As we boarded the plane to Houston, on the way to Cuetzalan, Mexico for a summer research project, a woman in front of us said, "Y'all are crazy for goin' to Mexico. I live near Brownsville and things are gettin' so bad down there."
I didn't mention that I'd spent the past semester in Xalapa, Mexico, and had come back with little more than bug bites.
On the one hand, I understood her concern and the concerns of so many people I talked to, many of whom offered the advice, "Don't get killed by the cartels," before I left for Mexico in December of last year. After all, between 35,000 and 40,000 people have been killed as a result of what the media calls the "drug war."
On the other hand, talking about Mexico as "the failed state next door," as an October 2010 Baltimore Sun editorial put it, didn't quite square with my experience in Xalapa. In fact, there was only one major shooting incident in the five months I lived in that city of around 600,000.
Was I just lucky to make it back to the U.S.? I don't think so. It's true that there is violence in Mexico. However, I think we're getting a very different picture of it here in the North.
Take, for example, the cnn.com headlines covering an Aug. 25 event. At 11:25 p.m., "At least 40 killed in Mexico grenade attack." At 5:42 p.m. on Aug. 26, the death toll is corrected and we get a generic location: "52 killed in attack at Mexican casino."
What are we missing? The specific location of the attack. It may seem like a nit-picky detail, but I think the resulting effect is serious.
With headlines like, "Gunfire erupts near Mexico stadium, sending soccer players fleeing" and, "Gunmen fire into crowd outside Mexico school; 1 man killed" (cnn.com, Aug. 22 and 24, respectively) you get the idea that the entire country is a war zone.
In a world created by these headlines, Mexico's Gulf Coast is its Pacific Coast and the border with Guatemala is the border with the United States and it's all overrun by cartels. A federal district amid some 32 states is collapsed into a single, violent mental image. It's true that Ciudad Juárez and Mexico City are often mentioned in headlines, but they're the exception rather than the rule.
This universalization of Mexico creates an image of all-out war that just isn't accurate for the country as a whole. It's true that some states are dangerous. Mexican friends warned me to stay away from the border and parts of the Pacific Coast, for instance. But I don't think that's enough to declare the whole country a failed state, war zone or lost cause.
The effects are more local than we might initially think. My study abroad program in Xalapa, for instance, is seeing fewer and fewer applicants every semester because of the fear — not the fact — of local narco-violence. Other programs have already shut down or moved. The loss is ours.
Mexico has its problems, but it also has more than two millennia worth of cultural heritage (including hundreds of archaeological sites), a spectacularly diverse and, in my experience, warm and welcoming people and natural beauty rivaling that of anywhere else I've been.
If nothing else, do yourself a favor next time you skim the headlines. Click those links and figure out not just what's going on, but where it's going on, too.
— Holley-Kline is a senior from Anchorage, Alaska majoring in Spanish and anthropology. opinion@thedepauw.com