Alien world: how treacherous border crossing became a theme park.

• Author: Zaitchik, Alexander
• Position: Culture and Reviews

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

IT'S A LITTLE before 10 p.m. when I climb into the back of a pick-up truck full of crouching young Mexicans. We're in the lush Mezquital Valley just outside Ixmiquilpan, a dusty strip town cramped with car part shacks and taqueria stalls a couple hours' drive north of Mexico City. The late-model GMC is scheduled to take its cargo--10 of us--north toward the Sonora-Arizona line. After the drop-off starts a treacherous pre-dawn border trek past armed U.S. patrols and the ranged, baying beasts of the desert wilds. Tonight we escape Mexico. El Norte or bust.

The truck is still idling when a young girl in an L.A. Dodgers jacket loses her nerve. "I'm worried about snakes and coyotes," she says in a quiet voice. "There are rattlers in the mountains. My brother said the little green ones are also poisonous." This is the first I've heard about poisonous snakes since signing up for this adventure.

"The clouds are no good," adds someone else. "We won't be able to see anything."

"Like the snakes," says the girl in the Dodgers jacket, her voice softer than before.

It's just possible to make out the faces of the group in the faint moonlight. These aren't the frightened, soiled migrants captured on green-lit night cams for network news investigations into "America's broken border" Not yet, anyway. These would-be migrants wear Diesel jeans and John Deere mesh caps, nose studs and gelled emo haircuts. Like me, each has paid $125 for two days of camping and a midnight "border crossing" experience in central Mexico. The staged run, 700 miles from the real U.S. border, covers a bruising adventure course that winds through the valley and is riddled with muddy riverbanks, bristly thwap-you-in-the-face brush, and jagged mountain passes.

The course is also flecked with gritty and realistic dramatic accents. Men in U.S. Border Patrol T-shirts bark insults in broken English through megaphones. Women and children are tossed into Border Patrol vehicles and driven off into the night. M-80s stand in for shotgun fire. Then there are the female screams in the distance, a soundtrack of rape.

It all adds up to the world's most elaborate simulation of the Mexican migrant experience. One much safer, and about $3,000 cheaper, than the real thing.

On my night as a hunted migrant, the Caminata Nocturna ("Night Hike") was celebrating its fourth sell-out year under the direction of Mexico's leading purveyor of domestic meta-tourism, the Alberto Eco Park in the central Mexican highlands. The park was founded in 2004 by indigenous locals known as the Otomi in an attempt to staunch the flow of their working-age population, 90 percent of which has migrated to the United States over the last two decades. Faced with the extinction of the local community and culture, a...