South of the wall: Living in Mexico as an American under Trump
Mid-margarita and a few blocks from my host family’s home, a drunk, middle-aged man ran up to the table my study abroad classmates and I were dining at and shouted, “Your country is fucked!”
That’s what I call a welcome. This happened during week one of my study abroad in Oaxaca, Mexico. Since then, almost two months have passed and I’ve learned the treatment of Americans bounces between two extremes here.
The first, a simple nonconfrontational shout or prod at the way you look or dress. The second, when you’re forced to tread cautiously down the street as police in full body armour and military-style outfits give you unnecessarily long glances as they drive by in their souped-up trucks, armed at all times with automatic weapons.
This hasn’t always been the case.
In late January, when President Donald Trump released modified immigration regulations that would send every person detained on the U.S.-Mexican border for being in the country illegally back into Mexico, things changed south of the border.
With Trump’s ethnocentric viewpoints constantly in play, and an extreme lack of foresight in Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s rejection of the regulations, the Mexican government was driven to action.
It had to secure its country from an influx of people living in the country without permission, most of whom were being pushed south from the United States, out of Trump’s sight and mind.
For Americans living, or in my case studying, abroad in Mexico, this means more security and more questions of legal residency. Especially during Trump’s first 100 days of “bettering” the country as fast as humanly possible.
A turning point came for me, as an American in Mexico, when my normally self-assured professor barged into the middle of cooking class last week. Something was clearly amiss. Here was my American college professor, who’d been travelling to the state of Oaxaca for more than 15 years, interrupting class. My classmates and I slowly gathered around, unsure of what he would say next.
“I usually wouldn’t interrupt, but I’ve been told this is an emergency,” he said.
The director of our school had warned him of a crackdown on people living in Mexico illegally, especially those from Central America, many of which had most likely been apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border.
For the eight of us, that meant there could be checks for legal Mexican residency at any time. We now had to carry our passports, the physical book itself, not just a shameful copy, with us 24/7, something we were expressly told not to do before leaving for study abroad
If called out by local police or federal law enforcement, we were expected to comply. If stopped without a passport, I could be fined or worse – deported. Something a student really doesn’t want to be worrying about when legally residing in a host country for the allotted 180 days.
It’s a simple feeling I never thought I’d experience. It’s a feeling I share with the families torn apart at border crossings by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents – fear. Fear of deportation.
The question and the fear remain on both sides of the border, for people legally and illegally present in a country. Is it a matter of simply proving your identity to avoid deportation, or are there other reasons why American students should be concerned about studying south of Trump’s giant, imaginary wall during his first 100 days?
