Tourism With a Message

They came for reality, and this is what they saw: toxic dust from an abandoned Tijuana factory swirling downwind into a sad, sick shantytown.

They came for reality, and this is what they heard: a young Mexican woman explaining that she earns $4 a day assembling typewriters for an American firm.

They came for reality, and this is what they felt: the sensation, as one of them put it later, of their hearts and their minds expanding.

This was a vacation, but a most unusual one. These 20 men and women paid $450 each for a three-day tour through the slums of the Mexican border. They paid for a vacation they knew would depress them, in the hopes that it would also inspire them.

“I came,” said Jim Long, a 49-year-old Bay Area engineer, “to rediscover my revolutionary spirit.”

This is the world of the “reality tour” as envisioned by Global Exchange, a San Francisco nonprofit organization that has made a $1-million-a-year business of carting tourists to some of the world’s most woeful places.

For the last decade, reality tours focused on overseas heartache in countries such as Cuba, Haiti, Guatemala and Vietnam. Then, last year, co-director Medea Benjamin realized that Americans could use a reality check in their own backyard. “We decided,” she said, “to start looking at ourselves.”

The result is a new series of trips exploring the social ills that vex California. They’re vacations, in essence, through all that’s uncomfortable and ugly in the Golden State--or just over the border.

The tours’ success coincides with a national surge in demand for offbeat, educational vacations. “Sitting on the beach, that’s for the minority today,” said Jerry Mallett, president of the Adventure Travel Society. “People want to learn about their surroundings.”

Even in this market, however, reality tours stand out. Most educational trips are built around recreational adventures or foreign travel. “The challenge is getting people to pay to look in their own backyards,” said Joel Mugge, co-director of the Center for Global Education at Augsburg College in Minnesota.

Benjamin was doubtful that people would rush to, as she put it, “pay money to see toxic waste.” Smiling with pride and a touch of awe, she added: “But they do.”

They pay to see oil drums oozing poison slime in a beat-up San Francisco neighborhood. To meet garment workers sewing at all hours in miserable conditions. They pay to tour apartments with flaking lead paint. Strawberry fields that are soaking in pesticides. Tijuana slums that are crowded with men desperate to jump the border.

And why not? Sounds like a perfect vacation to Neal Blumenfeld.

A hard-smoking Berkeley psychiatrist in tattered straw hat, Patagonia jacket and “Save the Fish” T-shirt, Blumenfeld digs this kind of conscience-raising tourism. “I’m caught in a Berkeley 1960s time warp,” he said.

The trips have attracted hundreds more: students and senior citizens, singles and couples, scientists and librarians, teachers and artists.

Some come looking for easy answers: Should they buy a TV made in Mexico, or are workers there being exploited? How can they tell if their favorite T-shirt was stitched in a sweatshop? Should they boycott strawberries?

Others come seeking personal redemption. “I’m here to see how much damage I’ve done as a capitalist,” said Virginia Barker, a commercial real estate broker from San Francisco on a one-day tour of environmental injustices in the Bay Area.

Then there are tourists like Napa high school student Navek Ceja, who seems bewildered that anyone would question why he spent three days with his Amnesty International chapter visiting Tijuana slums to understand what drives so many Mexicans north. He’s only 16, and to him, the reason is obvious.

“There’s so much to do,” he explained with crushing sincerity. “I want to help.”

Frustration Amid So Many Problems

In fact, reality tours don’t offer many hands-on chances to help. Participants don’t build homes for the poor, as they would on a Habitat for Humanity excursion. They can’t even roll down the windows of their tour bus to toss change to the glazed-looking man on the corner holding a rumpled cardboard plea: “Need Help. Hungry. Have 2 Kids.”

No, these are not feel-good trips. The issues they raise are frustrating. The problems they expose are infuriating. It’s exhausting just to keep up with the group; itineraries often run from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., and at night leaders hand out articles to read by morning.

In short, these trips are hard.

“They’re like a college course,” Long said.

Which is precisely why they’re so popular.

Consider the experience of Doug Mosel, a 54-year-old health care consultant from Oakland.

He took a day off last fall for an “Ecological Faultlines” trip through the Bay Area. By the time the tour bus stalled with a flat tire at 5 p.m., he had learned about exploited garment workers in Chinatown, toured a toxic waste dump in the Mission district, strolled around a dilapidated neighborhood crammed with 56 places to buy liquor, visited an industrial plant that was the site of a hazardous spill, talked to community leaders fighting a waste incinerator and heard from a woman who said she could never get anyone in authority to listen when she complained of poisonous chemicals seeping into her basement from the abandoned factory next door.

“Today has been a series of downers,” Mosel said.

But he considered the trip worthwhile because it nudged him along on his personal mission: “To figure out what to do with the last half of my life.” Seeing such aching poverty strengthened his resolve to cut back on material possessions. Talking to such dedicated activists inspired him to seek change in a society he considers corrupt.

“This is a real antidote to the hopelessness I sometimes feel,” Mosel said.

Most participants on reality tours are well informed about the issues they will encounter on the trip. Still they sign up, sure that seeing the truth for themselves--or, better yet, talking with people on the front lines--will enhance their understanding. Usually they are right.

Although she had read widely about illegal immigration over the years, nothing prepared San Francisco graphics designer Kina Sullivan for her encounter in Mexico with four men hoping to sneak into California.

