Investigating the scope

Borders - For a metropolitan area as large as Mexico City, it was important to explore the borders of what my research would focus on. Having gone through major historical events, Mexico City has been constantly changing borders. Most recently, it transitioned from DF (Federal District) to CDMX (Mexico City), where the borders of the political city shrunk significantly. This meant that the medical services provided in the current health system were available to people living within the most current drawn borders. Though, since Mexico City has been expanding horizontally (sprawling), where the border exists is merely a political definition, with neighborhoods expanding well beyond the city. People who live outside the borders, but work and commute within the city every day make it slightly more difficult to determine the clarity of the scope of the research. This is further complicated by the amount of tourists and foreigners that visit or live in the city. Nonetheless, for the continuation of the project, I decided to use the most current borders because of the accessibility of the data sets that were provided. This allowed me to have a beginning understanding of how to draw the maps that were essential to the project and how to further break them down into categories. Clearly, I did this while understanding the limitations of this choice. 

Transportation - In determining that the issue at hand was accessibility to the HIV service providers, I decided to focus on the spatiotemporal aspect of movement in the city. Subaltern theorists brought attention the the socioeconomic issues that cause a chain of problems depending on where one lands on the wealth gap. For instance, if an individual has to work multiple jobs, and live far from their work place, that means that their ability to travel for HIV testing purposes reduces dramatically. In this context, I focused on the role of the CDMX Metro and the time it takes for one to travel from their ZIP code to the closest HIV service provider. This began with an analysis of the Metro system in Mexico City, which I learned that it expands beyond the borders I determined for the research. Defining the stops, the time it takes from one stop to another, and the time needed from the closest stop to the HIC service provider were some of the steps I took to create a dataset to use for the later mapping. Another limitation that I clarified was the fact that Mexico City has a diverse range of public transport systems, some formal and some not. The reason I focused on the metro was because of the accessibility in price and clarity of movement that it provides.

Activists - One of the most interesting parts of the research project was reaching out to local activists that engage with HIV-related programs. In conversation with them, I learned a lot about the medical system and its accessibility in relation to socioeconomic background. It was particularly interesting to learn about the HIV service providers and how they operate and the time it takes from the first visit to the available treatment in the HIV-positive cases. Though the bureaucracy does not affect my project in this stage, since I am focusing on the accessibility of the providers for first visits, it was nonetheless important the learn about the following steps. I went to Mexico City Pride, with a huge turn-out, and was delighted to find tents from local organizations that were providing impromptu rapid HIV tests to anyone who wanted it. Further, I learned that these NGOs also organize HIV-testing drives, where they go to areas of focus like universities, sex worker streets, or queer clubs. This more decentralized form of testing brings an interesting perspective into my research, since the result that will come from the mapping in comparison with the HIV clusters would prove useful to these organizations.  

Synthesizing - Bringing this information together, I began formally writing the beginning of the research paper. I already had formulated a table of contents and a literature review, which changed and increased as weeks went by. Though, in sitting to write the project, I tried to develop a clear language that brings together the multiple actors that were at play. Defining disease, contagion, accessibility, the Subaltern, spatiotemporality, and the built environment's role, were essential to formulate a clear message. The theoretical framework and the scope of the research needed to be stated in an accessible manner, while setting the groundwork for the data that had been collected and the mappings. Though the final goal of the project was to produce a series of mappings at the scale of Mexico City, I wanted to make clear that these maps will be simplified for the sake of clarity, though they contained in them a world of issues and were a conglomerate of them.