Marriages Made in Tijuana

SAN DIEGO — Nick Inzunza, scion of a prominent border family, did not speak more than a few words of Spanish until he was an adult. But not long ago, Inzunza stood up before dozens of his Mexican fiancee's relatives and solemnly asked for her hand in an emotional Tijuana ceremony that seemed worlds away from the freeways and strip malls of Southern California.

Like a number of his Americanized Latino friends and acquaintances who are dating south of the border, Inzunza found love--and a return to his Mexican roots--in Tijuana. He went to the altar in November. His brother will marry a Tijuana woman in July.

"It's like going back to the Old Country to get married, except the Old Country is just 20 minutes away," said Inzunza, 27, who works as an aide to a county supervisor.

Driven by demographics, cultural nostalgia, family ties or sheer geographic coincidence, these young Latinos underscore the increasingly mobile transnational forces that the Tijuana-San Diego border share.

Rudy Murillo, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman in San Diego, says cross-border marriage is an old tradition. He himself was encouraged to go back to Mexico to find a wife, though he ended up marrying an Irish American woman.

Although there are no statistics, Murrillo believes that the trend is increasing with the growing populations of back-to-back twin cities whose residents increasingly view the other side of the border as a drive across town.

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More than 40,000 people cross the border to work every day, according to a study by San Diego Dialogue, a think tank that fosters cross-border relations. The study says that each month, 200,000 more cross north to San Diego, mostly to shop. And for the 300,000 who cross south to Tijuana monthly, the most common reason is family and social visits, it said. Thousands of affluent Tijuana high school students attend San Diego private high schools or state universities.

But as the border region becomes more interdependent, the intensification of cross-border social life reveals a complex web of cultural myths and realities that seem to define each side.

One big advantage of the Tijuana singles scene, some U.S. Latinos say, is that it allows them to step away from ethnic stereotyping--or even slurs--in Southern California.