Tourism With a Message

They came for reality, and this is what they heard: a young Mexican woman explaining that she earns $4 a day assembling typewriters for an American firm.

They came for reality, and this is what they felt: the sensation, as one of them put it later, of their hearts and their minds expanding.

This was a vacation, but a most unusual one. These 20 men and women paid $450 each for a three-day tour through the slums of the Mexican border. They paid for a vacation they knew would depress them, in the hopes that it would also inspire them.

"I came," said Jim Long, a 49-year-old Bay Area engineer, "to rediscover my revolutionary spirit."

This is the world of the "reality tour" as envisioned by Global Exchange, a San Francisco nonprofit organization that has made a $1-million-a-year business of carting tourists to some of the world's most woeful places.

For the last decade, reality tours focused on overseas heartache in countries such as Cuba, Haiti, Guatemala and Vietnam. Then, last year, co-director Medea Benjamin realized that Americans could use a reality check in their own backyard. "We decided," she said, "to start looking at ourselves."

The result is a new series of trips exploring the social ills that vex California. They're vacations, in essence, through all that's uncomfortable and ugly in the Golden State--or just over the border.

The tours' success coincides with a national surge in demand for offbeat, educational vacations. "Sitting on the beach, that's for the minority today," said Jerry Mallett, president of the Adventure Travel Society. "People want to learn about their surroundings."

Even in this market, however, reality tours stand out. Most educational trips are built around recreational adventures or foreign travel. "The challenge is getting people to pay to look in their own backyards," said Joel Mugge, co-director of the Center for Global Education at Augsburg College in Minnesota.

Benjamin was doubtful that people would rush to, as she put it, "pay money to see toxic waste." Smiling with pride and a touch of awe, she added: "But they do."

They pay to see oil drums oozing poison slime in a beat-up San Francisco neighborhood. To meet garment workers sewing at all hours in miserable conditions. They pay to tour apartments with flaking lead paint. Strawberry fields that are soaking in pesticides. Tijuana slums that are crowded with men desperate to jump the border.