I think my adventure started when I was about 16. I was at a big state comprehensive school, and was the only person I knew who had a Latin American parent in my conservative, English town. I did my EPQ on modern art made across Mexico between 1920-1934, focusing on post-revolutionary community and state building through public-facing and accessible artworks. It gave me a space to approach art history as a discipline from an ‘untraditional’ avenue. It also gave me a space to tap into my bicultural and bilingual childhood that I hadn’t really found an opportunity to do elsewhere.

Since then, going to Mexico was a constant but distant desire. It was the biggest goal I could ever come up with. Truthfully, it felt like a concept that wouldn’t happen all the way through booking my flights, roughly planning my movements between cities across the country, packing my things, all by myself. At the airport before leaving, I was still unable to grapple with this abstract notion that I was ‘going’. My brain couldn’t really comprehend this challenge

Less than 24 hours later, I was in front of Chichen Itza, one of the 7 Wonders of the World. Less than 48 hours later, on the back of a scooter going through the jungle of the Yucatán peninsula, exploring the underground cenotes and sinkholes. From here on, I spoke and immersed myself only in Spanish, surprising myself at how comfortable I felt speaking the language I forever understood but had not started properly speaking until my later teens.

Across Yucatán, exploring the cenotes and archaeological sites like Ek Balam, which I climbed by myself, was encountering a definition of adventure and wilderness that I hadn’t really thought capable of myself until then. To swim in an underground sinkhole, the exact same spaces the Mayans treated as sacred portals to the underworld, was so electric and sublime. The sublime is a feeling I always encounter when I go into nature, as I never really explored the natural landscape as a child. To do so in southern Mexico exacerbated that feeling beyond description.

It was one of the slower, quieter moments in the first couple days of my trip where I recognised my fulfilment. With the 3 other ladies who I’d made friends with in my hostel, as a break from touring the cenotes, we passed through a Mayan town. We stopped, walked in the blistering heat, then found a board with a menu written on it above some plastic tables and chairs on the side of the road. We sat down, chatted a little with the cook, and had one of the best meals I’ve ever had. We ate in silence, I think all slowly absorbing where we were, what we were doing and how grateful we were to experience a glimpse into the colloquial life of this jungle town and how it compared to our own lived experiences.

After this, my friends who I had made left; I was alone in my hot hostel room for the next few days. In the coming week, I had organised a community-facing work experience where I would lead a multi-day lino-printing workshop in Tabasco, in the gulf of Mexico, to a community disenfranchised due to environmental disasters. However, due to unforeseen circumstances with the artist I would be assisting, this opportunity fell through at the last minute.

After this unexpected interruption I felt disappointed and directionless. I questioned what I could actively do to fix this. One thing I felt I was missing out on was the engagement in contemporary art making, and understanding the power of different mediums in responding to the needs of different areas in Mexico. Within a gap of a week looming, I spontaneously booked 4 days in Oaxaca.

In Oaxaca, I visited contemporary art galleries in painting, printmaking in the historical centre, and artesanal textile families in the countryside. One of my favourite moments was taking a woodblock printing class in the centre at a printmaking collective’s studio. It was so fulfilling to learn the technique of woodblock printing so key to Mexico’s modern history and methods of political and cultural power and resistance, the very medium I had studied in my EPQ. Additionally, it was invaluable to discuss the implications of contemporary Oaxacan art as political commentary with one of the collective’s leaders. Conversations like these, alongside the art I saw and made, will definitely influence what I see as a possible career for my future, and what priorities I have for my last year of studies in the Cambridge History of Art department.

My last stop, Mexico City, greatly contrasted the beginning of my trip. I was no longer in the jungle but in an incredibly diverse, and thankfully colder, city. The art of CDMX was astounding, so diverse, and angered me, actually, that I hadn’t encountered such a rich palette of work because of Western exclusions in our education systems. I visited multiple modern and contemporary art galleries, and older cultural sites, communicating in my Spanish more comfortably than I ever have before. I attended a silversmithing workshop to again further my understanding of the forms of art and culture being made in the city in the present day. Undoubtedly, engaging with these works and art forms will influence my academic and practical approach to the arts.

I was in CDMX during the fervour of Independence Day celebrations, and I was there during the anniversary of the September 19th earthquakes of 1985, 2017, and 2022. Because of this, the city’s pavements are lined with cracks and gaps, and the buildings tilt. In one of the museums I visited, I accidentally attended a live performance of an anarchic-cumbia Mexican artist who was using her practice to honour those impacted by the earthquakes. For me, it was September 19th walking around Mexico City as a tourist; for some of the people around me, it meant a lot more, and I was privileged to feel and learn about this local sentiment.

It’s so strange; I’ve now achieved the biggest goal I could ever think of. Solo travelling Mexico has built my confidence across multiple types of urban and natural landscapes, and has let me engage with contemporary art and culture in a wholly new, and truly influential, way. I think most importantly to myself, and rather unexpectedly, navigating the whole trip in Spanish let me tap into a side of my identity that I haven’t built the space to engage with back home. This trip was fundamentally life changing for me, and its impacts won’t stay just in the month I was there, but will influence me indefinitely.