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Noon Talk: City Limits: San Diego, Tijuana, and the Gravity of Urban Planning at the U.S.-Mexico Divide

Kevan Malone, Clements Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America
12 noon to 1 PM
The Texana Room, Fondren Library, 6404 Robert S. Hyer Lane, °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â

This presentation examines the challenges of urban planning in the binational Tijuana River watershed of San Diego and Tijuana during the first generation of Mexico’s Border Industrialization Program (BIP)—a period when American-owned maquiladoras (assembly plants) drove rapid urban growth in Tijuana. The northbound Tijuana River—and the pollution it carried—recognized no political boundaries, obeying only the law of gravity. In 1967, a year after the BIP’s initiation, the International Boundary and Water Commission of the United States and Mexico agreed to construct a concrete channel on the river to allow for urban development of both sides of the border while helping to manage the problem of Tijuana’s sewage and urban runoff polluting American communities downstream. In the 1970s, while Mexican authorities carried out the project in Tijuana, environmentalists in San Diego blocked the project on the U.S. side, preserving the wetlands around the river’s estuary for a coastal state park and wildlife habitat. However, following the Mexican project’s completion in 1979, the river channel functioned as a projectile for pollutants from Tijuana into the parkland on the U.S. side, highlighting the limitations of environmental planning in a watershed divided between two sovereign and unequal nation-states.

Kevan Q. Malone, this year’s Bill and Rita Clements Fellow, is a historian of urbanization and environmental transformation along the U.S.-Mexico border. He holds a PhD in history from UC San Diego. Kevan’s research project while in residence at the Clements Center examines the environmental and public health impacts of American business-driven urban growth in the Tijuana-San Diego borderlands during the twentieth century, showing how U.S. and Mexican planners, policymakers, and residents cooperated and came into conflict in their attempts to address these challenges.  

Free and open to the public.  No reservations necessary.  Questions? Email swcenter@smu.edu.