MEXICO CITY — A man in all black shouts, “¡Tatuajes! ¡Perforaciones!” (“Tattoos! Piercings!”). An elderly woman clutches a rosary as she exits a church. A man with one shoe sleeps on a bench while a businessman in polished loafers sips his coffee on a call. Nearby, street performers squeeze accordion melodies into the air as children chase floating bubbles. This is Mexico City, a sprawling urban beehive, where the students of Professor Rubén Martínez get their first taste of the country.
The city resembles what Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once described as the Aleph: a “place on earth where all places are,” an intersection where everything happens at once. It’s no coincidence that Martínez, professor of English, Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University, assigned this reading to his students before the trip. For the past four years, he’s taken them to experience the Aleph in person.
This year’s trip took place June 7-14, and students who take “Engaging L.A. and Latin America” or “Mexico City / L.A. Comparison” have the opportunity each year to join the weeklong excursion in June with an additional $1,000 lab fee that covers flights, accommodation and most meals. The trip, now a part of LMU Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts programming, was originally led by Fernando Guerra, professor of political science and Chicana/o Studies, who passed it off to Martínez in 2021. Though it lasts just a week, it takes months of planning and coordinating with other staff, such as Victoria Martinez from the Pam Rector Center for Service and Action, to organize flights, hotels, and the itinerary.
For Professor Martínez, the program is personal. Both he and his father lived in Mexico City at several points in their lives, and as a young journalist, Martinez covered the city’s music scene. Many of his close friends today still live there and he knows the city intimately.
“I’m sharing part of my own life,” he said, when describing the trip.
Many of his students have friends, family or history in the city as well. For computer science major Alberto Martínez, a visit to the Torre Latinoamericana was especially sentimental, as he found out his grandmother used to work in the building. At the top of the towers’ 44 floors, he sat with the group in quiet admiration of the cityscape. He later described how it was surreal to see what his grandmother saw when she was his age.
To read and discuss concepts is one thing, but Martínez encourages his students to connect with the material of his classes on a personal level. Since 2007, he has built a reputation at LMU for his love of experiential, hands-on learning, and his students note the difference in his teaching style. As English major graduate Colette Kane put it: “I’ve never learned that much in my life. I felt like this trip renewed my faith in education and academia.”
The group explored historical sites, like the Museo Nacional de Antropología and the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacán. At an indigenous fair in Chapultepec Park, they sampled traditional foods from various regions across the country, learning new cultures through food. They toured major universities, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and Universidad Iberoamericana (IBERO), where they attended professors’ lectures and walked through graffiti-covered campuses where slogans criticizing government corruption reflected a student movement familiar to both sides of the border.
But exposure to the local student movement wasn’t just limited to the universities. One of the most powerful moments came at Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the site of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. After reading about the government’s violent crackdown on student protesters, students stood in the same square where it happened, under the shadow of a stone monument that listed the names and ages of the victims. Many of the victims were the same age as those visiting.
“I was drawing parallels between them and us,” said Marissa Cueva, a Chicana/o Studies and screenwriting graduate. “In some ways it was disheartening … And yet, at the same time, I felt less alone.” In the unusual silence of the square, alongside two local students who stood in quiet remembrance, the group experienced something a textbook seldom provides: not just reading about history, but feeling it.
For Cueva, who is Mexican American, and others, the trip had a lot of significance. “It gives the opportunity to those who have heritage in Mexico to visit and experience the big city that they may otherwise have not,” she said. “And for those who don’t have heritage, it opens them up to what Mexico really is, apart from just resorts and beaches, apart from the media portraying Mexico as bad or dangerous.”
Programs such as BCLA’s Mexico City trip are an opportunity for young academics to learn from the world around them and deepen their understanding of a country intimately connected to their own. “Taking students across that border, the higher and higher it gets, the more important it becomes,” explained Martínez.
In a country where anti-immigrant rhetoric runs deep, it is critical that students have a chance to see Mexico beyond the headlines and decide for themselves what it’s really like, because as the Aleph reminds readers, there is always more to see the closer one looks.
