History of Mexicali

The yellow half symbolizes the desert and the blue half the waters of the Gulf of California. The red diagonal line symbolizes the Río Colorado (as colorado also means red in Spanish). On the yellow half,  there’s a drawing of Mount Centinela with a cotton boll on top, symbol of the Mexicali Valley’s major  agricultural product. On the blue half there is machinery with an atom in the center, symbolizing  industry and science. Around is the legend “tierra cálida”, (warm land, in Spanish) referring to high temperatures in the area and also the warmth and hospitality of its people.

At the top is the Mexi-Cali anagram, separating both words with a line symbolizing the international border and an eagle head above this inside a half sun, symbolic of its origins.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the federal government granted these lands to Guillermo Andrade, in order to populate the border with the United States. Mexicali was established when several companies settled in the area between 1898 and 1900 to take advantage of water from the Colorado River.

At this time, Mexicali was sparsely populated, with the exception of the area known as Algodones, inhabited mainly by the Cucapah tribe. The word Mexicali is a combination of “México” and “California”, coined in 1902 by Colonel Agustín Sanginez, the political chief of the Northern District. At one time, Mexicali was part of the Ensenada Municipality.   The official date for the city’s foundation was March 14, 1903, and eleven years later the city became a municipality itself, forming its first city council.

As American companies started construction of irrigation systems in 1905, instead of using Mexican workers, they brought people from China to do the work.  Thus began the first Chinese colonies in Mexicali, which were important not only to the  development of the city, but also for giving Mexicali its reputation for the best Chinese food restaurants in this corner of the world!

This irrigation system built by Chinese workers helped agriculture develop, placing  Mexicali among the top producers in the cotton industry, as well as in other food products of export quality grown in the Mexicali Valley area.

In the 1950s, Baja California officially became México’s 29th state, and Mexicali became the State’s capital.  In the 1960s,  Mexicali’s productive sectors also included industry, as assembly-line factories began to settle in the area, transforming this desert city into an important business center, hosting many varied national and international businesses.