Tijuana

Tijuana is a city in the Mexican state of Baja California, on the Pacific coast across the border from San Diego. The Caesar salad was first made in the 1920s at the restaurant of Caesar Cardini, an Italian chef who had settled in the city.

The Rancho Tía Juana, a cattle ranch granted to Santiago Argüello in the early 19th century, gave the place its name. The town was formally founded in 1889, when the heirs of the ranch agreed on a plan for its streets. During US Prohibition in the 1920s its bars drew Americans across the border, and the Agua Caliente resort opened with a hotel, a casino and a racetrack. From the 1960s, factories set up under a border industrialization program drew workers from all over Mexico and made Tijuana a manufacturing city.

Samsung makes flat-screen televisions at its plant in Tijuana for the North American market. Hyundai Translead builds truck trailers and containers in the city. Medical devices, among them catheters and surgical instruments, are made in the industrial parks of the east side for companies from the United States.

Avenida Revolución, the main street of the old center, is lined with bars, craft beer pubs and shops that grew up in the Prohibition years. The Centro Cultural Tijuana, opened in the early 1980s, has a round domed cinema that local people call La Bola, with museum halls and a theater beside it. Club Tijuana, nicknamed the Xolos after the Mexican hairless dog, plays in the top division of Mexican football. Nortec Collective, a group of musicians from the city, mixed norteño and banda music with electronic dance beats in the early 2000s.