Our water bottles were dry when we crossed the laguna in a blue lancha. As we agreed, Aureliano was waiting for us at the embarcadero in Acapethua. We climbed out of the boat, plunked our backpacks into the trunk of his taxi, got inside and rolled down the passenger window that worked. Aureliano tied the trunk of his cab shut with rope and we drove off to catch a bus to Mexico City. Just a few blocks down the road, however, we had to pause while a funeral procession passed along the dusty street. Expecting unexpected delays, we had allowed ourselves plenty of time to get to the bus and since our meeting with Aureliano was on schedule, we relaxed in the back of the cab trying to catch any breeze possible and not move to stay cool.

Noticing our lethargy, the taxi driver asked if we wanted to stop at his house, a few blocks away, to drink some water. It was something about Aureliano, the heat and the little town with the funeral procession that made both Giorgia and I unable to refuse this offer from a man we did not know. In a few minutes, we pulled up to a concrete and wooden house that had no door at its entrance. Two girls came outside; Aureliano introduced us to his daughters and invited us into the house. Inside, we met his wife and son. One of the daughters brought us glasses of cold water. We drank and stood chatting around the large dinner table in the living room. His oldest daughter told us about her studies at the university near by. By the time our glasses were empty, Aureliano told us "now you know where I live, come back anytime."

Giorgia and I were both struck by this interaction. A taxi driver just took us to his home, introduced us to his family, gave us water to drink and invited us to come back and visit. Compared to our home in Seattle, this dusty, hot, Mexican town seemed to have a different boundary between a business and a personal exchange, public and private space and the relations of strangers. We noticed that the experience of space was very different here than the one we came from. There is little chance that we would be invited to the home of a taxi driver in Seattle, and there is even a smaller chance that we would accept. This interaction made us both aware of the variant manifestations of public space. As this story reveals, public space and interaction in public space is not the same everywhere. Culture plays a decisive role in how we communicate with one another and how we experience people and places. When we got back to the university, we talked with Tema about this difference; the three of us wondered how studies of cyberspace might take these experiences into account. Given our complementary interests in communication scholarship, we decided to explore this topic further as an academic and public work.

a project for
COM 538 Theories and Criticism of Communication Technologies
Professor David Silver

University of Washington
Spring 2003