What About My Trip
Yesterday in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, someone posted from their resort: “We are safe and sipping margaritas. Our resort is isolated but we see the smoke from the distance.”
Fourteen miles away, a woman was trying to reach her grandmother in Jalisco, the one who never left. Last heard from her two hours ago.
That morning, reports spread that the Mexican army had killed Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, El Mencho, in a raid in the mountain town of Tapalpa. Mexican special forces killed him with American intelligence support. The DEA considered him as powerful as El Chapo. Mexico showed results.
The cartel responded within hours. Burning vehicles blocked highways across Jalisco and five neighboring states. Guadalajara, a city of five million, turned into a ghost town as civilians hunkered down. Schools canceled. Buses torched. People across Jalisco received warnings through WhatsApp, moving house to house: keep your lights off, do not go outside, do not open your door. Not even for police.
Every major carrier canceled flights. At least one plane turned around mid-air. Officials reported 252 blockades across the country by nightfall, 65 in Jalisco alone.
Someone posted from home asking whether it would be resolved by April. They had a non-refundable trip planned.
A woman in Puerto Vallarta posted that day that her country was more than a vacation or a photo for the gram. “Please remember,” she wrote, “there are real lives behind the headlines.”
What about my trip.
The Design
The bubble was not an accident. It was a design decision made in 1970 when the Bank of Mexico, with federal funds and loans from the Inter-American Development Bank, began purchasing over 12,000 hectares of uninhabited coastline in Quintana Roo. The goal was explicit from the beginning: build a resort destination that would funnel American tourist dollars into Mexico without requiring tourists to encounter Mexico. Hotel zone to beach. Beach to other hotels. No reason to leave the corridor.
FONATUR, the government’s tourism development fund, formalized the model in 1974 when Cancun’s first hotels opened. The design divided the territory into three zones, tourist area, lagoon system, conservation land, and buried the workers’ city inland, far from the beach, with precarious housing and limited access to basic services. Workers commuted in from the second city to serve people in the first, earned wages calibrated to the poverty of the surrounding region, and were trained to make the guest’s experience feel effortless. The blueprint proved so profitable it spread up the Pacific coast, through Ixtapa, Los Cabos, and eventually Puerto Vallarta.
One geography. Two cities. The zona hotelera along the bay, bright and maintained and oriented toward the water. The workers’ city behind it, the one where a woman cannot reach her grandmother, where people board up windows when the fighting starts, where WhatsApp warnings move house to house like a current running under the ground the resort was built on.
The resort and the cartel do not exist on separate maps. The same structural poverty that makes resort labor cheap makes cartel recruitment easy. The same highways being burned on February 22 supply the hotels with food and linens and staff. FONATUR did not build a wall between the two cities. Walls can be torn down. It built a horizon, and everything behind it stayed out of frame.
The Gaze
In one photograph from that morning, a column of smoke the width of a neighborhood rises over the hills behind the resort. The hotels are fine. The palm trees are fine. The bay is blue.
The resort economy keeps lights on; it also keeps a second city off-camera.
There is a theory about how modern tourism works. A British sociologist named John Urry spent decades studying it. The tourist does not see a country. The tourist sees signs of a country, the beach that looks like a beach, the warmth that looks like warmth, the people who perform the role the vacation requires. Everything outside that frame is invisible by design, the poverty that built the resort, the labor that maintains it, the city behind the hotel zone.
Urry called this the tourist gaze, as socially organized and systematized as a medical diagnosis, as learned as a language. The resort does not just sell a room. It trains the eyes. It codes everything inside the corridor as the real experience and everything outside it as background. When background burns, it is still background.
On Sunday, the frame broke.
Beachgoers on a pier took out their phones to film thick waves of smoke obscuring blue ocean views. From rooftops, tourists watched military helicopters make low passes over the marina and filed videos with their followers. Several described the scene as surreal, as something they could not believe they were witnessing. A helicopter became content. Smoke became atmosphere. A city on fire became the backdrop of a story about a disrupted vacation.
One woman’s flight was canceled; the next option wasn’t until Thursday. She didn’t know what the night would bring. She just wanted to get to the airport and get home. Her fear was real. The gaze does not require cruelty. It only requires innocence: the trained inability to ask what your comfort has always cost, and who has always paid it.
Once something is framed, it is managed. The tourist watching smoke rise experienced it as something happening to their vacation, not something happening beyond the hotel zone. That morning it simply became visible.
