Editor’s note: This story first appeared on palabra, the digital news site by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
By Julie Schwietert Collazo
The moment when I knew we’d made the right decision about our kids’ education came in an email inviting parents to sign their kids up for a visit to Mexico City’s National Anthropology Museum.
But this was no ordinary field trip. Students would ride in a double-decker bus from the school to the museum, accompanied along the way and at the museum by luchadores from Mexico’s Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL), who would talk with students about mujeres guerreras and the history of women warriors in Mexico’s diverse Indigenous cultures.
This, I thought, was the education I didn’t even know I wanted for my children.
My only complaint was that parents weren’t invited.
***
I was in Mexico City for a work trip on May 14, 2022, when 10 Black people were murdered at a Tops Supermarket in Buffalo, New York. (Three others, two white and one Black, were injured.) Ten days later, a shooter entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 students and two teachers, and injuring several others. On the day of the Buffalo attack, my Black, immigrant husband was at home with our three children in New York City. When we spoke that night, I posed the question, “Why do we voluntarily remain in the United States? Why,” I asked him, “Don’t we return to Mexico City?”
To be able to ask that question entailed privilege for sure, privilege that isn’t available to many people who worry about violence. While our family is lower middle class in the United States, it would become upper middle class if we moved to Mexico, affording us even more protection. The question of moving also raised concerns among family and friends who worried about violence in Mexico.
I wasn’t naive about that violence, nor other problems in Mexico. Along with my husband, who came to the U.S. as a refugee from Cuba, I co-founded
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