The university's headquarters in Mexicali reflects the border city's role as the state capital and its historical position as the administrative center of Baja California Norte. Mexicali's character — shaped by agricultural development, Chinese immigration, American commerce, and the particular dynamics of border life — provided the context in which the university developed. The UABC campus there serves tens of thousands of students across programs in engineering, business, humanities, and the sciences, functioning as the institutional anchor for a city that has grown dramatically since the mid-twentieth century.

The UABC operates its main campuses in the three principal cities of Baja California Norte: Mexicali, Tijuana, and Ensenada. Each campus reflects the character of its host city. The Tijuana campus engages with the border's particular mixture of manufacturing, culture, and cross-border economic integration. The Ensenada campus developed in a direction that reflects that port city's relationship with the Pacific Ocean — the oceanographic and marine sciences research that has made Ensenada's UABC facility notable within Mexican and international scientific communities.

The Ensenada campus of UABC has developed into Mexico's leading center for oceanographic research — a distinction that reflects both the campus's location on Baja California's Pacific coast and the sustained investment in marine sciences that has built world-class facilities and a distinguished faculty over decades. The Pacific Ocean that breaks against Ensenada's shores provides the immediate subject of study: coastal dynamics, marine biology, physical oceanography, and the intersection of the California Current system with Mexican waters. Research from the Ensenada campus has contributed to the international scientific understanding of Eastern Pacific marine systems.

In 1980 and 1981, a labor dispute at UABC escalated from a strike into riots that tested the meaning of university autonomy under conditions of serious institutional conflict. Mexican public universities operate under a legal framework of autonomy — the right to govern themselves without direct government intervention, manage their own affairs, and resolve internal disputes internally. When a strike turned to riots, the limits of this autonomy became immediately practical questions: What did the university do? What could the state government do? How was the conflict eventually resolved? The episode stands as a reminder that institutional autonomy is a condition that requires constant negotiation with the world outside the institution's walls.

The UABC's history parallels the broader development of Baja California Norte as one of Mexico's most dynamic states. The maquiladora manufacturing boom that brought hundreds of thousands of workers to Tijuana and other border cities created demand for technical and professional education that the university helped supply. The agricultural sector of the Mexicali Valley, historically one of the most productive in Mexico, generated its own educational and research needs. And the ocean — present at Ensenada, visible in the distance from Tijuana — provided the geographic fact around which the university's most distinguished scientific programs developed.