By Miguel Murado

IN MEXICO there’s a theme park where you can experience how it feels being an illegal immigrant trying to cross the US border. You pay 150 pesos and you’re allowed to join a group of urbanites disguised as “espaldas mojadas” who spend the night in fear, running away from fictitious US border patrols that chase them with dogs, cars and blank-cartridge loaded guns.

While Disneyland, just across the border, is about experiencing the realisation of the American Dream, this other theme park is about experiencing how hard it is to attain that dream. Some are scandalised at this trivialization of a human drama, and they might be right. But I see some sort of symmetrical logic between these two places, and I’m not sure which one is worse; if any of them is bad at all.

All is a fake, in principle. Eco Alberto, that’s how the place is called, is not even close to the border but more than a thousand miles inland, at a village with the medicine-sounding name of Ixmiqulpan. Not all is as false as it seems, though. Ninety per cent of the Ixmiqulpan population has already crossed the border and live now in Las Vegas. The owner of the theme park himself crossed five times, yet somehow ended up this side of the border and decided to gather the few locals who didn’t succeed in their crossings either and they set off to make some profit out of their failure.

Because it is them, those men who once were captured and deported by the US Border Patrol, who now play the role of the US Border Patrol in their theme park. As I said, not everything is a fake. Baudrillard, the French philosopher who died a few days ago, surely would have enjoyed this perfect example of “simulacrum”, a personal obsession of his. For Baudrillard, the whole World was a theme park, only more expensive and less funny, and he might have been right about that.

But maybe there’s more truth to this simulacrum than Baudrillard or those who criticise it might think. A hundred and fifty pesos is not that expensive (it’s around 10 dollars). Who knows; maybe one of these tourists pretending to be migrants is in reality a migrant pretending to be a tourist and, hidden among those who are just looking for an adrenaline shot in their boring lives of businessmen in Mexico D.F., he secretly trains to turn the simulacrum into reality.

(Miguel Murado is a former Middle East correspondent and current political analyst for the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia)

Miguel Murado
La Voz de Galicia,