San Diego and Tijuana are the site of a national border enforcement spectacle, but they are also neighboring cities with deeply intertwined histories, cultures, and economies. In Unequal Neighbors, Kristen Hill Maher and David Carruthers shift attention from the national border to a local one, examining the role of place stigma in reinforcing actual and imagined inequalities between these cities. Widespread "bordered imaginaries" in San Diego represent it as a place of economic vitality, safety, and order, while stigmatizing Tijuana as a zone of poverty, crime, and corruption. These dualisms misrepresent complex realities on the ground, but they also have real material effects: the vision of a local border benefits some actors in the region while undermining others.Based on a wide range of original empirical materials, the book examines how asymmetries between these cities have been produced and reinforced through stigmatizing representations of Tijuana in media, everyday talk, economic relations, and local tourism discourse and practices. However, both place stigma and borders are subject to contestation, and the book also examines "debordering" practices and counter-narratives about Tijuana's image. While the details of the book are particular to this corner of the world, the kinds of processes it documents offer a window into the making of unequal neighbors more broadly. The dynamics at the Tijuana border present a framework for understanding how inequalities that manifest in cultural practices produce asymmetric borders between places.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Tijuana and the Politics of Place Stigma1. Bordering Places2. The Making (and Unmaking) of a Bordered Imaginary3. Images of Place and Race in Historic Tourism Promotion4. Urban Folklore, Urban Legend: Tales of Tijuana in San Diego5. The Look of Tijuana: Interpreting Markers of Distinction and Inequality6. Framing the Neighbors: A Decade of Photojournalism7. Image Work in Tijuana: Crisis and Reinvention8. Imagining the Border City RelationshipMethodological AppendixReference List