Re-enacting Border Crossings

I have no idea what to conclude about a Mexican theme park — Parque EcoAlberto — that has people re-enact migrant border-crossing for recreation/education.  Maybe I need more information?  Patrick O’Guilfoil Healy of the New York Times writes in the travel section:

The idea of tourists’ aping illegal immigrants can seem crass, like Marie Antoinette playing peasant on the grounds of Versailles.But the guides describe the caminata as an homage to the pathimmigrants have beaten across the border. And the park’s approach toconsciousness-raising is novel, but not completely unique. In 2000, thehumanitarian group Doctors Without Bordersset up a camp of tents, medical stations and latrines in Central Parkto recreate the setting of a refugee camp. Last year, the refugee-campproject returned to New York and also traveled to Atlanta and Nashville.

The full Times story is here. It seems to me that the analogy to the refugee camp reenactment is imperfect.  The refugee camp re-enactment was meant to raise awareness of people in various U.S. cities who had probably not thought sufficiently about the plight of the world’s numerous displaced persons.  But the migration reenactments seem (at least in this article) more like a Disneyfication of the migration process.  The participants seek amusement, and the article makes it clear that the reenactments paints a rosy picture of migration.  Moreover, by focusing on the physical — and easily reenacted — process of border crossing, the reenactments obviously do not attempt to educate the participants of the many and varied consequences of laws criminalizing migration.  In many ways, it is those larger lessons that are the more important lessons “about what [undocumented] immigrants go through.” These reenactments seem to put border crossing in a practical and legal vacuum, and I’m just not sure how educational that could possibly be.

-jmc