The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality

by Daniel D. Arreola, James R. Curtis

From Matamoros to Tijuana, Mexican border cities have long evoked for their neighbors to the north images of cheap tourist playgrounds and, more recently, industrial satellites of American industry. These sensationalized and simplified perceptions fail to convey the complexity and diversity of urban form and function—and of cultural personality—that characterize these places.

The Mexican Border Cities draws on extensive field research to examine eighteen settlements along the 2,000-mile border, ranging from towns of less than 10,000 people to dynamic metropolises of nearly a million. The authors chronicle the cities' growth and compare their urban structure, analyzing them in terms of tourist districts, commercial landscapes, residential areas, and industrial and transportation quarters.

Arreola and Curtis contend that, despite their proximity to the United States, the border cities are fundamentally Mexican places, as distinguished by their cultural landscapes, including town plan, land-use pattern, and building fabric. Their study, richly illustrated with over 75 maps and photographs, offers a provocative and insightful interpretation of the geographic anatomy and personality of these fascinating—and rapidly changing—communities.

258 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Daniel D. Arreola received the Ph. D. in Cultural Geography from the University of California at Los Angeles. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, and he has lived and taught in three of the four American states that line the U.S.-Mexico border. He has published extensively in scholarly journals and in book chapters on topics relating to the cultural geography of the Mexican-American borderlands. He is the author of The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality (University of Arizona Press, 1993), Tejano South Texas: A Mexican American Cultural Province (University of Texas Press, 2002) and Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places: A Geography of Regional and Cultural Diversity (forthcoming, University of Texas Press). He is also a Senior Consultant for World Geography, a new high school textbook (McDougal Littell, 2003).

Arreola serves on the editorial boards for several leading geography journals, an international cross-cultural architecture journal, and he is a contributing editor to the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. He is a past-president of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers. Presently, he is a Professor in the Department of Geography and an Affiliate Faculty with the Center for Latin American Studies at Arizona State University.