Wait, Why Are You Here Again?

So I was watching television when one of the commercials urging people to visit Sonora, Mexico came on. As the images of white sand beaches, of shopping centers set in centuries-old plazas, of huge platters of authentic Mexican food, and of fun-loving Caucasian couples dancing beneath the stars to the music of a mariachi band played before my eyes, I couldn't help wondering why exactly people in Mexico choose to visit Arizona.

We are not California: we do not have top-tier shopping or huge amusement parks or Hollywood or a beach on the ocean, for that matter. We are not Texas, which is rich in a Mexican-American blended culture and actually has its own amusement parks and quite a bit of shopping opportunities. Even New Mexico boasts a culture heavily-influenced by Mexican culture, their balloon festival, the testing site of the atomic bomb, and the strong possibility of having extra-terrestrial contact (or at least learning about it at Roswell).

So I went searching for reasons to come to Arizona. I started out at the Arizona tourism websites, but everything seemed so contrived and forced that I started looking somewhere else: YouTube.

I figured that if I wanted a good example of what people actually do when they visit Arizona from Mexico, the best place to look would be a place where they could post videos of their trip.

Well, I didn't find any video posted by people from Mexico, specifically, but I did find a few videos of a woman from Coast Rica who visited a family living in Arizona. However, since they posted three videos, all from different visits in different years, I figured that I would get a good sense of what people do when they come to Arizona. Here are the videos:

From 1997



From 1999



From 2002



In all of the visits, she visits the Grand Canyon. She also visits couple of the other national parks in Arizona and goes to the state universities. And she sees cactus.

I am not sure how accurate this portrayal of Arizona tourism is--I mean, she didn't even golf--so I will keep my eyes open for other reasons to cross the border into Arizona.

In the meantime, though, come to Arizona, where you can see the Grand Canyon. And cactus.

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All of the video is courtesy of the user craigkepner on YouTube. The URLs for the videos are http://youtube.com/watch?v=KmTBwWzM6KY (1997), http://youtube.com/watch?v=1OHi9WDOSLg (1999), and http://youtube.com/watch?v=sF6uuCdWMKg (2002). Check out craigkepner's profile at http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=craigkepner

Do You Know the Way to...Nogales, Mexico?

I made my first trip down to the border this semester on Saturday. Actually, it wasn't just my first trip this semester; it was my first trip down to the border since I was about ten years old. My family preferred the Pacific Coast and places where we had family for travel, so we never went down to Mexico, or much further south than Tucson, for that matter.

I figured that since I would be covering the border this semester, it would be good for me to at least see what it looks like and how I would get into Mexico, if I was so inclined. So I grabbed my camera, my passport, and my friend, Meredith, and went down to Nogales for a quick afternoon trip.

The first thing I noticed was that shortly we got onto I-19, all of the distance signs were in kilometers, not miles. It wasn't a particularly eventful trip down there; the road wasn't overrun with Border Patrol agents or anything. In fact, I was rather disappointed.

We finally began the winding descent into Nogales, and as we went around one curve the city opened up to me and I saw the houses on the surrounding hills. We made our way down to the main city street, so we could park and walk around. There didn't seem to be any traffic laws as people just walked into the street at random and as I saw several cars blatantly run red lights. Blue and white school buses drove people from their parking lots down to the border.

We parked and headed down to the inspection station. The area around the border was teeming with Border Patrol agents, some in SUVs, some on foot, and some on bikes.

We didn't plan on actually going into Mexico, since our time was limited and we couldn't actually see the end of the line of the people trying to get back into the United States, but the "low battery" light started flashing on my camera, and I figured that there must be some place to buy a lithium battery in Nogales, Mexico, since it does get a lot of tourist traffic.

So we crossed.




The first thing that struck me was that while there were easily 30 Border Patrol agents, at least, in the area, watching who entered the U.S., there was on Mexican border agent, sitting on a metal folding chair behind a collapsible banquet table, "watching" the people who came through.

We had barely stepped out of the inspection station and into the border when a jovial man in a yellow shirt came up to us, asking us in perfect English, "What do you need? I have everything you want: Valium, Oxys, Percocet. What are you looking for?" Obviously, the people of Nogales know that college students are coming and they know what they want. I looked up and down the street and noticed that most of the buildings I saw were pharmacies. I replied that we were just looking for a place to buy a lithium battery for a digital camera. He directed us to another, larger pharmacy across the street, making us promise to come back to him if we decided that we needed anything.

In our short trek to the pharmacy, we were stopped by three other men, all asking us what we needed and listing their prescription wares. Yes, the people of Nogales have our ticket. We begged them off and made our way into the pharmacy; they didn't have lithium batteries and the employee there said that there wasn't an electronics store nearby, so we headed back out into the street.

We wandered around Nogales for another thirty minutes, being stopped by another four men offering us prescriptions. After shaking them all off, and with my battery completely dead, we decided to head back to the United States.

We got into the line, which moved surprisingly quickly. As we waited in line, people offered to sell us gum and suckers. The Border Patrol agent glanced at my passport and waved me through.

We got in the car and left. The drive back to Tucson was considerably more exciting as we saw a couple of Border Patrol SUVs and had to go through a Border Patrol checkpoint, which again, we were waved through with the agents barely looking at us.

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All photos taken by the author.

For information about crossing over to Mexico, check out "¿Passport Preguntas?" on Border Beat, http://borderbeat.net/story/show/28, or visit the Border Patrol website at http://www.cbp.gov/.

