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This chapter includes a 2018 commentary about Comics Stripped (2011) at the Museum of Sex in New York curated by publisher/collector Craig Yoe and Sarah Forbes. Covering the decades between the Great Depression to the present, the exhibit featured art by Joe Shuster, R. Crumb, Wally Wood, Jack Cole, Tom Finland, and many others. Topics included Tijuana Bibles (“The People’s Pornography”), 1950’s men’s magazines, censorship crusades, the underground comix revolution, fetish art by Joe Shuster (as featured in Yoe’s book Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster) and Eric Stanton, cartoon porn, same sex comics, and international comics. This chapter includes commentary by curator, collector, and publisher Craig Yoe about how this extensive examination of sexual taboos and other naughty bits came about, as well as his thoughts about sharing his collection and the public response to the show. Images: two exhibition photos

Philippa left Europe after her discovery of the surprise pregnancy. She called her mother's nephew and he gave her a number of someone in California who knew a doctor from Mexico. She flew to the West Coast and spent a restless night in San Diego and the next morning she awoke gripped with apprehension that the Mexican doctor might not help her. Her contact was a Senora Guinar, in Tijuana, and this doctor agreed to carry out the abortion. Afterwards Philippa returned to New York to pick up the pieces of her life and there she met Georges again and told him the story of her unborn child.

Vice tourism by U.S. residents into Mexico precedes the Prohibition era. Dating back to the early twentieth century, U.S. residents regularly traveled south of the border to partake in activities illicit in the United States but permitted, or at least more readily available, in Mexico. Alcohol (and gambling) was especially a lure for U.S. residents and celebrities visiting Mexican border towns during the Prohibition era. The lower and relatively unenforced drinking age in Mexico more recently drew underage U.S. visitors to party in border towns such as Tijuana on weekends, at least until drug violence exploded in the borderlands, and continues to draw U.S. youth to coastal Mexican resorts over spring break, where debauchery reigns.

This study of 1960s Tijuana rock scene puts in evidence the globalized character of a city that, although often criticized by both American and Mexican discourses of identity, has often provided a musical answer to the desires for cosmopolitanism of Mexican youngsters throughout the country. By tackling recordings by American and Mexican musicians, Kun examines how the development of an American “Tijuana Sound” helped in the development of an American imaginary of the border and how it overshadowed the musical practices of young tijuanenses who were resignifying American rock from a border perspective. Kun's narrative style, based on the historical contextualization of a number of well-known and obscure LPs, is a model of how to approach recordings as documents that illuminate transnational cultural practices and discourses at specific historical moments.

If the primary purpose of pornography is sexual arousal through sexually explicit representations, and if ‘prototypical pornography’ is best able to fulfil that purpose through the adoption of a maximally realistic depictive style, then why do not all works of pornography aspire to prototypical status? There are quite a few non-standard pornographic genres, including Tijuana Bibles, hentai manga, and slash fiction, that possess certain depictively or fictively oriented properties that appear at least prima facie incompatible with prototypical pornography. These give rise to two issues that any viable analysis of pornography must address. First, the Depictive Question: How might issues in depictive realism bear, if at all, upon such works being pornographic? Second, the Fiction Question: How might the conditions for being a work of fiction, whether slash fiction or otherwise, fit, if at all, with the conditions for being a work of pornography? By addressing these questions, this chapter offers a clearer picture of the aims of pornography and the reasons for which significant subgenres of pornography might diverge from the prototypical ideal.

With pari-mutuel wagering outlawed in California in the 1920s and early 1930s and Prohibition in effect throughout the United States, newly rich Hollywood types flocked to Tijuana, Mexico,where racing, gambling, drinking, and the nightlife thrived at the Hipodromo de Tijuana and at Agua Caliente, a hotel-casino complex that included thenightclub where Rita Hayworth wasdiscovered and a racetrack where Hollywood whet its appetite for horse racing. The Agua Caliente Handicap became the richest horserace in the world, won by both Phar Lap and Seabiscuit. A horse owned by director Raoul Walsh won the Agua Caliente Derby, and producer Joe Schenck once dropped $100,000 on a single race.It was all captured in a mural executed by bandleader Xavier Cugat depicting the Hollywood elite frolicking in Tijuana.

This chapter traces the history of electronic music in Tijuana in an attempt to understand the Nor-tec myth of origin as a historical contingency that gave meaning to a series of cultural manifestations and artistic pursuits in that city at the end of the 1990s. It shows the individual and collective aspirations implicit in the production and consumption of Nor-tec, and investigates how memory is performed and how imaginaries of tradition and modernity are articulated in Nor-tec's myth of origin.

This chapter aims to show local cultural practices that appropriate the city and its mythology in novel ways that empower local individuals. It traces the issue of impermanence in the city's architectural history as a point of departure to explain the continuous re-signification of the city's urban landscapes by tijuanenses. It explores the relationships among musicians, fans, and the changing urban landscape of their city, including concert venues, clubs, bars, and dancing locales. It also uses Nortec music and videos as metaphors for the ambiguity of cultural meaning and discourse in a city like Tijuana. Its goal is to show that Nor-tec and Nor-tec-related expressive culture offer young tijuanenses alternative ways to territorialize and reterritorialize public spaces as well as hegemonic discourses of race, class, morality, and belonging in Tijuana.

