What safety actually feels like in Mexico City after five years
The first thing I noticed was not a headline. It was the motorbikes. You sit at a light and they come through the cars as if the gap were a lane. I had come from London, and from holidays here where the rule was windows up and never stop at a light after dark. That is a vacation brain. It treats every junction as a test.
People ask about safety before they ask about residency. They ask it as if Mexico City were one place, and as if five years would produce a single verdict. I have a view. I do not have a score.
The figures sit in our guide to the safest cities in Mexico to live. This piece is only what it has felt like.
What I was afraid of before we came
The headlines. The kidnappings you read about. Crime series on Netflix that I had actually sat through, which is a stupid way to learn a country and also, at the time, a hard one to unsee. You tell yourself you know it is television. You still take the atmosphere of it into the airport.
Then there was a story that was not television. A relative of my wife's, who had been in politics, was kidnapped. It lasted a day. That was enough. I carried that into the move more than I carried any map. Headlines are general. A family story is not.
I was not arriving as a tourist. I was arriving with my wife, to live. That changes which story you remember.
The things that turned out not to matter
The holiday rules. Windows up. Do not stop at lights at night. I arrived with that as a kind of kit, the way people arrive with a money belt. It depends on where you are, and I am not going to pretend every junction in this city is the same junction. I do not always do it now.
The motorbikes are still there. They are part of the traffic, not a plot. What receded was the sense that every light was the scene I had been rehearsing. You can spend a first month treating ordinary movement as a threat. It is exhausting, and it is also, after a while, inaccurate for the life we were actually living.
The country I had watched, and the city I was driving through, were not the same scale. That is experience talking. It is not a claim about the rest of Mexico. The other article is honest about the states we would not use. Read it.
The car
I am more on alert driving than I am walking in the neighbourhoods I would actually walk. I think about everything when I am in the car. On foot, in those places, much less. I will not name them. Knowing which neighbourhoods I would not go to is part of living here, in the same way it was part of living in London.
That is the inversion. In London I treated the street as the problem, not the car, and not a restaurant. Here it is the other way round. If you asked me to point to the hour in the week when I am still paying attention, I would point to the driving, not the pavement.
What changed about how we live
I stopped stressing as much. That is the honest change, and it is a dull sentence until you remember what I arrived with.
I dropped the holiday kit. Not everywhere, not as a dare. I still pay attention at night, and I still pay attention in the car. I do not perform the whole ritual at every light the way I did when this was a vacation.
I did not swap it for a new system. I just live here. The stress I dropped was the kind you bring from a screen, and from other people's stories. The attention I kept is the kind you keep in a car in any large city, including this one.
What I tell friends who ask
I tell them I feel safer in Mexico City than I did in London. I know which neighbourhoods not to go to. That still applies in London. In the neighbourhoods I would walk here, I feel safer than I would in London.
I tell them to ignore the headlines, and to ignore the version of Mexico they have from a crime series. I do not need to name the shows. They know the ones I mean.
I also tell them this, which is the line I actually use: if you are not involved in illegal things here, you do not have much of a target on your back, or the kidnapping risk you hear about. That is what five years in this city have felt like for me. It is not a rule for the country, and it is not a reason to treat the other article's no-go list as optional. Friends want a sentence they can repeat. That is mine, for this city, for the life we actually have. It does not travel to a state I would not put them in.
“I feel safer in Mexico City than I did in London.”
Five years is long enough to stop performing caution for people at home, and not long enough to get glib. I still read the same stories everyone else reads. I still live here.
The honest city-level picture, including the places we would not use, is in the safest cities in Mexico to live.
