Selling the Border: Trading Land, Attracting Tourists, and Marketing American Consumption on the Baja California Border, 1900–34

    Focusing on the Baja California border, this presentation will explore how real estate speculators, tourism promoters, and vice purveyors marketed the border to American consumers in the early twentieth century.  I argue that these boosters’ assumptions about Americans’ desire for adventure, opportunity, and vice led them to cultivate a particular set of images of the border.  In their promotions and development schemes they described the Baja California border as a novelty landmark, a gateway to an exotic foreign country, inexpensive ranchland, and a playground of illicit pleasures.  Linking shopping for curios, buying real estate, and partaking of prohibited vices, both American and Mexican boosters constructed a consumers’ border that offered Americans investment opportunities, exotic experiences, and illicit activities that were unavailable in the United States.

   These characterizations were pervasive and powerful.  Between 1900 and 1930 they attracted hundreds of thousands of American consumers to the emerging border cities of Tijuana and Mexicali and transformed the border from an isolated and undeveloped region to a site of intense American consumption.  Building on the work of Baja California scholars who have studied the historical ramifications of American investment, tourism, and vice, I show how promoters’ representations of the border contributed both to the real economic benefits and to the challenges to Mexican political and cultural autonomy that American consumption brought forth on the border.