Producer Charles K. Feldman (who held the rights to the first Fleming Bond novel) makes his own Bond movie, a big-budget, all-star sendup starring David Niven, Woody Allen, Peter Sellers, Orson Welles and original Bond girl Ursula Andress. Hit songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David pen several songs for the film, most of which are jettisoned by the time they see the final cut. The “Casino Royale” song, with satirical lyrics, is sung Noel Coward-style by an uncredited Mike Redway; Johnny Rivers flew to London to sing it over the titles but disliked the song and refused; Herb Alpert, of Tijuana Brass fame, later played trumpet over the instrumental track and that wound up over the opening titles. Bacharach and David write “The Look of Love” at the last minute in London for a love scene with Sellers and Andress; Dusty Springfield sang it and it became the first Oscar-nominated Bond song.

This chapter examines the activism of women's organizations along the San Diego–Tijuana border region, who are seeking to redress the injustices that workers experience in assembly factories, also known as maquiladoras. It focuses on the strategies, structure, and coalition-building efforts of three grassroots groups: the Colectiva Feminista Binacional (Binational Feminist Collective), CITTAC (Centro de Información para Trabajadores y Trabajadoras Acción Comunitaria; Support Center for Workers), and the San Diego Maquiladora Worker Support Network. Collectively these organizations address short-term needs while, at the same time, build networks and skills for the long term. Identifying their strategies offers insight to the possibilities for and implications of their work in producing a transnational space for organizing centered on relationship building and the construction of a counterhegemonic identity along the US–Mexico border.

This chapter assesses the mechanisms introduced in Chapter 4 by considering actual cases and evaluating how the mechanism or strategy used contributed to cooperation. In addition to mechanisms such as issue-linkage, side-payments and compensation as well as benefit-sharing, the chapter also examines foreign policy considerations and reciprocity as mechanisms or strategies for promoting cooperation. Mechanisms and strategies such as these aim to incentivize cooperation and shift the payoff structure so that it favors a mutually beneficial outcome.

The introduction begins with the problem of passing: a general issue of subjectivity’s dependence on external recognitions, but that Tijuana’s border location drastically exacerbates. Here, the equivocations of passing suffuse not just individual subjectivities but collective ones: the “we”s that pose city or nation as groups and locate the speaker within them. As the introduction sketches middle-class and popular articulations of we-ness in Tijuana, it builds a theoretical and methodological framework for grasping the formation of publics in linguistic practice. Publics suffused with the desires and disavowals of passing, though, require a further analytic accounting. The introduction relies on the concept of the fetish both to unpack the border’s importance for Mexican senses of national collectivity broadly and to rethink liberal publicity in relation to colonial and quasi-colonial histories like the border’s. This discussion renders some of Passing’s more profound implications: the productive instability of middle-class publics, however strong their commitments to liberal publicity, and the ethics that the hearsay public builds in the face of transnationally compounded exclusions—in the last instance, in face of the risk of death run in unauthorized border crossing.

Vice tourism by U.S. residents into Mexico precedes the Prohibition era. Dating back to the early twentieth century, U.S. residents regularly traveled south of the border to partake in activities illicit in the United States but permitted, or at least more readily available, in Mexico. Alcohol (and gambling) was especially a lure for U.S. residents and celebrities visiting Mexican border towns during the Prohibition era. The lower and relatively unenforced drinking age in Mexico more recently drew underage U.S. visitors to party in border towns such as Tijuana on weekends, at least until drug violence exploded in the borderlands, and continues to draw U.S. youth to coastal Mexican resorts over spring break, where debauchery reigns.

This chapter examines how women border dwellers are responding to transnational processes and the effects of neoliberal policies, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), by focusing on woman-centered activism projects as well as innovative forms of political organizing and community formation at the U.S./Mexico border. Building on the idea of transfronterismo, or transborderness, the chapter suggests that the actual border should be seen not just as a site of passage but also as a site for gendered transformation where a politicized transfronteriza identity can emerge. It looks specifically at the transborder space of the twin cities of Tijuana and San Diego and the work of the La Colectiva Feminista Binacional (Binational Feminist Collective, CFB). It probes the lives and experiences of the men and women of the maquiladora industry and shows that the construction of a politicized transfronteriza identity is determined by three factors: a shared geographical space, a collective consciousness based on mutual experiences and solidarity, and a feminist politics that looks at women's rights as fundamental to challenging the system.

This chapter discusses the background of Gaspar “Indio” Ortega. Perhaps the oldest aphorism of boxing is that poverty breeds pugilists. This is certainly the case for Ortega. His story begins in the dusty border town of Tijuana, which sits perched on the edge of the wealthiest nation in the world. From atop the hill above his neighborhood of Colonia Morelos, Tijuana, a young Gaspar Benitez at midcentury could gaze out across the border and over the sprawling farmlands beyond and wonder what life was like in Los Estados Unidos. Gaspar developed an interest in boxing in his teens. In 1950 he turned pro; he was fourteen years old. In 1953 Indio met American manager Nick Corby who would change his life forever.

Chapter five traces the experience of Paco Chavez’s friend Rogelio Martínez Serna— and that of his male peers—across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and attempts to achieve his hopes and dreams for an economically, physically, and emotionally stable family life. To do so, the chapter opens by examining Rogelio’s effort to migrate lawfully. It shows that his motivation for migration was stoked by Paco’s recent successful settlement in California. Like his peers, Rogelio imagined Paco earning pockets full of dollars, attracting women with his convertible car, and enjoying new adventures. Life was much more difficult for Rogelio, living in the Mexican border. Inspired by his friend Paco, and not easily defeated, Rogelio developed ingenious plans to achieve his purpose: migrating to California to save enough money for an economically secure life as a “man” who could support a household in Mexico. Despite his setbacks, he never lost sight of his aims, especially with peers providing support for how to lead the life of a successful male Mexican migrant with his masculinity and manhood intact. As Rogelio’s experiences show, migrants relied on social networks to achieve lawful migration, employment, housing, and companionship, facilitating their settlement in and transition to the new environment.