[DOWNLOAD] "Migration and Urbanization in Northwest Mexico's Border Cities (Essay)" by Journal of the Southwest # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Migration and Urbanization in Northwest Mexico's Border Cities (Essay)
- Author : Journal of the Southwest
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 190 KB
Description
This essay analyzes the influence of migration in the development of Northwest Mexico's border cities, most specifically in Tijuana, Nogales, and Ciudad Juarez. Northwest Mexico has become one of the most dynamic regions in the country, not only because of the maquiladora (assembly-plant) industry established since the 1960s in Tijuana, Mexicali, Nogales, San Luis Rio Colorado, Agua Prieta, and Ciudad Juarez, but also because of the consistently high levels of population growth and urbanization these dynamic urban areas have sustained since the mid-twentieth century. Among Mexico's border cities notable for their high rates of population growth and urbanization, Tijuana, Nogales, and Juarez are particularly exemplary. Today's booming border cities were, with the exception of Juarez, merely small frontier towns at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was not until the great post-World War II economic expansion of the U.S. Southwest that these border towns really began to take on urban dimensions. In Tijuana's case, early development was based on the establishment of dive bars and taverns, largely for the U.S. market, lending the town legendary status as a place of vice. Nogales, on the other hand, began largely as a port-of-entry for railroad and other types of cross-border traffic. The destiny of these cities was, early on, intimately linked to the United States, whose economic trends directly influenced the border's demographic dynamics as well as the flow of goods back and forth across the international boundary. The powerful and deep transborder relationships established among cities on opposite sides of the line are characterized by the large structural differences between the two nations, and by the Mexico's dependence on the United States for manufactured goods, merchandise, capital, and employment. Mexican migration towards these border cities in the twentieth century was driven by the relatively open possibilities for crossing (legally or otherwise) into the United States, and by the access to relative economic prosperity that those cities offered, including avenues offered by the burgeoning drug trade. These cities are in many ways as much or more culturally, socially, and economically articulated with the United States than with Mexico.