Image via YouTube.

Illegally crossing the border that separates the United States and Mexico is an arduous journey that claimed the lives of over 400 people in 2013 alone. In a town outside of Mexico City, International tourists and native Mexicans can endure the excruciating experience with an intense simulation that only seems too outrageous to be real.

Vocativ teamed up with MSNBC to highlight an experience that I refrain from calling a tourist attraction. Simply something that sidles so closely to human hardship can hardly be labeled with such a seemingly innocuous term.

However, there it is. Roughly two hours outside of Mexico City and 500 miles from the U.S Border sits El Alberto, a town that features the Caminata Nocturna, or Night Hike.

While its aim may be a bit cloudy the service is all too specific, offering a realistic look at crossing Mexico’s northern border illegally:

With gunshots, screams, and emotional reactions, it almost seems like a darker more sinister version of a Mud Run, an event that is far more about exertion and jubilation. And perhaps that’s where my original thoughts were founded.

You see my initial gut reaction was that it was rather obscene to take a vacation immersed in the plight of illegal immigrants, enjoying a simulation whose theme is based on travails that kill hundreds annually.

Being a Mexican-American with American-born parents, and someone who has known only the comforts of an American home, I am far too removed too offer more than a mere simplistic sentiment.

Digging further, the Caminata Nocturna offers something that is far more complex than a seven-mile trek offered at $10 a pop (via LA Times). In the end it is a far more polarizing issue than you would find from a video that punches you in the gut with shock and disgust.

The Los Angeles Times’ Reed Johnson, in a 2008 report, offered a more in-depth and nuanced look at the experience that has been offered since 2004 by the town’s Hñahñu Indians.

The business, which highlights the ultimate human gamble, is aiding a community that itself is struggling with extreme economic hardships.

Johnson writes to the impetus behind the Caminata Nocturna:

“They created the Caminata as a cooperative business to help compensate for the collapse in the last generation of the local farm economy from crops of tomatoes, corn and chiles. As in many parts of Mexico, mass migration from this area began in earnest in the 1980s, when Mexico's farming sector went into decline. Since the late 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement has further aggravated Mexico's job losses as small farmers have been driven under by competition from industrial farming.”

Now some might think the simulation is a training ground for future migration, a worry touched upon in Johnson’s report.

But it seems, and this may be naivety rearing its head, that empathy is the true intention of the experience, giving some semblance of the horror that actually comes with deciding to cross the border illegally.

In the video, Israel Yllescas offers a profound note on a harrowing expedition: “I felt sadness. I felt anger at times. I do know a lot of people who have crossed the border, and they need to go through hell. If people knew this before, many of them wouldn't do it.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Johnson’s report from 2008.

The reporter spoke with Marcelo Rojas, a biologist from Mexico City, who endured the simulation. Rojas himself offered that he knew three people, “that went and didn't make it, that wanted to cross the desert. They died there.”

Where some might initially see a fictional escapade others that are closer to the issue see a possible deterrent.

Johnson writes, “But Rojas said he hoped that the experience would encourage Mexican participants not to invest all their hopes in migrating northward. Better, he suggested, that more of them should stay and fight to improve conditions at home.”

Vocativ states 445 people died in 2013 from attempting an illegal crossing. The New York Times puts the number at 463 for 2013’s fiscal year.  

No matter the number the obvious dangers are a known commodity to those who take the gamble in heading north.

Whether the Caminata Nocturna is an institution of intrigue, education, or empathy is yet to be answered. By helping the local community as well as sating dark human curiosity, organizers produce a polarizing adventure that runs the spectrum of opinions. So perhaps the practice has even more in common with the illegal immigration dilemma than previously imagined.

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