Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border

  • Year: 2012
  • Location: Duke University Press
  • Collaborators: Fiamma Montezemolo

Co-editor with Fiamma Montezemolo. Anthology of scholarship, essays, literature, poetry, and visual art.

A boon for English readers who will find selections by prominent Tijuana-based writers and artists…a sort of reverse archaeological excavation, adding layers of complexity to this city and its archive of memory. – Bulletin of Latin American Research

Tijuana Dreaming is important and inspirational: a study of the imaginary of a city that constantly reinvents itself. By documenting the artistic and social expressions of this border city, Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo reveal what motivates us and what makes us proud as tijuanenses: living in a city so full of inspiration and possibility.—Ramón Amezcua, aka Bostich, of Nortec Collective
This is an exciting and timely collection of cultural criticism and creative work. The selections are inspired, alert to a wide spectrum of practices and debates. Personal narratives, urban development, art, literature, photography, and architecture are just some of the matters covered in this rich and thought-provoking conversation, and the foreword by Iain Chambers provides the perfect framing device, linking Tijuana to global studies and critical inquiry.—Roberto Tejada
An eclectic anthology of critical cultural studies, Tijuana Dreaming brings to life the tumultuous history of the border town’s shifting identity: the Prohibition-era booze-and-brothel magnet adjacent to San Diego, the late-twentieth-century booming free-trade zone of globalized assembly plants, and, most recently, the bloody site of today’s horrific drug-war violence. . . . [T]he volume’s overall high quality makes for a stimulating . . . read. – Foreign Affairs
Tijuana Dreaming is a significant anthology of recent writings on this city from the perspective of art, literature, architecture, music, and film. It is one of the most concentrated studies of the city to date. . . . The anthology also addresses a void in the existing literature on Tijuana through English translations of several texts by prominent Mexican writers, filling out gaps in the border-studies research that circulates in Anglo-American contexts. – Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
This volume is an enriching and fasci­nating contribution to the study of Tijuana and the Mexico-US borderland, and would be of interest to any scholar with an interest in the culture and history of the region. It is a dynamic, engaging and timely collection of works which address key questions of identity and identification against the backdrop of cultural and sociohistorical processes. – Bulletin of Hispanic Studies