It's a fact that the Canadian and American press seem to relish in depicting Mexico as a very dangerous place filled with despicable individuals who will not hesitate to rob you blind or beat you up. Overtime, this unfair depiction has tainted people's opinion of course. That horrible place is NOT the Mexico that I know and love. I find this 'dirt campaign' very disturbing - because for every terrible story you hear on the news about Mexico, there are 100 beautiful ones which the press won't bother telling you about. So I decided to tell you the stories that shaped my opinion of Mexico - and Mexicans.
November 1985 - I was 21 years old, working in Cancun, which was still in the early stage of it's booming development. I was there on my own, and at the time I only spoke French, very little English, and I was learning Spanish fairly fast because people could not really speak English with me. I was the Public Relations for Royal Tour International, a corporation from Madrid who had just arrived on the coast to get their share of the booming Cancun tourist market. It was a dream job for me, which I had found 3 weeks after I landed. I had made some friends at the youth hostel, mostly Mexicans from various parts of the country, and there was an amazing culture developing with the local community. We were all helping each other - and if someone was looking for a job, or an apartment, furniture, etc. - the word would spread in a jiffy and amazing things happened which allowed many, many people to settle there in the early days. Like many others, that's how I found my job and eventually, my apartment as well.
So one day I was working at promoting our 'overbooking' rates to other hotels (so that overbooked hotels would send us their guest overload - which the overbooked hotel paid for) and I was in the area called Zona B - the newest hotel developments ( most of them not yet open to the public), and pretty far from downtown. I took a taxi to the last hotel in the zone, and I walked my way back from one hotel to the other and met the various managing team members. The hotels were sometimes up to 1km apart in Zona B at the time. When I finally got to the last one and finished my business, I was very much looking forward to going back to my home hotel just in time for siesta, and jump in the pool. Again, Zona B was new, with many construction sites, and very few taxis were going that far from downtown.
So as I walked out of the last hotel on the strip, I was delighted to see a taxi - and simply got in and instructed the driver on my destination. We didn't chat much along the way... I was tired and hot and didn't feel like making conversation. When we finally arrived I systematically asked how much I owed - and he turned to me with a big smile and said 'Nothing miss, I'm not a taxi' (his car was dark green, like all Cancun taxis at the time). I could not believe it. ' What? Are you serious? You just drove me all the way down the coast... you should have told me, I would have radio'd a taxi' (yeah... we used a CB to do that in 1986...). Still with a smile on his face, he said that he had plenty of time, and it was a good deed on such a hot day. We had a good laugh... what a funny story! He would not take money either. I thanked him for his amazing kindness, and he wished me well.
And this is one of the many stories that shaped my opinion of Mexico, and Mexicans. Stories of kindness and generosity.
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