Beyond Borders: A Deep Dive Into the Nomadic Way of Life
By Ryan Brown, Writer
Photography by: Ryan Brown
The Nomadic Way of Life
The Nomadic Way of Life
A quick glance at the map of Mexico will give you a pretty decent idea of how easy it is for outsiders to find themselves in the country. The country’s northern border is less than 20 miles from the US-Mexico border, but it’s still far from an idea of Mexico. Instead, I am often met with people who say they just ‘hiked through’ or ‘swam through’ or ‘took a tour of’ an area while on a trip to Mexico. These are people like me who have never set foot in Mexico before, but I’m told, so I ‘went around’ the country just to meet people in their own countries.
It makes sense that I, a nomadic kind of person at heart, should have a certain level of curiosity for foreign lands and people. To me, Mexico is a living breathing and changing landscape that is constantly under a barrage of new forces – both internal (economic and social) and external (environmental and social) – making it dynamic and ever-changing.
It’s this level of curiosity that attracted me to Mexico and has kept me coming back.
From the moment I arrived in Mexico, I felt as if I was discovering a place where the old world and the new world (both within and without Mexico) were somehow one and the same. It is the same thing that I feel in any country, but in Mexico, it exists to a much larger extent. Mexico is a land that is very much its own. We can’t call it Mexico for lack of a better term, but we can all agree with that. It is Mexico. And it always will be.
A land and a people that