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The Home Depot Toluca Mexico
A Starbucks aperture away is usually a reliable cue to echo the “globalization equals Americanization” mantra. There are, afterwards all, 12,000 of them, from Chonburi, Thailand, to Ankara, Turkey. Starbucks’ barista-speak – you apperceive the drill, “tall-grande-venti, skim-soy-whole” – is on its way to actuality the latest Esperanto.
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But the best contempo latte-fication of the apple unravels a added complicated story. Friday, Starbucks opened the aboriginal of four planned food in Tijuana, Mexico, the sprawling bound burghal that is “abroad” alone because of a band fatigued in the California clay at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. To bewail the Starbucks aggression as added Yankee imperialism alone goes so far in a burghal with Yankee imperialism in its DNA.
Tijuana grew up in the 1920s, aloof aloft the ability of U.S. Prohibition laws, and was rushed into addition by the California “border barons” who bankrolled the city’s amusement palaces – booze and carnality outposts such as the Agua Caliente Casino, meant not for Mexicans but for gringos who beyond the bound to do all the annoying things they couldn’t do at home. The agent of Tijuana’s mala fama, its bad rep as a burghal of sin, has annihilation to do with its Mexicanness and aggregate to do with its Americanness.
Unlike added Mexican cities area Starbucks has outposts (Puebla, Toluca and Mexico City), the attendance of U.S. ability in Tijuana is annihilation new. TVs and radios aces up English-language broadcasts from San Diego, and it is not tourists arcade at the bounded Home Depot and Wal-Mart. The aboriginal Tijuana Starbucks is housed in a aloft Pizza Hut, in advanced of a bronze of the admired hero of Mexican independence, José María Morelos y Pavon. It is a prime bend in the alive Zona Rio bartering district, beyond the artery from the affluence gym Sports Apple ($120 a month), area the coffee chain’s aperture was the fizz at treadmills and Pilates classes aftermost week.
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So why are so abounding Tijuana locals affronted up about Starbucks? Because in archetypal Tijuana style, the burghal already exhausted Starbucks at its own game. D’Volada, founded by a Tijuana ancestors in 2000, started as a absolute archetype of the Starbucks formula. It now has 64 food in Mexico and, in a move of about-face globalization, two beyond the bound in San Ysidro and Chula Vista. (A Los Angeles abundance is allegedly in the works.) Few anticipation Starbucks would bother with Tijuana because D’Volada already was, in essence, a Mexicanized Starbucks, confined $1 coffee and application milder beans.
So allotment of the anguish of Starbucks Tijuana is the blackmail it poses to D’Volada, a “glocal” success adventure now deeply alloyed into Tijuana’s burghal fabric. Even worse, D’Volada shops are franchised by a family-run company; the Starbucks outlets in Mexico are allotment of the authority of Carlos Slim, the telecom administrator and battling to Bill Gates for the “richest man in the world” crown.
But area D’Volada appealed to the boilerplate coffee drinker who was accommodating to bounce for added than home-watered Nescafe, Starbucks – with its hardly college prices and its internationalist cachet – already is a allurement for the city’s high crust.
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Starbucks additionally arrives aloof as architecture moves advanced on two big-ticket high-rise compounds, New Burghal and Green View Tower, that affiance aegis walls and tennis courts and, aloft all, amusing cachet – projects that are attempting to redefine the city. On the new Tijuana Starbucks mug are apish shots of the old Agua Caliente Casino tower, the huge all-around cultural centermost and the aflame accompanying building of the executive-class Grand Hotel.
The burghal should appoint Starbucks to do its marketing: “Tijuana: home to a alluring Hollywood past, a contemporary cultural present and a approaching of all-around finance.”
This basic Tijuana was in abounding aftereffect at Starbucks’ VIP aperture affair Thursday. Servers offered up coffeecake on trays; perfume-soaked association ladies absorbed Frappuccino shots flavored with Mexican cajeta (caramel) and diplomats from the French Consulate nibbled chipotle-tinged panini. Even the approachable ambassador fabricated his way through the klieg lights for a photo op and some chai de canela (tea with cinnamon).
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As the night ended, aide parking associates emptied a tray of algid boilerplate lattes. One of them quipped, “Que D’Volada ni que nada, no?” (“Forget about D’Volada, right?”) And aloof like that, an assured coffee approaching accustomed area cipher anytime anticipation it would.
JOSH KUN is a assistant at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. He wrote this commodity for the Los Angeles Times.
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