UC San Diego

The number of Gen-Z and Millennial American expats who have relocated to Mexico has grown exponentially in the past five years. While a sizable amount of academic research on immigration focuses on forcibly displaced populations fleeing to the United States, the ethnographic research in this thesis analyzes the immigration of upper to middle class Gen-Z and Millennial American expats who have relocated from the United States to Tijuana, Baja California, México. I argue that the neoliberal urbanization of Tijuana creates opportunities for expats to reactivate the ideological schema of United States superiority over Mexico in the ways in which they pursue individualistic value in their lives in Tijuana. Ultimately, the freedom that expats seek living in Mexico relies on restriction and the creation of asymmetric borders between themselves and “others” in Tijuana.