Border City

From the Los Angeles Times and Sonoro comes the De Los Podcast — a weekly conversation where music, pop culture and Latinidad collide. Hosted by De Los editors Fidel Martínez and Suzy Exposito, the show pulls back the curtain on the stories, people and cultural moments shaping the Latino experience in the U.S. and beyond. Every episode is a front-row seat to conversations with the artists, actors,...

A random accident forces Sandra to slow down and embrace her life on the border. New waves of migrants arrive in Tijuana, pushed by violence, poverty, and political upheaval and fueled by dreams of reaching the United States.

Artists, chefs and ordinary citizens point the way to a revitalized Tijuana, even as the city faces new challenges. Sandra faces challenges too. Two deaths in her own family.

Doctors in their white coats protest the violence, while some young musicians refuse to stay home, and an arts promoter opens a new gallery. Sandra feels caught between two worlds as she flies back and forth to Washington to care for her ailing mother.

The Arellano cartel grows weaker as its top leaders fall, but the violence continues. Threats strike new fears in the highest echelons of law enforcement. The Tijuana opera hosts an inaugural performance. Sandra’s mother flies in from Washington, D.C. and meets Sandra’s friend Angela.

Sandra covers the assassination of another police chief and the arrest of a powerful drug suspect. She also sings with the Tijuana opera and invites friends from both sides of the border to a concert on a hillside looking out toward San Diego.

Sandra ponders the fine line that separates danger from safety in this city of contrasts. A prominent Tijuana journalist is ambushed and a family falls victim to the Arellano cartel. But she also sees another side of the city, as her friend Angela throws her a surprise birthday party.

The kidnapping of a prominent maquiladora executive — and the threatening presence of the Arellano drug cartel — overshadow the city’s ambitious effort to boost its image. But like many Tijuana residents, Sandra feels little personal danger as she settles into her new life and explores the city.

Sandra Dibble expected to stay in Tijuana a year. Instead she found herself drawn into the worlds that intersect at this crossroads of the Americas. Journalists. Migrants. Artists. Drug gangs. Tijuana is a place where paths converge, often in unexpected ways.

Border City is a different kind of story about the U.S.-Mexico border, told by a reporter who has spent more than 25 years trying to understand the dynamics of Tijuana, Mexico, and its relationship to the United States. In 1994 Sandra Dibble left a prestigious job in Washington D.C. for Tijuana, Mexico’s largest border city. A few days before she arrived, a major presidential candidate was assassi...