LOS ALGODONES, Mexico — Let other Mexican border towns wager on factories and free trade. This burg is thriving on bad teeth and aging eyes.
The community of 10,000, the least known of the five border crossing points leading into California, has carved a booming niche by providing cut-rate dentistry and general medical care to the thousands of snowbirds who spend the winter in their trailers and RVs across the border in Imperial County and nearby Arizona.
Its market specialty is apparent as you drive the only lane crossing into town. Men in cowboy hats hand out fliers for prescription drugs on special at local pharmacies, while signs in English trumpet the dozens of dentists and eye doctors whose offices jam the few blocks closest to the border.
Discount medical care is common along the border, but in few places does it dominate as in Los Algodones. Here, dental offices outnumber restaurants 49 to nine. Add in the 26 pharmacies, 20 optical shops and 14 physicians offices, and you've got something of a mecca of medicine.
Mary Ann Johnson, a Wisconsin retiree spending her second winter in the area, said she and her husband come to Los Algodones for two reasons: "Our teeth and our glasses." Johnson, who lacks dental insurance in the United States, figures she saved at least $500 by getting a crown and new glasses in Los Algodones recently.
From November through April, waiting rooms and sidewalks are crowded with senior citizens from as far away as Saskatchewan and Manitoba, pensioners paying cash for $130 root canals, discount eyeglasses and hormone pills going for a fraction of the cost charged north of the Mexican border.
That commerce, which by some estimates generates more than $100 million yearly, has changed the face of Los Algodones, once a collection of watering holes catering to young bar-hoppers from nearby Yuma. Shiny medical offices sit where bars used to, and freshly minted Mexican doctors and dentists arrive to open shops.
The successes in catering to the sans-a-belt set has some local boosters dreaming that building golf courses and RV parks might further raise the profile of a Baja California town that still doesn't show up on many maps.
Jorge Garcia Salazar, a jeweler who is the equivalent of a mayor, said the town's transformation began in 1982, when a peso devaluation invited a torrent of bargain-hunters with dollars. "We didn't have this kind of tourism," he said. "There weren't as many new buildings. There weren't as many shops."
