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Mexico on My Mind
By Elizabeth Wade
In just a few months, if all still goes as planned, I'll begin studying comparative literature in Mexico City on a Fulbright Scholarship -- after having spent the past year working at a New York public health organization, tracking stories like the ones about deadly swine flu now covering newspaper front pages.
Mexico, and particularly its megalopolis of a capital city, is no stranger to bad press north of the border. Now that the country has emerged from seventy years of corrupt one-party rule, Mexico City (or D.F. for distrito federal) is mostly known in the U.S. for its overwhelming air pollution, crippling poverty, powerful organized crime, devastating natural disasters, frequent kidnappings, E. coli-contaminated water, and, most recently, swine flu.
But as with any other major city, D.F. is much more than the sum of its horror stories. During my undergraduate years, I spent six months studying at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and grew to love the vibrant chaos of a city that felt as big as Los Angeles with streets as bustling as those in New York -- a surreal merger of my two hometowns. More than 20 million people live in D.F. more or less peacefully, if not always happily.
I will admit, however, that swine flu makes me more than a little nervous. As a healthy person in her early twenties, I have never seriously worried about dying from a disease -- a fact that certainly helped me work at a public health organization with calm. But, frighteningly, young people like me are the prime targets for swine flu in Mexico.
This eerily echoes the flu pandemic of 1918, in which young people dropped like flies when their healthy immune systems overreacted to the infection, filling their lungs with fluid and essentially drowning them. It is a strange reversal to be more worried about the health of my young friends in Mexico than that of my landlady Juanita, who is about to turn eighty-nine. So whereas we in the U.S. are used to taking extra care with nursing homes and hospitals during the flu season -- places for the elderly -- Mexico closed all of its schools, from daycare centers to universities, all across the country. Restaurants and movie theatres advised people not to go to work in Mexico City but reopened the week of May 6.
Like other schools, the UNAM was closed for over a week, and all of the stories on the school's homepage are still about the flu and how to avoid it. The school closures raise many other questions for the daily lives of Mexico's citizens: Will high school and university students be able to graduate on time (and will I be able to start my semester)? How many parents were forced to stay home to care for their children while the schools were closed? How many people stayed home just because they were frightened? And how many people who were unwilling or unable to get to work over the past week will lose their jobs?
It makes me a bit sick to think of the shared keyboards I touched in Internet cafés and school libraries there now crawling with swine flu virus. But it makes me far sadder to think of empty metro cars and deserted streets in a city where normally you can never escape a crowd...of bands playing to non-existent audiences at my favorite concert venues...of the street markets closing, putting vendors like the woman who sells tamales across the street from my apartment out of work...of Juanita having to listen to mass on the radio instead of taking the bus to church on Sunday.
Thinking about returning to Mexico during the height of the drug war had already made me decide that I was not going to cancel my plans out of fear. And since it is still months before my departure from the U.S., the worst I can probably expect from the swine flu outbreak is an annoying delay in getting my student visa. But I hope the city I love is the one I will be going back to, not one marred by the fear that your next handshake and welcoming kiss on the cheek might be your last.
Elizabeth Wade is a research intern at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org).
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