To post a positive post about Mexico City in a social network
2 days ago I shared this on threads:
The post got viral. While, as you can see, the most showed to appreciate, I received a lot of attacks and bad behaviour from some people.
Through this post I answer all the accusations, of people who show they don't even know what they're talking about.
Am I middle-upper class and live in Polanco?
No. I live in a popular neighborhood (barrio) of the north side of the city. To be precise, I live in a modular unit of over 400 apartments. Our neighborhood like many in Mexico City is a huge place where there is not just a class of people, but a mix. The hood is divided by from the railway that separates in half, the “residential” side and the popular side. I live in the part considered residential, but in the modular unit that is different respect to the privately owned houses that border us.
I am not rich. I am a professional photographer. My wife is historian and giving private Italian classes online. Sometimes I earn very good, sometimes I don’t. This requires me to always be on the ball, working 7 days a week. Of course I am free to manage my time since I work for myself. It is often still a battle. If it were not, maybe I would have a Leica and maybe I would go and live in Oaxaca as I have long dreamed. At the moment the earnings are able to support my family in daily life and that is all.
Since the accusations have spoken about how I move around the city: I, unlike probably these negative commentators, take public transport. Even the microbuses that have long been feared and avoided.
It would be enough to observe my work to understand a little more about me. I am not a rich man who does colonialist photography. In fact, certain people in the photographic environment really piss me off.
The accusation of gentrification
This one made me laugh. Because it shows how people talks using terms that don’t know the meaning. Gentrification refers to the process by which urban neighborhoods experience a transformation characterized by an influx of more affluent residents and businesses, often leading to increased property values and the displacement of lower-income residents. For example, in the United States, gentrification occurred in Brooklyn when wealthy white people displaced black people from their neighborhoods, causing rents to rise and making it impossible for longtime residents to continue living there.
The idea that an Italian, the only Italian living in my neighborhood, is gentrifing is absolutely ridiculous. To clarify I have the permanent residence here and I am married with a Mexican woman.
I'm not minimizing and I'm not exposing people to danger
Which city in the world has no risks and no crime? There are cities in the world that are dirtier and more dangerous. And anyway, it all depends on personal experience that cannot influence the general discussion. 30 milions of inhabitants is a miracle that is not worse. In Rome (Italy) that people never travelling (not touristing) think is like Vacanze Romane the movie is dirty. It is a city, the capital of Italy with a lot of crime and decay. And currently there are gangs of pickpocket in the subway, as documented by Cicalone, a famous youtuber.
When the New York team came here to interview me in 2013 for my Leica work on assignment they were amazed how the city is clean and not smelling bad like NYC.
The most stupid comment
Anyway, the award for the stupidest comment came from a guy who said "if you're poor you live like shit" and I wanted to respond with a very Italian, or rather Roman, phrase: E GRAZIE AR CAZZO. If you're poor you live like shit, tell me where it's not like that, idiot!
The political context in Mexico generates this band of frustrated people
The political conflict, however, generates many of these comments. Supporters of old parties that had power here through corruption continue to want to highlight all the bad things that are in Mexico. Which certainly are there but mainly generated by the parties that they still continue to support. Fundamentally right-wing parties that oppose the left in government.
Conclusions
Could I have avoided publishing this post? Sure. But I'm tired of idiots venting even under a post that is only positive about the city I've lived in for 15 years. I did it as a man who is truly integrated here, who in many ways already considers himself Mexican. And I did it with the spirit of a photographer who is giving workshops here and who takes his students to photograph in the center and nothing bad has ever happened. We go with often expensive cameras. I even take some photographers to the second block of the historic center. Do you think I'm crazy or are my students crazy?
This idea of Mexico City being extremely dangerous is also registered outside the capital in Mexico itself. Recently, even those in Guadalajara have shown this idea, but it is precisely a narrative that often, very often has no basis in reality. If it were true that they kill us so easily, we would not have been thirty million for a long time, right?
Preconceived ideas only generate hatred and the ravings of fanatics. If what they say were true, even living in nice and exclusive places, there wouldn't be this current migration to Mexico from the United States. Stop to think and talk like certain no-btrain politicians currently presidents of countries or upcoming new preseidents, believing that the narco cartels exist here and the drug when crossing the border flies: of course there are are cartels in the US, but nobody is talking about that.
Stop to think as the maninstream wants because the mainstream is created (by being purchased and paid) by the system.