Whether self-referential or naming some other commodity, Mexicali came to evoke associations with red-light Chinatown ambience, saloon culture, and the hybridization of the U.S.-Mexico border. Likewise, Obregon noted with horror to General Plutarco Elias Calles that American tourists had begun calling Nogales' principal street, Calle Elias, "Mexicali Street." The proliferation of Mexicali (as a place-name) in media productions, postcards, and music may be viewed as off-site markers referencing the border city's attractions and personalities. moral crusaders had long vehemently protested. In 1920 the Mexican consul in Douglas, Alfonso Pesqueira, lamented to General Alvaro Obregon, "Our border cities began to look like red-light districts," echoing what many Mexican nationalists and U.S. ![]() In contrast, a popular and unthinking way of viewing Mexicali developed that was ultimately the cultural byproduct of the border vice-tourism industry which emerged in the first third of the twentieth century. Scholars of the U.S.-Mexico border point to the construction of this twin city and the transformation of the Colorado Desert into a modern zone of commercial agriculture as testimony to the triumph of international capitalism and symbiotic relations. ![]() What is in the name Mexicali? Engineers and planners at the turn of the century crafted the place-name Mexicali and that of its border twin, Calexico, as monuments to the transborder irrigation project that integrated Baja California's Mexicali Valley and California's Imperial Valley into a single regional economic unit.
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