What Does Frida Kahlo Have to Do With the Bay Area? I Found Out in Mexico

I’m riding a bus across Mexico, through the craggy, mountainous roads of Veracruz and the arid states of Puebla and Tlaxcala, into the not-so-photogenic outskirts of Mexico City’s megasprawl. It’s not my first time rolling along this specific route. For years, I’ve caught redeye flights from Oakland, landing in the Mexican capital at an ungodly hour to eat street tacos, then zagging over to my family’s hometown in Xalapa, near the Gulf of Mexico’s humid coastline.

Seeing this place each time is comforting: the indigenous fauna, the highway vendors with baskets of potato chips and homemade tortas, the nearby peak of Perote, and, on the clearest of afternoons, the Pico de Orizaba, Mexico’s tallest mountain and an active volcano. I’ve known this landscape since childhood, through my teenage years as a college student, and into my young adulthood as an aspiring wanderer. Even now, as a father with a skittish, open-eyed toddler at my hip, this still feels like home. Mexico’s warmth — its literal heat, but also its figurative embrace — has never failed to deepen my appreciation of being wholly American. My consciousness has been shaped by living, and observing how others live, on both sides of a contentious U.S.-Mexico wall. Being here is an unavoidable reminder of who gets to represent “America” and of what reality looks like for so many residents of this vast, complex continent that extends far beyond any singular politic or government entity.