This photo to me represents a fantasy image of Mexico I think many Americans have been brought up with. And the fact that I have a photo of it shows that, at least to some degree, the image is representative of real-life Mexico.
But when you travel a bit and learn about people's lives—The makeup of their government, the culture they are born into, the options available to them, you start to understand that this image, this reality, doesn't represent Mexico. It represents life as most people lead it. Well, a heck of a lot of people, anyway.
In the U.S., it's very easy to shelter yourself from the millions of fellow citizens who are in fact poor. But unless you travel through parts of the country that don't offer "points of interest", you'll rarely see what struggling people go through every day. In the U.S., people that are considered poor are represented as caricatures on TV, and where else do we form our impression of the world? In Mexico though, as in many other countries, the poor make up a huge portion of the population, so it's harder to keep them hidden. Or rather, easier to be exposed to them. Or easier to be one of them.
I'm not sure if I have a point to make. But you have to at least admire the ingenuity and general attitude of so many people who can get by alright with so little. They walk out of the house with clean clothes, they have friends, they work hard, they go on vacations, they raise families. OK, here's a point: maybe as us Americans start considering what we need to do confront global warming or to be involved in a healthy social world order, we might reconsider how dearly we hold our exceptionally high level of daily comforts and the global costs of protecting them. Maybe a few sacrifices wouldn't kill us after all.
In any case, I just think it's a cool picture.
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