Wetback Wannabes Sneak Across Virtual Border

For the first time ever, crossing the border has become a tourist attraction. Nearly 600 miles from the Rio Grande, tourists can now re-live the “mojado” experience complete with border patrol agents who shout in English, screeching sirens and the occasional gunshot.

The place is Parque EcoAlberto, an eco-tourism park located in the state of Hidalgo about an hour and a half outside of Mexico City. For the last two years, members of the Ñañu indigenous community, which runs the park, have led groups of 20 tourists on the so-called “night walk.” With over 90 percent of their community living in the U.S., the Ñañu have an idea of what it’s like to cross the border. Many of the tour guides who impersonate “la Migra” have personal experience on the U.S.-Mexico border, albeit in the opposite role. “Everything that they have lived, they show for those who come,” says Purificacion Alvarez, a 21-year-old park official. “Everything is made to seem so real that sometimes people start to cry either from desperation or just the feeling.”

According to the park’s web site, the night walk is a “tribute to immigrants, with the purpose of making others aware of what they go through to achieve the American dream….” Nevertheless, some media outlets have distorted the issue, says Alvarez. “We understand that some reports have come out claiming that we prepare people to cross the other side. That’s completely false, because here we don’t train people, we make them aware,” she explains. Alavarez hopes that visitors will leave with a better understanding of the gravity of crossing the border and the dangers migrants face along the way.

The night walk has been a financial boon for the struggling Ñañu community. Most visitors who come for the tour stay for the food, the local handicrafts and to enjoy the park’s other activities, which include hot springs, rappelling, boat rides, and archery. And that allows the community to benefit without disintegrating completely. “In other words, having a theater of the border is an alternative to having to cross the border,” explains Dr. Michael Kearney, an anthropologist at the University of California at Riverside who specializes in transnational migration. He sees the tour as a sign of how migration has become integral to the lives of so many Mexicans. “It really indicates how important this is to the people who go to the trouble to produce something like this, it implies the significance in their lives.”

In a little over two years, more than 1,200 people have taken part in the night walk, the majority of them tourists from Mexico City. Angel Lopez Flores, a 21-year-old systems analyst from Guadalajara, says he would definitely participate if he had the opportunity. “It would be exciting, the adrenaline rush, [and a chance] to see what happens to our countrymen, what they suffer through.” At 100 pesos per person, the border-crossing tour is most reasonable for middle-class Mexicans, the group least likely to immigrate in the first place. Maria de la Luz Garcia Perez, a tourism coordinator in downtown Guadalajara, sees another important draw: “Much better that you get to see it through the eyes of other people and don’t have to live through it yourself.”

So far the park has yet to receive any gringo tourists, but if you find the irony of a Mexican “border guard” yelling at you in English too much to resist, you can make your reservation (20 person minimum) at www.parqueecoalberto.com.mx.