But Tijuana’s beauty lies deeper, and has to do with why the town is flourishing now.

Only a few decades ago, Tijuana was a blank slate, a small coastal outpost on the California border. It had none of the old elites, family business groups bent on preserving their power and wealth.

Instead, it was folks beaten down by Mexico who came by the millions to, and often through, Tijuana. Desperate and possessing only their own wits and capacity for work, they brought a dynamism that Mexico had stifled but Tijuana found use for. Those who stayed found a new world and many moved up into the middle class in a lifetime.

It helped that Tijuana is the Mexican city farthest from Mexico City. Tijuana tolerated far less of the desiccated pomp and protocol, the reverence for title, that has suffocated so many fine ideas and sharp minds in the capital, which is the center of the country in almost every way, good and bad. To be far from Mexico City, particularly to the north, was once considered to be virtually not Mexican at all. Federal bureaucrats from Mexico City for years only unwillingly left the center of power. They were paid extra to go to Tijuana. But that distance gave Tijuana oxygen. There’s an old saying about Mexico: So far from God, so close to the United States. There’s some truth to that. But the last few decades have shown that, for poor Mexicans, the truer riff is, “Farther from Mexico City, closer to God.”

Immigrants, fleeing north for decades, have demonstrated that. So has Tijuana, which has been Mexico’s best domestic factory at turning the poor into the middle class.

Crucially, of course, the city is face-planted up against the United States. Early in the town’s history, in fact, it was easier to get to Tijuana from San Diego than from elsewhere in Mexico, where the winding road from Mexicali took most cars a week. Until several decades ago, Tijuana used dollars, not pesos.