Tijuana at 137: A Birthday the City Chose for Itself

On Saturday 11 July, Tijuana turned 137. There were flag honors at the Torre de Agua Caliente, mariachi and cake in the Parque Teniente Guerrero the night before, four days of historians in the old city hall, and cumbia at the Glorieta Miguel Hidalgo to close it out. What there was not, and never has been, is an event in 1889 that the date commemorates. Tijuana's birthday is a decision, taken by a room full of people nearly nine decades after the fact, and the story of how it was arrived at is more revealing than the ceremony it now anchors.

The plan, the arbitrator, and the agreement

The paper trail begins with a property fight. The old Rancho Tijuana had passed to the heirs of Santiago Argüello Moraga, and dividing it required an arbitrator. That role fell to the engineer Ricardo Orozco, who presented the plans of the Rancho Tijuana "en su carácter de árbitro del referido juicio," as Semanario ZETA recorded in its account of the 1889 documents (ZETA). The date now marked every July is the day the agreement was signed among the members of the family of Santiago Argüello and Pilar Ortega de Argüello (ZETA).

Out of that partition came the document Tijuana's historians call the Plano Zaragoza, the settlement's first urban plan, drawn by Orozco and commissioned as the old concession was divided (El Imparcial). The plan carried a name for the town it laid out: Zaragoza, after General Ignacio Zaragoza. The name did not take. The people living there went on calling the place Tijuana, and the plan's title survives today only as the label historians use for the drawing itself (El Imparcial).

The city's founding document is a land settlement. Its founding name was rejected by the people it was assigned to. Both facts have survived the ceremony built on top of them.

How 1889 became official

For most of the twentieth century Tijuana had no fixed birthday. It acquired one administratively. In 1976 the then municipal president, Fernando Márquez Arce, convened historians and local enthusiasts specifically to debate the question, "las personas citadas para debatir la fecha de fundación de Tijuana fueron convocadas por el entonces Presidente Municipal, Lic. Fernando Márquez Arce en 1976", and that gathering concluded that 11 July 1889 was the appropriate date (ZETA). The evidentiary anchor was the Plano Zaragoza, presented at a history symposium of that decade by Magdaleno Robles, the city's first chronicler (El Imparcial).

Local historians have never pretended otherwise. Andrés Waldo Espinoza, coordinating this year's history symposium, put the qualifier plainly: "Tijuana cumple virtualmente 137 años, pero obviamente la historia de la ciudad trasciende". Tijuana is virtually 137, but the city's history obviously runs past that (El Imparcial). The date is a civic convention, chosen because a city needs one, and defensible because the document behind it is real.

Four days in the old city hall

The most substantive part of the anniversary is also the quietest. The XIX Simposio de Historia de Tijuana ran from 8 to 11 July at the Antiguo Palacio Municipal, at Calle Segunda and Avenida Constitución in the Zona Centro, with more than fifty ponencias on the program (El Imparcial). It is organized under the city's culture secretariat and coordinated by the Archivo Histórico de Tijuana (ZETA).

The opening day, Wednesday 8 July, carried a tribute to Mario Ortiz Villacorta Lacave, president of the Consejo de la Crónica de Tijuana, honored for what the organizers described as his invaluable contribution to the rescue, documentation and dissemination of the city's historical heritage (ZETA). On Friday 10 July at 6:45 p.m., the writer Cristina Rivera Garza delivered the keynote, "Archivos de la respiración: cuerpo, documento y desahogo en El invencible verano de Liliana" (ZETA). A symposium that exists because of a debate about a date drew, this year, a novelist whose subject is what archives do and do not preserve.

Mariachi, flags, and a disputed crowd

The public rituals bracket the symposium. On the night of Friday 10 July, in the Parque Teniente Guerrero downtown, mariachis played Las Mañanitas and a cake was cut: the tradition kept alive by the civil association Unidos por Tijuana A.C., directed by Jorge Fitch Romero. ZETA counted dozens of residents in the park, with Mayor Abdiel Gutiérrez Coronado attending: "Hace 137 años comenzó a escribirse la historia de Tijuana, una ciudad que se ha convertido en un referente de esfuerzo, resiliencia, oportunidades, progreso y hospitalidad" (ZETA).

The official acto cívico came the next morning, and not at city hall. It was staged at the Torre de Agua Caliente, the surviving tower of the old casino complex, flag honors, the XXV Ayuntamiento municipal band, and the anniversary cake, presided over by Gutiérrez Coronado, who described the city as a land that receives everyone with open arms (KSDY 50). The choice of venue is its own small argument about what the city considers its landmark.

The celebrations closed Saturday night at the Glorieta Miguel Hidalgo with a free concert by the cumbia group Rayito Colombiano, fronted by Raymundo Espinoza, formerly of Los Ángeles Azules, with Los Subtenientes de Tijuana also on the bill (ZETA).

A city that had to vote on its own birthday is a city with an unusually honest relationship to its origins. Tijuana's 137 years are counted from a surveyor's drawing and a signature between siblings, ratified by a committee in 1976 because the alternative was having no date at all. The name on the plan was ignored. The date on it was not. Every July the city sings to a document.