Then came the dentists. In 1969, Dr. Bernardo Magaña, newly graduated from dental college at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, set up shop directly across the street from border control. Within a year, he was treating dozens of patients a day, most of them Americans. It would be more than a decade before many other dentists joined him. The town was just too rough, Magaña’s son, Bernardo, who now runs the practice with his brother and his mother, told me. “So my dad took it upon himself to clean it up.” In the early eighties, Magaña was elected mayor of Los Algodones. Backed by the state government in nearby Mexicali, he cracked down on vice and shuttered the most notorious establishments in town. Year by year, the bars gave way to dental clinics, the partygoers to patients. According to Roberto Díaz and Paula Hahn, who run a website about medical tourism called Border CRxing, Los Algodones now has the highest per-capita concentration of dentists in the world: well over a thousand in a population of fifty-five hundred. It’s known as Molar City.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter