It’s the people who don’t regularly travel to Mexico who are the most scared. They’ll hyperfocus on the cartels, the kidnappings, the murders, the “bad people” on the roads. Those aren’t the people I worry about, though.
I also don’t worry about the beach town vacationers or the road trippers. The worldly innocents eager to travel and teach English in Mexico are lucky; I taught English in Mexico for a year and continue to travel there every year and hope to live there again.
No, I worry about those who desperately want to migrate, safely, to the US because it’s not safe for them to stay at home. I worry about those people already living in the US who fear deportation: the construction workers, the house cleaners, the farm workers, the waiters, the parents, the students. I worry about those who desperately want to stay with their families.
When I tell some people that I’m traveling to Mexico, they place their worry-filled flour sacks on my lap. The heaviness sits there like a big sad baby. Here’s what I tell them.
Imagine this: the doorbell rings and a neighbour hands me a clear plastic bag filled with the biggest, juiciest blackberries I’ve ever seen. At the school where I teach, a student gives me a black plastic bag, filled with ripe avocados. A neighbour invites my boyfriend and me over for a Valentine’s Day dinner. They drive an hour and a half to the town over to get us KFC (or Kentucky, as they call it) because we’re Americans and they know that we like fried chicken, as do they.
We travel by bus to the town of Angangueo over Easter break and don’t know where the hotel is, but a man in a car pulls up and says we can stay with his family. His wife cooks us a whole fish in their outdoor kitchen, over their wood-burning stove. The dad drives us up a dirt road where we see the monarchs shiver on the pines and fly like miniature orange and black striped kites.
At weddings, we take corn tortillas in our hands and grab carnitas with our palms with a ferocious joy. Food, thoughtfulness, hospitality, and love: these are the trends in my Mexican experiences.
Am I worried about my survival in Mexico? No. Am I worried about the survival of my Mexican friends in the US? Yes.
