The Changing Shape of San Diego’s Zonie-Hate

To many San Diegans, they’re almost mythical.  

They come flooding in from the east, down Interstate 8, chased by the oppressive triple digit summer heat.  The parking lots of our beaches, bays and parks fill with row after row of SUV’s bearing the familiar purple and teal, Saguaro-cactus-stamped license plates. The beaches themselves become choked with pop up tents with maroon and gold tridents.  

In years past, the influx was so significant that the tourists’ local paper put out a special beachside edition. Meanwhile, advertising campaigns beckoned them to our beaches, promising San Diego would give families’ “sweat glands a vacation.” 

Despite the financial boon, though, San Diegans have long loathed the seasonal migration. Their resentment has been so acute that decades ago they coined a soft slur for the interlopers.  

Zonies. 

It’s the kind of word you can taste. The kind that leaves a thin film of antipathy on your tongue. 

While the sentiment emerged from the predictable grumblings of a tourist town, it betrays a sort of desperate, grasping nativism. After all, the family from Prescott, or the 20-somethings from Phoenix, for example, get to rent for a comparatively cheaper cost what San Diegans pay dearly for – San Diego. 

And in recent years, as that cost has continued to shoot up, chasing locals away, San Diegans’ performative disdain for Zonies feels less a product of actual disdain for Zonies, and more like a latent fear that our love affair with this city is an unrequited one.  

‘Zonies Go Home’ 

In 1971, when Darrell Esparza started working as a lifeguard, San Diego was different. The city still felt like a town. Tourism, too, felt more regional. To the then-18-year-old Esparza, the throngs that flocked to the beaches each summer seemed almost exclusively Arizonan. 

“They’d come and take all the parking, drive slow, trash our town, get in bar fights, be disrespectful and then leave. They were just everywhere,” Esparza said.  

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Naturally, anti-Zonie sentiment flowed. It was so ubiquitous that a local surf shop printed dirtbag-forward bumper stickers that read, “Tourists go home – but leave your daughters.” Others remember the sticker being more specific – “Zonies go home – but leave your daughters.” 

Looking back, Esparza thinks they got a bad rap. They were largely college kids, so of course they were going to do what college kids do. By the time he retired as a lifeguard sergeant in 2009, he felt the animosity had waned. By then, the beaches were flushed with people from all over, not just Arizonans.  

“The Zonies were the first ones to kind of overrun us in the summertime, but as the years went by, then it became everyone else,” Esparza said. “But we didn’t care where they were from. We rescued everybody.” 

Some tales of bad behavior still float around.  

Marlena Harvey’s colleagues at a jet ski rental company always joked that nine out of 10 wrecks were caused by people from landlocked states – most often, Arizonans. In one incident, an Arizonan smashed a jet ski into the bay’s single buoy at 45 miles per hour. The collision tore the jet ski in half and plunged it to the bottom of the ocean.  

When divers plumbed the eviscerated watercraft from the depths, they found an empty water bottle in its dry compartment. It reeked of vodka. 

“Arizonans aren’t gonna’ see us again, so they just don’t really care,” Harvey said. “But people that are local to San Diego are like, ‘Oh, I’m probably gonna’ see these people again, so I shouldn’t be a trash person.’” 

(I reached out to a handful of Arizona elected officials to defend their citizens’ honor, including Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs and the mayors of Yuma, Phoenix, Tucson and Avondale. None agreed to speak with me.) 

I’ll come out and say it: I don’t think Zonies deserve the scorn. I also don’t think many San Diegans are actually all that scornful of them. Much of today’s Zonie-hate feels almost like a winking joke, or the tribalism of team sports. 

For some, it’s as simple as their presence being inconvenient: crowded parking lots, clogged freeways, long lines at local haunts (tellingly, much of the complaints center around the sacred architect of southwestern cities – the automobile). It’s the kind of stuff that makes someone say “fuckin’ Zonie,” in hushed scandalized tones. But never to their face. We are, after all, San Diegans. 

For others, the resentment oozes with uppity condescension. These are tacky desert people who invade our paradise with oversized Trump flags and coolers of Natty Light and leave everything trashed, their stereotype goes, forgetting that we also are a desert people, albeit ones with access to a coast. Even that sentiment, though, may be a cope for the premium we pay to exist near that coast. 

‘The Nice Thing About Zonies’ 

It’s only natural that a tourist hub would develop animosity for the tourists – warranted or not. “Why must I look at drunks staggering along the shore or noisy boating parties,” Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger wrote of the popular Italian resort town Baiae in 51 A.D.  

