The World's New Culture Meccas

Adam Piore

Tijuana, Mexico: Hybrid Happening

It's well past midnight in a vacant lot outside Tijuana and Sal Ricalde, 27, is dancing behind the controls of his veejay station. On a nearby screen, he projects a swirling, psychedelic image of an altar to the infamous local narcotics trafficker Santa Malafama. "We collect imagery by roaming around the city," says Ricalde. "The main idea is to shoot what's around us." The party's music--to which a young crowd of factory workers, artists and ranchero cowboys is gyrating--comes from the hands of Ramon Bostich. In 1999 Bostich helped invent the "nortec" sound, a blend of traditional Mexican folk music and electronic rhythms. The genre won Tijuana a reputation for more than tequila and sleazy brothels. But it also had a deeper, more liberating effect upon the town's denizens. "Nortec gave people the freedom to explore," says Gerardo Yepiz, a graphic artist and former nortec collaborator. "Tijuana became the muse for a lot of artists."

Partly because of nortec, but for many other reasons as well, Tijuana is in the middle of an artistic flowering that has drawn attention from television executives and museum curators from New York to Tokyo. Artists of all stripes are re-examining the hybrid culture of Tijuana that exists between the glitz of San Diego and the factory life Diego Rivera could have painted. "Tijuana is a social laboratory," says Marcos Ramirez, a prominent Tijuana installation artist. "There's no other place in the world where two different systems collapse against each other as hard as they do here."

Tijuana has beckoned to people from all over Mexico and Latin America for years. First came the fortune seekers eager to cross into the States. Those who didn't make it set up in sprawling shantytowns on the outskirts of town. The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 brought another flood of migrant workers. This eclectic and ambitious mix of ideas, cultures and tastes helped spawn a thriving frontier atmosphere. Unlike their predecessors, who often rejected their roots in Tijuana because of the town's seedy reputation, this generation takes pride in its heritage. "No one is going to shut me up here," says 25-year-old Daniel Ruanova, an abstract painter who has American citizenship but prefers to spend his time in the "Wild West" of his hometown.

Like Ruanova's paintings, which draw on videogame imagery, much of Tijuana's art is inspired by technology. The city has attracted several cyberfestivals in the last few years featuring guerrilla art, virtual sit-ins and activist speakers.