Tijuana is Mexico's crowded Pacific border engine
Baja California's largest city sits on Mexico's northwestern Pacific shore just south of California, anchoring the San Diego–Tijuana metro straddling the border. By 2024 its population reached about 2.297 million, up 1.63% from 2023, ranking it among the Americas' bigger urban centres and Mexico's westernmost major city.
The name almost certainly has nothing to do with an aunt. Santiago Argüello Moraga called his 1829 land grant Rancho Tía Juana, "Aunt Jane" in Spanish, but historians trace it to Tiwan or Tijuán, the name of a nearby settlement of the Kumeyaay, the Yuman-speaking people who first lived here. The folk story of a real Aunt Jane running an inn has no supporting records. Europeans first passed by in 1542 with Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, and Sebastián Vizcaíno mapped the coast in 1602.
The border made the town. When Mexico lost Alta California in 1848, the frontier settled between San Diego and Tijuana, and some Hispanic families moved south to stay in Mexico. The city counts its founding from an agreement signed on 11 July 1889 and chased tourists from the outset. Prohibition-era Americans came for legal drinking and gambling along Avenida Revolución, where the Caesar salad was born, and the lavish Agua Caliente resort of 1928 drew Hollywood stars until President Cárdenas banned casinos in 1935. For a few years from 1925 the city was officially renamed Ciudad Zaragoza.
Factories reshaped it next. A federal Border Industrialization Program from 1965 brought foreign-owned maquiladoras, and the population doubled from under half a million in 1980 to nearly a million by 1985. Channelling the Tijuana River from 1972 cleared a shantytown called Cartolandia and created the Zona Río commercial district. Today Tijuana is North America's leading centre for medical-device manufacturing and the world's most visited border city, with more than fifty million crossings a year along a frontier of about 24 km with San Diego.
It is the largest city in Baja California and in northern Mexico, with about 2,297,000 people in 2024, and anchors a binational metro area estimated at over five million in 2016. The boom has a grim side: cartel violence gives it one of the world's highest homicide rates, second highest according to Statista in August 2023, and in 1994 presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was assassinated there.
Source: Tijuana
