Mexico was epic.
Leave your preconceptions at the door (I didn't). Let the American media hype be damned (I did). And dare to venture beyond the Yucatan peninsula (done and done). And so, with a two week Easter Holiday we started in Mexico City, took the public ADO bus (more on this later) to Puebla, boarded another bus to Oaxaca three days later before boarding a flight to Huatulco and spending five days on the coast at Zipolite Beach. With one day left to go, we returned to CDMX and took in all (or at least a few) the sights, smells and panaderias we didn't have time to during our first stay.
It was love.
And I know the country has issues: crime, kidnappings, drug cartels. But we were met with: pedestrian-only Sunday streets in the capital, carbohydrates dipped in carbohydrates, incredibly kind people.
Mexico forced me to consider my identity. I'm not the only brown kid who was born and raised in America. I'm not the only brown kid whose parents expected them to learn the language in school instead of speaking it to them at home. And i'm certainly not the only brown kid who grew up in middle America desperately wanting to blend into the blond whiteness of everyone else around them.
Herein lies the drama of growing up in the USA, where minority is less than on so many levels. But this is not a space for my political ranting. My point is that I didn't have a framework to consider the goodness, uniqueness, antiquity of my own ethnic background. I knew bits of it--food, some spanglish, some traditions; but Mexico was not a place we travelled to as a family and so it was easy to believe the stereotypical hype. My bad.
This trip has been a game changer.
