This study analyses and deconstructs the representations of the border and the city of Tijuana through an iconographic approximation. Amongst the many representations of Tijuana there are recurring themes, such as poverty, violence, drugs and prostitution. This study is centered around the character/icon that stands as the masculine archetype of the border: the bandit from the mid XIX century to the beginning of the XX, revolutionary during the XX century, and narco (drug lord) by the end of the XX century and beginning of the XXI. Most of these representations are external in origin and usually follow the parameters of brevity. Some examples are pictures from Battles in Tijuana, tourist postcards, corridos (folklore songs), poems, short stories and American Dime Novels. For almost 200 years, the identity of Tijuana was held hostage by outsider representations.

In response, Tijuana developed a new form of representation: a divergent aesthetic. Some of the first exemplars of internal representation regurgitate the simulacra imposed by the external---two-dimensional imaginaries of border identity---but this was due to two main reasons: the need for a homogeneous identity and that this identity caricatured the border and made it more attractive to American tourists, it was simply economically beneficial.

There internal representations follow a divergent aesthetic. In the realm of expression or content they follow the guidelines of short form fiction, amongst these features they are: serial, fractal, metafictional, intertextual, elliptic, paradoxical, and hybrid genres. In the realm of the content or story they respond to the previous representations by rejecting any loyalty to form. Amongst other characteristics, divergent literatures create their own non-codes, disassociate from the postmodern, prefer crude reality, make tireless use of mass codes and reject canonical ones, they are self-destructive, have no epiphany, suspense is routine, and they cannot achieve a synthesis.

Divergent aesthetics compose an activist literature that questions form, genre, and the parameters of the canonical by exposing representational methods that have formed part of the hierarchical structuring of identities and space within the Tijuana border region.