Who am I?
I’m a student at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, studying communications. Nowadays a person must be engaged at all times with media and technology, if you disconnect for awhile you will be left alone in the 21st century society. Every day I use media, on the road to get to school and whenever I have a free period I check on my newsfeed and social media apps for updates.
Media to me has always been part of my life. In my daily life I use instant messaging to communicate to my friends and family and whenever I forget my phone at home I feel disconnected from the world because I’m not aware of what is happening in my surroundings. The migration problem that is more latent in my country is the Mexicans, Central and Latin American citizens migrating to United States, though this situation is very unfortunate, the government of my country would rather not to talk about that since it’s an issue that damages their image. Not a lot of people know about what the migrants have to endure during their journey and others sadly just don’t care. In the city there are a lot of migrants that after looking for a better way of living have stayed and, if they were lucky, have now a business they run and earn money from it, though in most of the cases these people are still hoping to find a better situation for their lives, the only migrants I’ve met are the ones with successful stories, I never used to be worried about them until the last couple of years when I found out under which conditions they were living and it shocked me. Now I try to create awareness to close people to me, that the migrants are not outsiders but human beings.
To me one of the most meaningful communities is my class from highschool of 2015, I grew up with them since I was 5 years old, while we were growing up the digital era developed along with our lives and therefore we were a privileges community who would be able to watch TV, listen to the radio or watch a movie whenever we would want to, we became used to all kinds of media. When we started middle school we started creating our own personal judgment and realized what the media portrayed wasn’t always true. Migration has never affected our community directly, because usually all the migrants go around the city. Normally the media never represents migration that is been present in America, the way for finding out news about that is to surf online sites. But still as a community and social service we would create presentations to exhibit the journey of the migrants to everybody else at the school to create awareness.
This personal narrative was written at the 2016 Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change. It exists as part of a digital publication called MOVE which aims to educate readers on the social, political, and cultural impacts of global migration. All stories published in MOVE were created at the 2016 Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change by students and faculty from around the world.
