and thousands of soldiers training in El Paso found relief in the Juárez tolerance zone, one of many "boystowns" scattered on the outskirts of border cities.

Anyone that’s heard anything about Mexican bordertowns knows of the “Black Legend”, these depictions of border cities as wannabe Sodoms and Gomorras. But for every great period of “immoral” development there has been an official attempt at “cleansing”. In colonial times local cattle drivers asked for tax breaks and special treatment in order to deal with Apache threats (turns out many of the ranchers themselves were filibusters and cattle robbers, and the “Apache” menace was as vague and misleading as any of the Wars on Terror we’ve grown used to). In the years of the Revolution local bosses held staged fights between bandits and local authorities while cashing in on drug deals and gambling. Moralist crusades forbidding kissing in public were launched by authorities that owned speakeasies and bordellos.



The most spectacular of these ersatz improvement operations and urban makeover schemes (and, for that matter, the grossest failures) were the nationalist rescue campaigns of the Cardenismo in the 1930s and the Sin City-to-Pleasantville expectations of the 1961 National Border Program (Pronaf).

In 1935, President Lázaro Cárdenas declared gambling illegal, declaring open war on casino owners, mostly foreigners known as the “border barons”. The government seemed determined to reclaim its role as an active urban arbitrator. A couple of casinos were turned into public schools and handful of hotels were removed to give way to working-class neighborhoods. The idea was to come up with a number of concrete, eye-catching, straightforward urban measures that could speak for themselves: exemplary measures. But in truth, the deep structure of the uneven development in Juárez and other border settlements remained untouched by Cárdenas: the economic free zone that left the region dependent on American supplies and consumers. “Mexicanizing” the border could only go so far…

The Pronaf followed this rich heritage of image-driven urban policy, but took things a step further. It was a beautification and industrialization initiative sponsored by the federal government and led by Antonio J. Bermúdez, a former mayor of Ciudad Juárez, that was supposed to "rescue" Mexican border cities from the evils of their historic dependency on their U.S. counterparts. Some of the troubles outlined by the program included the commercial imbalances that forced local consumers—described as being held "captive" by American retailers—to cross the boundary in order to cover their basic needs and the seediness brought about by vice tourism. The program was supposed to remedy the situation through an "integral" planning venture, one of the earliest to be implemented in the country, and possibly the first that equaled improvement with beautification, concentrating on the physical aspect of cities. The Pronaf was divided in two phases: first it would focus on land acquisitions, refurbishing border entry gates, building new cultural and tourist landmarks, creating incentives for private investment, and promoting cities through a series of urban marketing campaigns. In the longer term, the Pronaf would build American-style malls (the first ever to be built in the country) and industrial parks, all administered by the government.

The program lasted only four years, and the second phase never came. The program failed miserably at dignifying and beautifying. Still, the Pronaf is the most important direct planning precedent in terms of the definition of Ciudad Juárez's current urban character and structure. If you’ll bear with me here, I’ll let you in on the secret as to why. Just stick around for the next post.

* To go to the first post of this series on Ciudad Juárez, click here

(Photo source: OAC).

The Image of the (Failed) City

With all due respect to Mr. Raymond Chandler, everyone knows Tijuana is Mexico. In fact, Mexico itself is turning into something of a Great Big Tijuana. Tijuana has gone from nasty spot on the National Conscience to pin-up city for the postculturally advanced. The term tijuanización, or tijuanization, became popular in the 1930s, as a slur against whatever had become Americanized and thus uglified. Tijuana, nonetheless, has turned its ugliness into an asset. (If you don’t believe me, just do a search on this blog for Teddy Cruz).

This is not the case of Ciudad Juárez, though, the oldest of the Mexican border cities. No one refers to Juárez as CJ. Juárez is Tijuana without the sites. Ciudad Juárez has to be the most infamous of Mexican border cities (it doesn’t get much worse than that). Throughout its history, the town had thrived on a seedy reputation, but in the 1990s Juárez found itself overwhelmed by an apocalypse-now, scarier than fiction whirlwind: bodies of hundreds of murdered women dotting its barren outskirts, sprawling slums (sardonically nicknamed Cartolandias, Cartonlands, with a distinctively Disney ring), extralegal radioactive waste heaps and random killings at narco-clubs and midday drug-related violence. Common knowledge has it that the city is one big wreck; consumed by rampant corruption, poor planning, environmental degradation, and social fracture.

Robertos Bolaño’s 2666—which Time magazine named “best book of 2008” (I myself described the novel as “ball-grabbing”)—has recently put Juárez in the limelight:

The city was very poor, with most streets unpaved and a sea of houses assembled out of scrap…they discovered rail lines and slum soccer fields surrounded by shacks, and they even watched a match, without getting out of the car, between a team of the terminally ill and a team of the starving to death, and there were two highways that led out of the city, and a gully that had become a garbage dump, and neighborhoods that had grown up lame or mutilated or blind, and, sometimes, in the distance, the silhouettes of industrial warehouses, the horizon of the maquiladoras. The city, like all cities, was endless.

Local authorities and planners have been dealing this sort of bad press (usually it’s less exquisite) for quite some time now. A couple of years ago, Juárez’s Tourist and Commercial Development Secretary launched a “Juárez Presentations Network”, a tour of promotional talks and events, as the latest of a long chain of strategies to revert the city’s “bad image”. The campaign was to present “the best of the town” in order to attract tourists by highlighting Juárez’s “values” and “cultural attractions”. For city leaders, Juárez’s main problems are conveniently reduced to a perception issue. The image of the city—not in the classical sense, in terms of readability or spatial recognition proposed by Kevin Lynch, but in terms of more recent, superficial, “urban marketing” trends—has become the pet cause and the focus of practically every policy instance.

This obsession with the image of the city has become evident in all sorts of urban actions, that range from the absurd confiscations of banned videogames that fail to show the “true values” of the city, to the serious and cynical discrediting and blaming of the families of murdered women and various social organizations for “promoting a degrading vision” of the city. What is most disturbing and revealing, though, is that this visual consumption strand of local urban policy is actually deep-rooted, that it has been at the center of planning in Juárez for decades. In my next couple of posts I’ll try to untangle the logic behind this focus and shed some light on the reasons for the supposed failure of urban “rescue” efforts in the city.


(Photo from Flickr user detritus. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)