Running from Migra at a Mexican Park

We’ve been chronicling our planet’s slow but steady descent into a vast collection of theme parks, from the theme park economy at Cambodia’s Killing Fields to our news item yesterday about Myanmar’s theme park temple complex. Just when we think things can’t get more absurd comes a Houston Chronicle story about a park in Mexico that simulates the experience of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, on the run from migra. Visitors to the park north of Mexico City pay $15 to slog through bogs, ride in a truck and hear the sounds of gun shots and the shouts of immigration officers.

Writes Marion Lloyd of the park and its “chief smuggler,” Alfonso Martinez:

Residents of El Alberto, a Hñahñu Indian village 120 miles north of Mexico City, know the dangers. Most of the townspeople—up to 90 percent, by local estimates—have ventured across the border illegally. And like most of the town’s 2,500 residents, Martinez is a veteran.

He nearly died after he got lost in the Arizona desert in 1999 and readily concedes that the tours are far from realistic.

But, he says, “They let people get a glimpse of the suffering that migrants endure.”

He also uses the tours to educate visitors on the plight of Mexico’s 10 million Indians, who are often treated as second-class citizens by the country’s mixed-race majority.

“The colonizers stole everything but our soul,” said Martinez, who blends philosophy with off-color jokes during the mock crossings.

Patricia Ávalos, a computer technician from southern Campeche state, joined him for a trek on a recent Saturday night.

“I want to experience what my people suffer,” she said before setting off from the village’s main church. “I don’t plan to cross, but at least this gives me an idea of what it must be like.”

©2026 World Hum, All Rights Reserved