For those of you who were wondering how the Fulbright program is unique in Mexico, here’s a link. First of all, it’s called the Fulbright-García Robles Program, named for Arkansas’s own Senator William J. Fulbright and Mexico’s Alfonso García Robles. Among many accolades, García Robles won the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco, which set up a nuclear-free zone in Latin America.
In addition to bearing the names of these important leaders, the FGR program in Mexico is under the direction of La Comisión México-Estados Unidos para el Intercambio Educativo y Cultural (The Mexico-United States Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange), a.k.a. COMEXUS. This binational organization was created in 1990 in an agreement between our two governments, and since then they have facilitated the exchange of more than 4,000 Mexican and US citizens.
I can say firsthand that COMEXUS has done utterly amazing work preparing for the recent arrival of our cohort of over 100 US scholars. They set up all of our placements throughout Mexico, flights, visa pre-authorizations, and bank accounts. During orientation, I was floored by how insanely well they treated us. They made hotel reservations, booked several private museum tours (including a UNESCO World Heritage Site), rented out a club for salsa lessons, and hand-picked each dish for breakfast and lunch so that we could taste a variety of Mexican cuisine. They even had Tums and Pepto Bismol on-deck for those whose stomachs weren’t agreeing with the Mexican cuisine. We had politicians and dignitaries from the US Embassy come speak to us, and the Mexican Federal Police’s mariachi band gave us a surprise concert. All in all, we could not be in better hands. ¡Muchísimas gracias por todo, COMEXUS!