She heard a first-time migrant say he trusted in God to keep him safe and trusted in Americans to treat him well. She heard a veteran border jumper in a Cleveland Indians cap joke about the peanut butter cookies the Border Patrol serves to those who get caught. She saw the border fence, touched it, peered through it toward the United States.

Immigration no longer seemed an abstract issue. Now it had texture. Now it had a face.

“It feels so personal,” Sullivan said.

Seeking that emotional connection to the news, tourists of all ages have filled reality tours such as “Getting the Dirt on Lettuce” and “Getting Real About Criminal Justice,” which includes conversations with prison inmates and visits to halfway houses. At prices ranging from $30 to $525, the tours have proved so popular that Global Exchange has expanded its offerings from 14 trips a year to 20.

The trips can be physically and emotionally draining, but the tourists don’t have to rough it.

Participants tool around battered neighborhoods in comfy vans, eating chocolate espresso beans and organic pears. They pile out to tour a ragtag labor camp or to hear a local activist explain her struggle to clean up a sewage-swamped beach. Then they climb back in the vans and pass the trail mix.

This kind of tourism could come across as patronizing.

Sometimes it does.

Jaime Cota, a Tijuana labor organizer who picks up an extra $75 now and then driving vans for the border trips, said he bristled when early groups stormed into his city acting “as if they were conducting a sociological experiment.”

Voyeurism vs. Concern

Organizers have since reminded tourists to be more sensitive, not to treat local contacts like exhibits in a zoo, Cota said. He now welcomes the chance to discuss his work with visiting Americans and to get tips on labor issues brewing up north. But still, he senses a shade of condescension: “It’s easy to come here and say, ‘Oh, poor Mexicans, we’re going to help you, we’re going to solve your problems.’ ”

To fight the image that they’re just voyeurs parachuting into trouble spots for a quick look and a cluck-cluck of dismay, organizers encourage tourists to swap ideas with the people they visit.

That approach can backfire. UCLA student Stacy H. Lee, for instance, said she felt as though her Global Exchange group was “objectifying” immigrants by surrounding them at the border and bombarding them with questions while cameras clicked. “It was like, ‘Oooh, look, you’re migrants,’ ” Lee said.

But on other trips the interaction works. A group of Bay Area high school students on a border tour chatted with workers outside a factory, hung out with Tijuana teenagers at a YMCA and talked for an hour with several wretchedly poor Mexican families living in shacks built of wood scraps, bedsprings, plastic sheets and discarded garage doors.

To the students’ amazement, their questions were not just tolerated but welcomed.

“I felt strange, I felt awkward, I felt pretentious and obnoxious,” said Zoe Duskin, a freshman from a private San Francisco high school. “But once you get past that, people are pretty accepting. Maybe you are 15 years old and asking about their wages, but you’re there because you care.”

Eight months pregnant, a young Tijuana woman named Corine confided to the high school students her fears about giving birth in a muddy shantytown with no power, water or sewage, no cars or dependable bus service, no hospital for 13 miles. As the sobered students walked back to their vans, promising to send what supplies they could, Corine’s husband told them they had done much already. “More than anything, the moral support you give is important,” he said. “That means a lot, because no one else listens.”

Tour leaders hope their clients won’t long be satisfied with just listening.

An Attempt to Change Lives

Their goal is to spur these tourists to action: lobbying lawmakers, perhaps, or writing letters to the editor. Joining human rights groups. Attending rallies. Or maybe changing buying habits so they purchase only union-made goods.

As Global Exchange program coordinator Fabiola Tafolla told a group: “We’re committed to this work because we hope it’s going to--it has to--change your lives.”

Because Global Exchange has a decidedly liberal bent--the group organized a much-publicized boycott against Nike and publishes books with such titles as “Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama”--the trips’ calls for action tend to lurch left too.

Organizers say they push hard to include all viewpoints in their trips. Participants may meet with farmers opposed to a worker union drive, for instance, or with loggers furious about increased protection of the spotted owl. But group leaders usually make their own opinions quite clear. “It’s biased, frankly, toward the view they want you to adopt,” said Arlen Kennedy, 62, a retired teacher from Foster City who has been on two California trips.

Even so, participants don’t necessarily walk away vowing to dedicate themselves to liberal causes.

“Does this mean I won’t buy a toy [made in Mexico] for my grandchild?” asked Blumenfeld, the Berkeley psychiatrist, after hearing workers complain about harassment at foreign-owned factories in Tijuana. He lit a cigarette and answered with a sigh: “I’ll probably still buy the toy. I’ll just feel guilty about doing it.”

San Mateo arborist David Brubaker, 38, felt just as conflicted at the end of a border tour focusing on trade issues. “I thought I knew a lot more where I stood,” he said. “The trip answered a lot of questions, but it brought up even more. I’m not going to come to a conclusion for a long time.”

That reaction, tour organizers say, is not only common but commendable.

As long as people remain confused, they will keep thinking about the issues and groping for solutions. And that, in the end, is the point of a reality tour. “People probably go away from these tours more frustrated than ever,” Global Exchange leader Jorge Hinjosa said. “They think, ‘My God, it’s even harder than I thought. It’s even more complicated.’ But that’s reality.”