Book 1: The United States and Mexico share a two-thousand-mile boundary where landscape and architecture clash in a vivid

contrast of two cultures. From Aztec to High Tech explores the architectural future of interdependent neighbors who share a
history, an economy, and a landscape. After reviewing three key periods in Mexico's three-thousand-year-old architectural
past―indigenous, Spanish colonial, and modern―urban planning scholar Lawrence A. Herzog focuses on the border
territories of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, particularly in California. Through eighty black-and-white
photographs and interviews with architects from both sides of the border, this engaging book provides a compelling picture of
how traditional Mexican architecture has intersected with the postindustrial, high-tech urban style of the United States―a mix
that offers an alternative to the homogenization of architecture north of the international border.

Tijuana, a city “pulled between the forces of globalization and traditional Mexico” (p.120). These spaces – ranging from upper
class residential areas to zones of mass consumption and zones of conflict have produced a landscape of “contrast and
contradiction” (p. 140- 141).

Book 2: Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California, edited by M. Dear, G. Leclerc.
According to the authors, the simultaneous evolution of four key dynamics -globalization, the rise of the 'network society',
hybridization, and privatization- is transforming the built environment of the "postborder megalopolis", presenting unique
opportunities and challenges along the international divide, while both blurring distinctions between the United States and
Mexico and reinforcing them. The resulting landscapes are thus a hodgepodge of the hypermodern, the hybrid, and the "dual
city" -one characterized by profound differences within.

Immigrants flock to Southern California, while corporations are drawn to the low wage industry of the Mexican border towns.