In Mexico, golf is played exclusively at private clubs. Average costs to join are between $16,000 and $35,000 per year, with the most expensive club over $100,000. That's striking in a country which has an average annual income of only $15,314 (OECD 2017).

I've always been interested in the way that golf courses look in relation to their surroundings on a landscape, and in a city like Mexico, they stand out like refreshing private oases among the endless concrete slab. This course sits high in the mountains which ring the city, at an altitude of over 2500 meters, a place where the elite have carved out a new downtown, new highways, new private estates, malls, and of course country golf clubs. This glittering wealth often bumps up against uncomfortable realities, as the peripheral neighborhoods contain some of the poorest and most vulnerable people. COVID-19 has hit these neighborhoods, for example, disproportionately hard.

Like the author of the book "Privilege at Play: Class, Race, Gender, and Golf in Mexico" (Hugo Ceron-Anaya), I don't hold any enmity towards golfers, and I don't necessarily hold prima facie enmity against the wealthy either. Powerful rent-seeking interests and systematic trends in societies (especially ones with a weak/corrupt/deregulated government) create forces at play that are much bigger than any one individual. To incorrectly quote Jay-Z, "hate the game, not the player". In my mind, that's why aerial photography is so powerful - it removes the individual gaze and gets at something much greater - what Eyal Weizman called "the inscription of humanity upon the face of the earth". These are collective decisions, aided and abetted by individuals of course, but not solely responsible. Fixing this (if you are one of my followers who thinks this needs fixing, of course), therefore, will take collective action to reverse.

For more information on golf in Mexico City you can find Hugo Ceron-Anaya's book (where I got the data above) here:

https://bit.ly/2NPGt7U

For more information on COVID-19 in Mexico City and how it is disproportionately affecting the poor, look here:

https://bit.ly/3upCTCC