The city's historic buildings include the Guadalupe mission (1662) and a late 19th-century customs house. Among its cultural centres are the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez (1973) and a museum of anthropology and history.

Juárez's service sector grew during the 1920s as large numbers of American tourists crossed the border to circumvent Prohibition. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, however, the city's economic troubles multiplied when thousands of Mexican labourers were deported there from the United States, swelling the masses of unemployed. For much of the 20th century, workers from other parts of Mexico were attracted to the city by its relatively high wages and its proximity to the U.S. border.

Juárez is the northern terminus of the National Railways of Mexico. The city is also a commercial and service centre for a heavily irrigated, cotton-producing hinterland. Juárez—like its northern sister cities Tijuana, Mexicali, and Nuevo Laredo—has grown markedly since the 1970s, largely because of economic and legal incentives for maquiladoras (maquiladora) (export-oriented assembly plants), as well as a thriving transnational tourist sector. Additional maquiladoras were established and the trucking industry grew more rapidly after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was implemented in 1994. The population, which had reached nearly 545,000 in 1980, had more than doubled by 2000. However, city services have not kept up with the swelling population, which has resulted in widespread environmental pollution, extensive squatter settlements in outlying areas, and rising rates of violent crime. The city has also gained notoriety as a staging area for smuggling immigrants and narcotics into the United States. In the 1990s nearly 200 people, including dozens of young women who—it was later determined—had been raped and murdered, were reported missing in or near Juárez; many of them were presumably killed by drug traffickers. Pop. (2000 prelim.) 1,217,818.