A Swine Time To Visit Mexico

A Swine Time to Visit Mexico

by Michael Hogan
Vanity Fair
April 27, 2009

A friend put it best in an email he sent this morning: “You picked a swine time to go to Mexico City.”

He has a point. On arrival at the airport Friday morning for a long weekend, my traveling companions
and I were greeted by customs and immigrations agents wearing blue facemasks, SARS-scare style. We've since seen our fair share of surreal sights indicating that Mexico City’s government and citizens are taking seriously the threat of a flu pandemic: masked soldiers folding the flag in front of the empty Museo Anthropologico, police traveling from door to door to shut down every restaurant in the fashionable Polanco district on a suspiciously quiet Saturday night, hundreds of soldiers guarding the perimeter of the university, which has been closed since Friday.

But the news reports that portray Mexico City as a vast infection zone straight out of Camus don’t tell the whole story. For plenty of people, life goes on. Whether or not they choose to wear masks, there are still millions of people shopping, driving, eating, walking, and socializing. Chilangos, as Mexico City residents are known, are trying to follow the government injunctions against shaking hands and kissing cheeks, but in a town that prizes hospitality and friendliness, it isn’t always easy.

We weren’t able to see the big museos or attend any of the other huge public events we had in mind—
a lucha libre wrestling match, a show by the D.J. duo N.A.S.A. But we have kept busy, visiting a house designed by the great architect Luis Barragan, attending an opening by the artist Gabriel Orozco, perusing the stalls at the Mexican Contemporary Art fair, and eating countless delicious meals, some served by cheerful masked waiters. On Friday night, we accompanied a group of creative Chilangos to
a party at the natural history museum, where even those who had spent the day in a state of hand-washing paranoia ended up dancing until 4:30 in the morning and “breaking every rule” of how to limit the spread of the infection.

Criticize us if you will, but I think the life-goes-on approach is healthy, at least at this early stage.
The latest reports put the number of suspected cases at just over 1,600. In a city of 25 million people, those are pretty good odds. Sure, no one wants to contribute to a global pandemic but there are ways to be safe without shutting yourself in: wash your hands, don’t touch anything or anyone you don’t have to, avoid dense crowds, keep some distance between yourself and others. And use common sense: our plan to do karaoke was scrapped after we considered the chemistry of used microphones.

I can’t find much to complain about in the official government response. They’ve taken rational measures to prevent situations where one sick person could infect many thousands, but they’ve stopped short of doing anything that would unduly infringe on individual rights or create a panic. (Disclaimer: I’m officially on vacation, so I haven’t made a complete study of this.)

Whatever the government does, though, it’s bound to come under fire from various quarters. The
people I’ve met in Mexico City— mostly bilingual, upper-middle-class artistic types—grasped the Stateside public-relations fallout of this episode long before Janet Napolitano gave her first press conference. They'd already been suffering through a spate of bad press centered on drug violence—coverage most Chilangos consider grossly unfair. (They have a point: from the reaction people had when I told them I was visiting Mexico City, you’d have thought I’d chosen to spend a weekend in Waziristan.) Now they expect the flu to serve as a new pretext for whipping up hysteria in the U.S. about immigration and border security.

Sadly, I suspect they’re right. But the reality of how the virus has already spread suggests that
walls and checkpoints are essentially beside the point. Thousands of people fly back and forth
between Mexico and the United States every day, which is how it should be.

Mexico is our neighbor, both geographically and culturally. The best way to handle this crisis is to cooperate, extend a hand, and remember that we're all in this together. If we stay calm and use
our heads, life will indeed go on.