A New El Dorado: Watering a Transborder Boom Town, 1920–40

With the onset of Prohibition in the United States, the tiny town of Tijuana became a major player in the lucrative transborder ‘vice trade’. Its main street, Avenida Revolución, was overrun with bars, casinos, and other entertainment establishments, many of which were built with US capital and frequented by US patrons—and all of which required a steady supply of water. Wells dug into the banks of the Tijuana River served their purpose early on, but the transborder nature of the watershed made pumping up groundwater a thorny matter of international diplomacy. Upon the advice of local water experts, the governor of Baja California initiated construction on a large dam and storage reservoir located about 12 miles south of the border. Although it was initially intended to provide water for agricultural development, the construction of the dam set the stage for a much-needed overhaul of Tijuana’s haphazard urban water infrastructure, which by the 1930s had become thoroughly inadequate in the city’s expanding neighborhoods. Meanwhile, just north of the border, a fierce legal battle was raging between private water companies and the City of San Diego over the lawful rights to the San Diego River. The City’s argument, that it retained its “pueblo rights” to the water previously granted under Spanish and Mexican law, was upheld by the California State Supreme Court in 1930, forever changing the relationship between city and backcountry in San Diego County. This paper examines urban water development on both sides of the transborder metropolis during the boom years of the 1920s and the challenges of the Depression. It shows how the transborder nature of urban space and local watersheds in the California borderlands shaped the opportunities available to water developers on both sides—and complicated their decisions by turning local issues into matters of international consequence.