Cariño, the Heart of Mexico

First impressions came at me quickly as I stepped off the plane and into the Mexico City airport. It’s always exciting to visit a foreign country and a capitol city, one of the world’s great cities in this case, a metropolitan area of more than 22 million people. My excitement matched the moment, though it took a few minutes for the speed of it all to slow down and for me to settle into all the newness and strangeness of it: the language, the music, the colors and art and movement of people. Sights and sounds so different than the airport in Chicago where I had been just a few hours earlier. 

I was in Mexico for my work with The Olga Lengyel Institute (TOLI), as a Holocaust educator and trainer of teachers. With the TOLI team, I would be helping deliver a week-long seminar for teachers from across Mexico at the Museo Tolerancia y Memoria, a beautiful, powerful Holocaust museum in Mexico City. Though I was there as a teacher, even a teacher of teachers, I felt I had to be there first and most as a student: it was my first trip to Mexico, and I had so much to learn about the people and places I would meet and visit for the next week. To teach the teachers of Mexico, I had to be open to learn. 

With colleague and friend Irvin Moreno-Rodriguez, Director of the Stockton University Sara & Sam Schoffer Holocaust Center

Though I had never visited Mexico, the experience wasn’t completely foreign to me. I had learned Spanish well enough to live in Spain and take a semester of classes during my junior year at Kalamazoo College and to help lead a digital storytelling workshop at a university in Costa Rica ten years ago. And though the Spanish of Spain and Costa Rica are very different than the Spanish of Mexico, I had been able to learn and practice the Spanish of Mexico on and off for a couple of years with colleagues, students, and families when I worked for Fennville Public Schools. Like many school districts and communities in West Michigan, Fennville is rich with families who trace their roots back to Mexico, whether it was generations ago, or families more recently arrived, or even families who travel between Mexico and Fennville every summer to help provide the necessary labor for area farms and orchards. So, once I caught up with the speed of it, speaking the language was like visiting an old friend. 

But as a country we don’t always treat Mexico as an old friend. Frequently we hear talk of Mexico in the news, often as a bogeyman, cast in the negative light of a fear-based political agenda. As part of this agenda, we have heard national leaders talk about Mexico and its people in ways that range from ignorant and dismissive, to downright dehumanizing. More recent stories in the news about Mexico and its people are even worse: racial profiling by federal officials and law enforcement, illegal detentions without due process, even downright harassment of people based on language, culture, and even skin color. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I interacted with the people I would meet traveling to Mexico. Would the tension and the hostility of the situation in the United States be a problem for me as an American in Mexico? Would I encounter tension, even hostility, myself? 

It turns out the answer was of course not. Instead, I encountered cariño, the heart of Mexico, in every person I met. 

Cariño is the cultural value of caring that is as ubiquitous and free flowing in Mexico as the smells and sounds of the food stands offering carne asada tacos and tortas for a dollar’s worth of pesos in the Parque de Bellas Artes, or the sight of colorful papeles picados strung along a restaurant ceiling and moving in the wind of a ceiling fan. 

Cariño is the belief that we should treat each other well in this world not for any reason other than the fact that we are here together, each one of us and all of us, as people who share this world together. Cariño isn’t Midwest nice, fakery, or false flattery. Its power is in its simple authenticity: taking just an extra moment to genuinely see and regard another person by looking them in the eye, sharing a smile or a warm word of greeting or gratitude, laughing together over some chance thing, or wishing that person a beautiful day and really meaning it. 

Market Stall in Mexico City 

On the phone with my wife after my first day in Mexico, I struggled to describe my experience of cariño—how moving it was to feel that the people I encountered truly wished me well as a fellow human being. It was something so simple yet difficult to put into words: I felt like everyone I met genuinely cared whether I was happy and content. I told her how lovely it was, and how much I wished we all experienced this kind of warmth in the places we call home. 

I understand that my experience in Mexico City was only a few days, and Mexico, like the United States, and every other nation on earth, can't be summed up after a few short days of limited experiences. Mexico, like the United States, has plenty of examples of the opposite of caring and compassion: it can be downright dangerous and deadly in Mexico like it can be in rural West Michigan. But that doesn't dismiss or diminish what I was experiencing in this metropolitan area of 22 million people. What I was experiencing, the quality I recognized as cariño, was real.

I thought of the difference between cariño, caring for other human beings, and the dehumanizing politics of fear, especially of immigrants. It was then I remembered a family I had worked with as a school administrator when a single mother of two young children, then a seventh-grade son and a younger daughter, relocated to the school district from their home in Mexico because the mother was doing what I would do, what any of us would do, when it comes to the safety of our children. 

The family came from an area of Mexico where drug cartel violence was always a threat but had become a very specific threat endangering her son. Young teenage boys like her son were often recruited by the cartels to join them, to work in the drug trade, and when recruited, saying no was dangerous and could even be deadly. So, when her son was in the sights of the cartel, her motherly instinct kicked in and she got her children out of Mexico to the safety of the home of a relative in West Michigan. They came to the country legally, on a short-term visa, but remained in the country after the visa expired. When I got to know them, they were in the country illegally, on an expired visa. But returning to Mexico meant returning to immediate danger, so they didn’t return. If it were my son, I wouldn’t either. 

And I would hope that I would find refuge in a country that had compassion and a sense of protection, even obligation, for the safety and well-being of a young person. Sadly, this is too often not the case. In fact, we’re seeing the opposite, the zeal of those who demonize illegal immigrants like this mom and her kids without knowing them or understanding their plight, to throw vulnerable people into cruel conditions of incarceration (Alligator Alcatraz?!) or to deport them into deadly danger. 

A sculpture outside the museum in Mexico City captures the angels and demons of our human nature.

I do support border security and the legal process of immigration; I also support the tradition of refuge and asylum. We don’t have to choose between one and the other. But we do have to choose whether we are a nation of compassion, or one of cruelty, whether we dehumanize others or look for the divine spark in every human being. 

It is too much to ask for cariño as a national trait in the way I see it in Mexico – our country values different things, efficiency, profit, individualism, for instance – things that make a national culture of cariño impossible, at least at this point in our national history. But cariño is not impossible in our individual lives, in our everyday interactions, and in the way we look at and look to treat the humans we come into contact within our communities. 

I would much rather build my relationship with my neighbor, any neighbor, be it a bordering country or the family next door, no matter their situation, on caring and compassion rather than fear. It has been fear for far too long. 

It’s time for us to try cariño.