Keynote Jafet Quintero Venegas and Álvaro López Title : The Night Walk: from a dangerous migration to a tourist performance.

By

Jafet Quintero Venegas

and

Alvaro Lopez

The Night Walk is a recreational activity organized by the Hñahñú community of the town of El Alberto, municipality of Ixmiquilpan, state of Hidalgo, Mexico, and is part of the menu of activities that tourists who visit the area can hire. This is a performance that involves several actors that represent the migratory phenomenon of undocumented Mexicans trying to reach the United States: tourists take the role of emigrants and the local community of polleros, border patrol agents, drug traffickers and others subjects that can facilitate or frustrate their objective in reality. This walk is an expression of dark tourism because it represents the real danger of undocumented migration and puts those who participate in it at some risk of accident.

Gino Jafet Quintero Venegas

PhD in Geography from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Postdoctoral fellowship in the Bioethics University Program (UNAM) in zooethics. Academic fellow at Monash University and the University of Sydney, both in Australia.

He is currently a full-time associate researcher at the Institute of Social Research (Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales) UNAM. He is also a professor of “Geography and Ethics” and “Animal geography” in the bachelor degree in Geography at UNAM, and profesor of “Ethics, territory and environment” in the posgraduate programme of Geography, at UNAM. He is one of the coordinators of both the Permanent Seminar on Critical Studies in Tourism and the Permanent Seminar on Critical Animal Studies.

Alvaro Lopez

Álvaro López-López has a PhD in Geography from Arts Faculty of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is currently a senior researcher at the Institute of Geography, UNAM, and also a professor in the undergraduate and graduate programs in Geography at UNAM where he teaches “Space and tourism”. His basic line of research has been the “geography of tourism in Mexico”, from which he has developed research projects about “sex tourism,” “dark tourism” and the “intersection between the geography of tourism and the geography of animals” among others. He was the president of the Mexican Academy of Tourism Research.