Mexico cares

I love going to the airport. Person on the go, woman of the world, got a flight to catch. Don't go thinking I lead a mundane existence! I have places to be. I had to get up way before a comfortable hour to catch my flight from TJ to Mexico City for the Fulbright midterm conference. Yeah, I said Fulbright Midterm Conference just because it makes me feel special. Glamorous. Worldly. Everything I am not. The Volaris planes cut around the little plane parking lot, sporting names on the side of each plane. Francisco. Alejandro. Cute, very cute, there goes the Sara plane. My Interjet plane was a spark plug, it seemed to shoot down the runway and barrel into the sky in a spunkier way than most planes. And up it went, swooping and turning and rocketing away from troubled TJ.

I love Mexico City. Urban jungle, everything a city should be. I have been there before and was excited to go back. I was surprised when the taxi from the airport pulled up in front of the hotel that Fulbright put us up in. I knew it would be nice. Zona Rosa. The super nice part of Mexico City. The odd part was that I have stayed in the same hotel before on a school study trip I took as an undergrad. Sometimes I wonder who I really am. When I look for a hotel, I usually have to specify that I would prefer my own bathroom as opposed to sharing the one in the hall with a bunch of twenty year old backpackers. How I ended up two times within the same lifetime in a beautiful colonial hotel in the Zona Rosa confuses me.

Not to say that I don't like nice things. I love nice things. As I viewed the cafes and shops that line the Zona Rosa under the clear blue skies and warm air of DF I felt completely content. We were shuttled between beautiful hotel to gorgeous offices of the Mexican education ministry to the spacious and polished conference rooms of the U.S. Embassy. This is the life, I thought as we mingled with people that are used to these spaces, these rooms. "I'm with the State Department", "I'm with the Embassy", "I'm with the Fulbright Commission" I heard over and over again. And we were the star attraction. I found myself feeling sad at unexpected moments. I really doubt I will be a guest of the State Department again in my lifetime. All of this special treatment is completely temporary and sooner rather than later I will be scrambling to figure out what to do next. I knew it wasn't reality. My current reality is on the dusty edge of Tijuana in a graffiti tagged neighborhood. I had the same sensation at my first Fulbright conference in DC. As I sat in an expensive hotel listening to important people thanking me for being a part of important things, I knew I was just days away from returning to the dank, utilitarian spaces that embody the public school system where I work.

"Do you feel safe in Tijuana?" I was asked for the millionth time in DF. I still didn't know how to answer that question. I am a superstitious person. If I said "yes", I knew I would be shot dead tomorrow. Am I cowering in fear? Well no, I'm not. But Tijuana is not safe. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Everyone likes to tell you that the only people that get killed here are narcotrafficantes. What they don't mention is that these shootouts take place in very public places, in bars, streets and restaurants that are spread indiscriminately throughout the city. There is not a sign out that says: We kill people here. It seems to happen everywhere. Do I feel okay here? Yeah, I'm okay here. But I am not the bad ass that I feel like they wanted me to be. You'd have to be a freak to feel safe in a city where dead bodies have been hung from overpasses and scalped faces sewn to soccer balls.

I spent an extra day in DF in order to enjoy the city outside of conference rooms and because the floods in Tijuana weren't really enticing me to return. The rows of colonial buildings and hyper urban atmosphere reminds me of Madrid. It seemed even more beautiful than the first time I was there. It really didn't feel real. In ways it didn't even feel like Mexico. Sure, Mexican people were everywhere - I know that all Mexicans don't live like the people in Tijuana, but somehow I couldn't put it together in my head that both places could exist at the same time. In the Zocalo I caught sight of huge piles of water bottles and thought we were walking up on some sort of massive recycling project. Upon closer inspection, we discovered that people were collecting and loading water into trucks to help the relief effort in Haiti. It was fantastic and immediate and knocked me out of my self centered, overly reflective state.

Before I knew it, I was hovering over TJ again in a plane. My stomach was kind of hurting and I felt a little dread...do you feel safe in Tijuana? Do you feel safe in Tijuana? Though it was after midnight, the dread slipped away as I rode through familiar streets. Near my house, I noticed a patrolling convoy of Mexican military following a truck that sported a soldier manning a mounted machine gun. Hmmm, I thought, the beige ski masks are way less intimidating than the black ones.