Chula Vista means beautiful view in Spanish, and around you sits San Diego County's second-largest city, shaped by its US-Mexico border position. Chula Vista was founded in 1888 as an agricultural community, and its fields produced celery, lemons, and olives through the early twentieth century. The postwar suburban expansion that swept across all of San Diego County transformed Chula Vista dramatically: by the 1970s the eastern mesas were filling with tract housing, and by the 2000s the city had grown to nearly 250,000 people.
Chula Vista's population is majority Latino — over 60 percent — a demographic that reflects both the long history of Mexican-American communities in the South Bay and the ongoing immigration flows across a border just eight miles south. The city has the highest concentration of US Customs and Border Protection personnel of any American city, as the agencies that manage the border are headquartered here. It is also home to the US Olympic and Paralympic Training Center, one of only three such facilities in the country.
Chula Vista's residents navigate a daily reality that most Americans never encounter: the convergence of immigration enforcement, border commerce, and a binational labor market, all within the boundaries of a single suburban city.