Singing a new song: Mexican border town embraces opera. (Executive Travel).

Tucked onto a quiet street in the rugged working-class neighborhood known as Colonia Libertad, overlooking the border crossing to the United States, is a little slice of Vienna or Rome.

Outside, it looks like a nondescript cafe surrounded by a dentist office, a liquor store and ice cream and taco stands. Inside, to the right, is an Internet cafe with sterile, off-white computers. But turn to the left, bead down some steps and you'll see why the cafe is worth a visit.

Beyond the tables and chairs, framed drawings of the world's great opera houses and posters for Puccini's Tosca and Turandot hang from one wall. To the side sit an old piano, a guitar and a Viking helmet with horns. In the corner, an ornate picture frame encircles a 36-inch television. Gold curtains attached to the frame can be pulled shut over the screen.

This is Tijuana's Cafe de la Opera, the brainchild of Enrique Fuentes, a teacher's assistant across the border in San Diego, California, and, above all, an opera lover.

A year ago, Fuentes opened the Internet cafe with an eye on eventually spotlighting his real love. He even named the computers: Aida, Carmen, Madame Butterfly and La Boheme. He traipsed through San Diego flea markets collecting pieces for the decor and erected stage lights around the sign on his building.

Now, four days a week, Cafe de la Opera offers opera lectures, recitals, voice and piano classes, open-microphone nights devoted to opera and videos of full-length operas on Fuentes' curtain-covered television.

But this gathering place is just one part of Tijuana's unexpected, and flourishing, opera scene. A weekly opera radio show last year moved from a small station to one heard across the hills of the sprawling city. Tijuana now has two conservatories of music and two children's choirs. Four opera singers who left the border town to study in New York and Mexico City have returned to ply their craft on home turf.

Perhaps it was only inevitable that in August 2002 the Opera de Tijuana--the city's first opera company--formed. It grew from an arts group that for two years drew standing-room-only crowds to the opera scenes it produced in a theater. In March 2002, the group put on Madame Butterfly to such success that its producers formed the separate opera company. Their first production, I Pagliacci, is scheduled to hit the stage this March.

"What we've seen has really been a phenomenon. We see people from all classes come to the performances," says Teresa Rique, a teacher and administrator for the Opera de Tijuana.

Still, Tijuana's opera scene is small. Most of the city's million-plus residents would be surprised to hear one exists at all. The unmarked offices of Opera de Tijuana are hidden on the second floor of a small building in a residential neighborhood. Moreover, no city in Mexico is less likely to be associated with opera than Tijuana. The city's image is one of shantytowns, graffiti, drug smuggling and illegal immigrants. Narcocorridos--popular songs focused on the drug culture--and heavy metal music blast from the discotheques along Avenida Revolucion, the tourist drag. Vendors sell plaster Tweety Birds among the cars waiting to cross into the United States.

But in recent years, a large middle class and private sector have developed. That, and proximity to the United States, have brought more cultural opportunities and activities, as well as the money to support them.

"Tijuana was the city of prostitution, drugs and Mickey Mouse dolls," says Jose Medina, a tenor and artistic director of the opera company "It's no longer like that, The idea of Tijuana is changing."

Indeed, the discos are often empty. Vendors say most of the cars crossing into the United States belong not to tourists but to Tijuana's middle class residents heading off on shopping trips. Mexican business executives long ago surpassed gringo tourists as the city's primary visitors.

Interest in opera is attributed in part to the chaos that characterizes Tijuana. Those involved in opera here believe that, surrounded by cacophony, people seek harmony and exactitude. In the context of Tijuana, opera almost takes on the cachet of an underground, alternative music. Whatever the reason for opera's popularity, the world's quintessential border town has been losing one skin and crawling into another.

Opera thrives amid Tijuana's craziness, above all, because of the support from the city's now-arge business class and the volunteer efforts of opera lovers like Fuentes. This is a change for Mexico, where decades of paternalistic one-party rule taught arts groups to turn to the government first, But government subsidies of opera are almost nonexistent here, which is why some people believe the art form has grown slowly but solidly.

"It's like a child' says accountant Manuel Laborin, who hosts an opera show every Thursday on Radio Universidad. "If you give him everything, he becomes a bum. If you give him the basics, he learns to do it for himself. That's what's happened to us in Tijuana."

Still, Fuentes believes the music may not be so out of place here. "A doctor I know says, 'Opera is a vice.' In a city of many vices, this is another," he says.