Tucson: Because It's Closer to You Than Any Other American City

Ever since my family moved into our house in Phoenix six years ago, my dad has been wanting to paint on the flat roof messages to people in airplanes who fly over our house. What exactly he wants to write on the roof sometimes fluxuates depending on what's going on in the world; it can range anywhere from "United We Stand" (right after 9/11) to "Down with the B.C.S." (generally every year from when the B.C.S. bowl announcements come out until the games are played). However, the one phrase that he keeps coming back to is "Spend Your Money Here."

While not the most eloquent welcome message to potential Arizona tourists, my dad's blunt message gets the point across for which so many visitor centers aim. The Metropolitan Tucson Convention & Visitors Bureau has taken the general idea and molded it into an invitation to come and see all that Tucson has to offer.

According to the Bureau's website, over 22 million travelers cross the border to visit Tucson and of the $1 billion spent in Arizona annually, they estimate that Mexican visitors create $360 million in economic impact in the Tucson Metro area. (Photo at right: some Mexican tourists.)


The Bureau has wised up to the spending power of Mexican tourists--and wised up to the statistic that just over 30% of Mexican visitors spend their money in Tucson--and have made efforts to attract more visitors from Meciso and to make their visit to Tucson easy and pain-free.


On their website, they offer a special section for Mexican tourists. Generally speaking, the only difference between this pge and the other page is that the one geared toward Mexican visitors is written in Spanish (though some of the accommadation information is still in English), including the descriptions of various Tucson attractions. The section also includes specific information about how to get to Tucson from Mexico and the distance from Tucson to large Mexican cities and other U.S. border towns.

However, perhaps the biggest indication that the Visitor Bureau is trying to get people to Tucson is that they opened up a visitor center branch in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico.

Mexican tourists have a lot of spending power in Tucson, enough to really affect our economy. So next time you're sitting, watching the new "Grey's Anatomy" and a commercial for visiting Sonora, Mexico starts, before you start to groan about how immigrants are sending enough of our money over the border, so U.S. citizens shouldn't be expected to go down there and spend even more, realize that chances are some Sonora citizen is having her telenovela interrupted so she can hear even more about getting over the border and into Tucson.

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For more statistics on Mexican people visitng Tucson, check out http://www.visittucson.org/static/index.cfm?contentID=765&Reset=0#mexico

The first picture is courtesy of http://www.solucionesamericas.com/

The second picture, of the Mexican tourists in Tucson (really!), is at http://www.cuc.udg.mx/eventos2003/Mayo/visita-anual-tuxon-17may/index.html

The third picture is a print screen of the Tucson tourism website for people from Mexico: http://www.visittucson.org/static/index.cfm?contentID=5&Reset=0

Is "Ole" Replacing "Rah" as the New Football Cheer?

I was watching one of the several pre-game shows before the Super Bowl on Sunday, and they were showing a montage of the playoffs. As I listened to the statistics being rattled off and they players being named as impacting the game, it struck me how many Mexican-American players had a huge impact on their team this season: Tony Romo in Dallas, Jeff Garcia in Philadelphia, and Roberto Garza in Chicago, among others.

The Mexican-American representation made me wonder about how much attention the Super Bowl would be receiving in Mexico; it is the most-watched show on earth, but have our neighbors to the south embraced it? The immigration influx has brought parts of the Mexican culture into American society, including their sporting preferences; soccer's popularity has even started to rise in the States, with soccer-games being televised on an increasingly frequent basis, and not just on the Spanish-language stations. So do Mexicans watch the Super Bowl?

According to an article printed in the Boston Herald, about 20 million people are expected to watch the Super Bowl in Mexico and, for the first time, a soccer match was not scheduled to be played at the same time as the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl will also be shown at 13 movie theaters in Mexico City.

And there are even signs that the excitement is not just because of the size and importance of the championship game; in the 2005 season, a game between the Arizona Cardinals and the San Francisco 49ers in Mexico City, the first NFL game played in Mexico, drew 103, 467 fans to Estadio Azteca to watch the game. The Cinemex movie chain also broadcast Monday night games throughout the season, drawing nearly 14,000 fans.

Football games have been broadcast in Mexico for almost 40 years, so people remember the glory days of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Chicago Bears, and the Dallas Cowboys, but what Mexico is seeing now is a relatively new popularity boom. Like an American visiting a European country going to see a soccer match, when Mexican people visit America they are going to sporting events, like football games and basketball games, and taking their newfound interest in the sport and teams back home with them.

While some people talk of how the Mexican culture is infiltrating the United States, there needs to be a realization that the cultural flow is going both ways; while Americans are slowly starting to pay attention to the World Cup, figuring out what a yellow card is, and understanding why people are upset when Adolfo Bautista misses an easy shot, Mexicans are starting to go to NFL games, figuring out what first and ten means, and understanding why Rex Grossman was such a hot debate.

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For the full article from the Boston Herald, go to http://patriots.bostonherald.com/otherNFL/view.bg?articleid=180859

The Tony Romo photo is from story.scout.com/a.z?s=114&p=2&c=556350 and the Roberto Garza photo is courtesy http://www.robertogarza63.com/

The photo from the Cardinals-49ers game in Mexico is from http://www.nflatino.com/noticiacompleta/index.php?news=200510022048

For more information about the NFL in Mexico, check out http://www.nflatino.com/inicio/index.php