The all-inclusive resort did not invent the division between the zone of comfort and the zone of labor. It inherited it from centuries of colonial logic, renovated it, gave it a wristband and a swim-up bar, and called it paradise. The cartel and the resort grew from the same soil. One extracts pleasure. The other extracts everything else. The tourist moves through both without having to know it.
The Mirror
There are people who spent that Sunday with a phone in their hand calling family in Guadalajara, parsing WhatsApp videos to see if they recognized the street corner, waiting for someone to pick up. Over 38 million people in the United States are of Mexican descent. Jalisco is one of the most common states of origin. On February 22, an unknown number of them watched the same smoke the tourists were filming as the city where their people live.
The English-language press knew who to call. Tourists with names and hotels and social media accounts, stranded and frightened and quotable. The people whose city it was stayed in the background, where the design had always put them.
People learn to see certain places as destinations and certain people as the staff. The lie a person accepts about someone else, that their inconvenience matters and that person’s emergency is backdrop, does not stay contained to the tourist. It shapes what gets built, what gets funded, what gets protected, and what gets left to burn.
Something leaves a person when they learn to hold the phone steady over someone else’s burning city. And they never feel it go.
The Front Desk
She kept her voice level. She kept her smile in place. She told guests to please return to their rooms. Everything was being handled.
Behind her, geometric tile in red and white running the length of the dining room floor, warm wood panels, amber light easing down from a coffered ceiling, wine glasses already set on tables for a dinner no one would eat that night. The whole room engineered for a particular quality of ease, the kind that does not ask where it comes from or who built it or what is burning outside the glass entrance behind her.
She was trained for this, not for cartel violence specifically, but for the larger task the resort requires: whatever she is carrying stays out of the guest’s experience. Her fear is not part of the package. The resort paid for the smile that keeps all of it out of frame. The guests paid for the resort.
Nobody asked if her family was okay. The smoke was in the background. The drinks were complimentary.
She had been paid for that smile. Paid to carry her fear somewhere the guests could not see it, and to make the carrying look like nothing.
A woman in Puerto Vallarta posted that day asking tourists to put their phones down. Ask the staff how they are doing, she said. Ask if their families are okay. She said it from inside the country. While her city burned.
The tourist gaze was trained into people. The selfie was still a choice.
What about my trip.
Notes & Sources
The Event (February 22, 2026)
Mexican army kills El Mencho in Tapalpa, Jalisco — cartel unleashes wave of violence across Mexico:
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/mexico/jalisco-new-generation-cartel-leader-killed-rcna260184
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/02/22/mexico-cartel-leader-killed-oseguera/
White House press secretary confirmed U.S. provided intelligence support for the operation:
Guadalajara turned into a ghost town — public transport suspended, schools canceled across multiple states:
Cartel set vehicles ablaze across nearly a dozen Mexican states; smoke billowing over Puerto Vallarta, people sprinting through the Guadalajara airport:
Air Canada suspended flights to Puerto Vallarta; American Airlines waived fees for customers traveling to Guadalajara or Puerto Vallarta:
U.S. Embassy warned citizens to remain in safe places in Jalisco, Tamaulipas, Michoacán, Guerrero, and Nuevo León:
The Design
FONATUR founded 1974, Cancun construction began 1970, absorbed 21% of Mexico’s federal tourism investment by mid-decade — master plan deliberately separated hotel zone from workers’ city:
https://ijhss.thebrpi.org/journals/Vol_3_No_8_Special_Issue_April_2013/2.pdf
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/how-cancun-grew-into-a-major-resort-146194/
“The city’s planned segregation of the hotel zone from the support city serves to imprint the front-of-the-house/back-of-the-house paradigm of the tourist industry onto the city’s geography” — Project MUSE academic analysis of Cancun’s design:
FONATUR’s all-inclusive mega-resort model and its social and environmental consequences — Florida Institute of Technology / CREST academic report:
The Gaze
John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (1990, Sage) — tourists are trained to see destinations through socially organized frameworks that render the labor economy behind them invisible; Sage Publications publisher page:
Academic analysis of Urry’s tourist gaze framework — Tourism Geographies journal, Taylor & Francis:
Urry’s 1990 paper “The Consumption of Tourism” — Sage Journals (Sociology):
The Mirror
38.8 million U.S. residents of Mexican birth or ancestry — Migration Policy Institute, 2024:
People of Mexican origin are the largest Hispanic group in the U.S. at approximately 40 million as of 2024 — Pew Research Center:
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