KIRO NIGHTS

Gee: A dystopian story about America and Mexico

Jan 30, 2019, 9:16 AM

Mexico...

(Jorge Aguilar, Unsplash)

(Jorge Aguilar, Unsplash)

I recently asked my Facebook friends to suggest a couple of programs to binge watch through the winter months and among the suggestions were a couple of interesting choices.

One of them was Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which is about what would happen after America’s Second Civil War. Another is Amazon’s “The Man in the High Castle” which asks us to ponder what would happen if Germany and Japan actually had won World War II.

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But then my mind drifted off, like it often does, and I started thinking of my own dystopian story.

What if…

Mexico, troubled by the things they saw in the United States, decided to deny entry to certain ethnicities. This is because a series of events suggested that they were far more likely to commit crimes against Latin Americans? Imagine a couple on their honeymoon taking a cruise. When the cruise ship docks in a Mexican Riviera port, because they’re a certain ethnicity, they aren’t allowed to enter the port town.

Trapped on their prison ship, the shunned people begin to tweet out their dismay of the situation while the American public react in many ways.

Furthermore, in my dystopian  story, only few ethnicities would also be stopped at border gates in the border states, and they’d be denied the ability to get off their planes in Mexican airports.

Pretty gloomy stuff, right?

In “The Man in the High Castle” (spoiler alert) it is discovered that a parallel universe exists, where the United States actually won World War II, and stories of this alternate truth start to scare and confuse the Germans and Japanese in the other “world.”

So then I started thinking about my hypothetical story.

What if…

In the alternate narrative of my completely made up dystopian story, Mexico decided to ban the entry to everyone who wasn’t a white male or their spouse? Would there be outrage?

This is where I struggle with filling in the details, because I know in the first incarnation of my story, there would be all kinds of outrage and backlash in the states.

What if…

Mexico gets fed up with the United States for talking about building walls, and for what they perceive as a systemic culture of discrimination against many people, including their own indigenous people, and simply close their borders and ports to all Americans.

If all Americans were shunned from Mexico, would we unite in being mad at them, or would we rally together to fix what is broken on our side of the border?

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Gee: A dystopian story about America and Mexico