Never tell anyone you're travelling to Mexico. When I tell people that I'm crossing the planet on a motorcycle they always ask about Mexico.
Mexico is where bad things happen. People ask "What I'm going to do about Mexico".
I should've said "Nope, no Mexico for me, I'm skipping the whole country and I'm going to take a garbage barge across the Caribbean to Caracas so they can dump me off in one of Venezuela's most starved barrios." That would calm their nerves.
Mexico has violence. We all know this. As someone who lived in a major American city during a crime wave, I know what it can be like to hear gunshots on your front porch. It's happened, it happens. Crime doesn't discriminate, but the people who report on it do, and that's why Mexico has the bad wrap that it does. Allow me to explain:
There is a flaw in the human psyche exploited by media for profit.
As the writer of "The Handmaid's Tale" author Margaret Atwood put it:
"We don't like bad news, but we need it. We need to know about it in case it's coming our way."
That's what social media and the news do to you.
After watching the 2014 movie "Nightcrawler" starring Jake Gyllenhaal, I learned a little bit about the formula that media can operate under to keep frightened eyes glued to the screen and watching their broadcasts. In the movie, Gyllenhaal would go around LA day and night looking for videos of victims of crime or scenes of car accidents-- basically unsightly horrors that plague a city. He would sell them to a news stations that had one simple goal: to drive viewership. They even said it out loud, and I paraphrase:
"The best stories on the news are violent crimes happening in rich neighborhoods to give the illusion that inner city crime is creeping into the suburbs."
Now- take that formula? Zoom out. To North America. Mexico is the "inner city" and the US is the "affluent suburb."
Mexico is the place where all the bad things are. It's where people go to die, get kidnapped, raped, or murdered. From a perspective solely through the lens of media, we imagine Mexico to be a big arena, where no one sleeps and structure fires casually burn through the night. People hide around corners and under manhole covers just waiting to pop out and get you. It must be anarchy, and those trying to escape are BRINGING IT HERE.
This narrative lives and thrives in the minds of the eyes that are glued to the media that shills this formula out.
It works so well, that these frightened people painstakingly labor to evangelize others to their mindset. They need to warn others. If they find out I'm going to Mexico, the MUST inform me about the dangers, because I'm either brave or a straight-up fool to run head-first into the jaws of a failed narco-terrorist state.
Before crossing into Mexico, I was in a restaurant in the borderlands. Someone had opened up a conversation with me about my motorcycle when they saw it parked outside. I mentioned that I'm crossing the world on it and Mexico was next.
The whole room opened up to talk to me about it. A man told me about how federales confiscated his cameras in the 80s, even when he had papers, and it could only be worse now. Another man told me that the people there were violent and I need to be careful. He reminded me of the beheadings. After hearing THAT, another couple that had entered the restaurant half-way into these conversations to pick up their takeout dinners eaves-dropped and the wife had to say: "Please. Be careful. I'm a mom, it's just very dangerous down there."
They're all terrified of Mexico and they need me to share their fear. To feel like they're helping, they need to bring me to their level.
I asked every one of them if they'd been across the border. They'd answered that they'd either flown to a resort town like Cabo or they hadn't crossed in over 30 years. In my humble opinion, these people who are giving me such stark warnings don't know jack shit about the Mexican border so I graciously took their warnings with a massive bowling-ball-sized grain of salt.
I guess what gets me angry is that they've been given hyper-sensationalist information. They're indoctrinated. They're ignorant and they don't know it. Then, they feel the need to go and share their ignorant uninformed viewpoints with others.
It's like 90% of the people I meet think the Earth is Flat, and when you say you're going to try to go find out if it's round they get frustrated with you and tell you "you're just going to fall off the edge of the Earth." Don't go to Mexico, you'll die there.
And what if I do die down here? Would it not have just been as possible as being gunned down in the streets of Minneapolis or Chicago? Do Europeans fear the US like we fear Mexico? Do they avoid school zones because they think they could be hit by a stray bullet?
Do you want to know what Mexico is REALLY like? Would you like to get a perspective from someone who has spent days hanging out with Mexican nationals in their bars, on their ferries, speaking to locals and sleeping under their roofs in their homes? That would be me, your primary source, and I'll have more on that next up in Saga 5, here in The United States of Mexico.
-JT
11/16/2022