Just about every cliche regarding Tijuana rings true: fault line separating two worlds, the Mexican Wild West, the Third World's first city of tomorrow, and endless other pithy phrases. They all point to an undeniable reality, and at the same time miss much of its essence; the catchy lines emphasize a duality and a difference that make Tijuana special, but never do justice to the depth and meaning of that difference.

Understandably, sociologists and economists, urbanists and writers are mesmerized by the unique quality of the town. Only in Tijuana (and to a similar extent in Ciudad Juarez) do Third World and First World actually meet, physically, geographically, culturally. The Mediterranean separates Europe from Africa, the Bosphorus and the Balkans from Asia, and Japan is the proverbial island unto itself. Russia is kept at bay from Western Europe by a continuum of Eastern European nations, none as prosperous as Germany, none as backward as the former Soviet Union. Nowhere do a rich country and a persistently poor one share a land border; never have the overwhelmingly quintessential traits of underdevelopment hugged twenty-first century affluence as they do when Tijuana and San Diego, just a few miles across the line, meet, clash, and coexist.

This exceptional nature lends itself to myriad interpretations, ranging from the inclusion of the Mexican metropolis in the US hinterland, to baptizing Tijuana as the first American town in Mexico. But perhaps the most accurate depiction of a city best captured in the counterintuitive cinema noire classic, "A Touch of Evil," where Orson Welles played the American bad guy and Charlton Heston the honest Mexican cop, lies in a paraphrase of H.G. Wells' exclamation on returning from Moscow in the 1920s: "Tijuana is Mexico's future, and it doesn't really work."

If any region south of the Rio Grande fits the metaphor of being "plugged in" to the United States, it is the northwestern border of Mexico. Everything in the city moves and breathes with the other side: the jobs in the maquiladoras all manufacture goods exclusively for export; the restaurants and hotels in the newer districts all cater to the trans-border trade; the people waiting along the line— though they have moved eastward and westward, off the city center, now—are all seeking to cross and find work "del otro lado"; the banks and drug cartels look north, as do the businessmen with credit and accounts in dollars, and the consumers, who shop "American" except when the peso crashes and ends no longer meet. Whatever else this may mean for Mexico and its fifth largest city, it certainly represents a huge improvement in relation to the rest of the nation. Unemployment is dramatically smaller than in the heartland; wages, while still abysmally low, are higher than elsewhere in the country; money ebbs and flows in countless transactions, and competitiveness in the global economy, however artificial it may sometimes appear, is a respected imperative, not a derided catchword.

But in the same fashion that only a tiny part of Mexico fits in Tijuana today or ever will, not everyone in the city shares the boom-town prosperity. At most a million Mexicans permanently reside in Tijuana; total maquiladora employment there is less than a hundred and fifty thousand. It is easy to forget sometimes, but Mexico is rapidly approaching the 100 million inhabitant mark, and needs to create a million new jobs a year just to keep up with population growth. So no matter how many Hitachi, Samsung, and Sony assembly factories swoop down on the Otay industrial park, there are simply not enough TV customers to gainfully employ the teeming Mexicans craving jobs, incomes, a decent life and security for their families. For every Tijuana, there is a Chiapas; for every Juarez, there is a Oaxaca; for every Mexicali, there is a Guerrero. Unfortunately the list of boom-towns stops there, but not the seas of poverty and inequality in Mexico.

This is the second basic dilemma facing the use of Tijuana as a paradigm for Mexico. It is not only that Mexico does not fit in Tijuana; its natives don't all belong either, at least not to the modern, more fortunate testament of the city. Tijuana is, in this specific sense, extraordinarily Mexican: the social, ethnic, gender, and regional gaps that beset Mexico from north to south are omnipresent there, and they have a direct bearing on the violence that has engulfed its psyche and everyday life.

Luis Donaldo Colosio was not assassinated in a posh hotel or on the green lawns of the more fancifully landscaped maquiladoras, but in a swarming slum, whose crowds crushed his security detail and schedule. The assassins who gun down law enforcement officers, drug lords, and small-time dealers are young men who for different reasons do not fit in the idyllic vision of a Mexican Silicon Valley. The hustlers and smugglers who shake down the migrants heading north and the deportees shipped back across the border are as much a part of Tijuana as the Japanese executives they hope to kidnap one day. Because Tijuana is Mexico, it cannot escape the deep fractures of Mexican society, and may even exacerbate them, because of its proximity to the promised land.