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Tijuana's new selling point to U.S. tourists is that it is, as a San Diego billboard blurb for the El Conquistador puts it, "So near but yet so foreign." Some Americans pop across the border simply to fuel up on flavorful Mexican food and beer. Also, despite the lure of duty-free foreign goods, merchants have learned that American visitors are even more interested in Mexican handicrafts: Taxco silver, Oaxaca peasant clothes, Tlaquepaque tiles. Ironmongers are doing a brisk business in wrought-iron chandeliers and mock-Tiffany lamps. Cabinetmakers and carpenters have set up dozens of prosperous furniture stores selling ready-made Mexican colonial.
To enhance the new image, Mayor Marco-Antonio Bolanos and other city fathers are inducing shopowners along the Avenida Revolucion to redecorate their storefronts in colonial style. Even the city's new jail, at last replacing the old hulk, looks like a Franciscan mission. As for the bawdy old nightclubs, the few remaining are pale shadows of their former infamy. A visiting American who recently wandered into one of his old haunts found himself the only customer eying the bored, bikinied go-go girls.