Almost all tourist destinations have their own Zonie. Arizonans, for example, complain about “snowbirds” that flock to the desert when winter turns their midwestern homes into ice fields. 

In Huntington Beach, where Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera graduated from high school, it was visitors from Inland Empire locales like Riverside who earned the ire of locals. 

“It’s frustrating watching your home be consumed by people who are not from your home,” Elo-Rivera said. 

That frustration has reached a boiling point in many tourist havens in recent years driven by inflation and a post-Covid tourism boom. In Barcelona, residents sprayed sprayed tourists with water guns , in Puerto Rico, Borinqueños took sledgehammers to an infinity pool under construction, in Venice, locals decried a new entrance fee to the city they felt would turn it into a “theme park.” 

These are people grappling with the question of how much of a city belongs to tourists, and how much belongs to locals. And for many, the proliferation of short-term rentals like AirbnB’s is the most visible example of tourism’s encroachment. In San Diego, their presence has sparked major pushback over concerns they’re depriving locals of housing and transforming communities. 

Some tourist-San Diegan wildland-urban interfaces like Mission Beach have largely been exorcised of any nonseasonal human life. Sure, the area’s always been a hub for out-of-towners, but it’s never felt so all-consuming. Nowadays, during summer, you could walk the three quarters of a mile strand of south Mission Beach knocking on doors and be hard pressed to find a local.  

What makes the circle so difficult to square is that tourist destinations do rely on visitors. Tourism is our region’s third largest economic driver. Last year, the industry injected $22 billion into the local economy and helped support more than 200,000 jobs. 

Zonies play a pretty big role in that. San Diego receives more visitors from Arizona than any other state but one. Last year, their 1.3 million visitors coughed up about $674 million. That’s about 4.5 percent of the city’s total tourism revenue, according to the San Diego Tourism Authority.  

As San Diego, and California more broadly, braces for a potential tourism slowdown amid political and economic uncertainty, the region’s sure thing with Arizonans may be even more needed. That’s to say nothing of our city’s budget woes. 

That dough is why former-lifeguard-turned-former-councilmember Byron Wear focused so much on the industry during his time in office. Supporting hotel construction, from which the city could draw taxes and fees, was one of his primary objectives during his two terms, he said. 

“The essence of it is ‘are we willing to share our city, our beaches, our parks, our lifestyle with other people?’ We need to be welcoming,” Wear said.  

Still, he quipped: “The nice thing about Zonies is when the temperature drops in Arizona, they all head back home.” 

‘The Sunshine Tax’ 

It’s not hard to see why many San Diegans feel less welcome in the city they call home. 

Average rent in San Diego has risen by 52 percent since 2018. Water rates have continued a steep upward climb, with planned hikes of nearly 30 percent over the next two years alone. Electricity rates have been the highest in the nation. Residents have also been hit with a slew of new fees for everything from trash service to parking. 

Those bleak financial realities are part of what’s driving the modern Zonie resentment, Elo-Rivera said.  

“That piece of, ‘Life is really hard here, I’m working multiple jobs, I’m watching family members be displaced or stressed out,’ all of that creates the conditions for resentment toward whoever the quote-unquote ‘other’ is,” Elo-Rivera said. “Especially when you’re staring at others enjoying excess and enjoying luxury that seems unattainable.” 

That’s why he’s proposed a tax on vacation rentals and empty second homes. Those proposals have been criticized by organizations like the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, whose leadership called them a “targeted attack” on tourism. Elo-Rivera has waved away those criticisms as bad faith. In his telling, it’s just an effort to get visitors to pay the “Sunshine Tax,” already paid by locals. 

“Are we going to tap into the into the resource (of tourism), or we just going to keep having San Diegans bear the burden?” Elo-Rivera asked. 

That burden has begun to make San Diego feel structurally hostile to human life in a way not so dissimilar from the environmental hostility that’s long driven Arizonan’s east during summer. Sub in sky high costs for sky high heat, squint your eyes, etc. 

In one recent survey, 69 percent of San Diegans said they’d considered moving. Nearly 80 percent of those said it was because San Diego was too expensive.  

Data also clearly shows which kind of inhospitableness people find more bearable. While Arizona’s population has grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade, San Diego’s still hasn’t recovered from pandemic-era declines. Last year’s .4 percent population growth only came because of immigration, a trend that troubled observers. 

For the 24,000 who fled San Diego for elsewhere in 2024, many likely followed a well-trod route: hop on I-8 and drive the six hours east to Phoenix. 

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