From the Berkeley Beacon
By Gabrielle Dunn
Beacon Staff
The members of “The Rosarito Seven,” as they call themselves, headed to “Papas and Beer,” a waterfront bar in Baja California Mexico.
Though it was a Saturday night, the Emerson College graduate students found the club’s dance floor less crowded that they anticipated.
Student Mary Ann Cicala said the medium-sized crowd, though friendly and welcoming, centered mostly around a mechanical bull.
Students like Cicala, working toward a Masters degree in Management and Communications, have been collaborating on a semester-long project in Dr. Greg Payne’s Public Affairs class to boost tourism in the Mexican beach town of Rosarito.
Konstantina Georgaki, a student in the class and Payne’s teaching assistant, said seven of Payne’s 28 students went to Rosarito at the end of February for three days.
The students met with Rosarito’s mayor Hugo Torres, interviewing him for their short documentary My Rosarito.
The RediscoveRosarito project began this semester when the class was looking for an initiative they could work as a group.
Payne suggested the city because he visited it when he was student at the University of Southern California, going to the beach town with his friends to surf.
“It started off with us wanting to do a hands-on approach and answer the question on how do you implement public affairs in practice.”Georgaki said. “I think we’ve gone beyond the class project because, yeah, the year ends in a week, but we’re taking it pass the semester to a communications-based initiative to enhance Rosarito’s image.”
Parts of the project include Burritos, Baja and Baseball,, where kids from Rosarito will be be brought to San Diego for a baseball game, a documentary of an international surfing competition held in the town and a Taste of Baja culinary festival at the Rosarito Beach Hotel.
“The focus is to drive Americans down there,” Payne said.
Rosarito, 30 miles south of San Diego, has suffered a blow to its tourist economy due to reports of a crime wave sweeping the area.
According to Jan. 7 Associated Press report, tourist visits to the Baja area dropped by 3 million in 2007-from 21 million to 18 million.
In Rosarito, seven out of every ten jobs are tied to the tourist economy.
In the same article, Torres estimated the number of visitors to Rosarito Beach dropped 30 percent since last summer.
Georgaki, co-creator of the group’s website, said the class did a meticulous news analysis and discovered that the negative stories picked up by the national media were traced back manly to the San Diego Union Tribune.
Cicala, a first year graduate student, said one focus for the class was figuring out what misconceptions and perceptions exist about the area and then challenging those stereotypes.
“When you think of Baja California or Tijuana the first thing you think of is drug trafficking and a sort of cowboy-esquelawlessness,” Cicala said. “It’s romantic and exiting but you don’t want to take your family there.”
Cicala took on the task of creating podcasts about Rosarito for the group’s web log. The Management and Communications major said she was interested in podcasting because she subscribes to numerous podcasts, although she did not have prior experience creating her own.
“It was great to get behind the driver’s seat in an audio booth and see what I could do,” Cicala said.
Cicala’s first podcast, and the only one currently available on the blog is called “Why Rosarito?”
In the 12-minute audio clip, Cicala provides an overview of the project and interviews Payne and students in the class about why they chose the beach town as the subject of their campaign.
The podcast is the first of a five-part series Cicala said she hopes to continue producing over the summer.
Eventually, Cicala said she wants to pitch the podcasts for publication on Lonelyplanet.com, a well-known travel Web site.
“The class is an exciting way to approach theory in communication management,” Cicala said. “It’s a living, breathing case study.”
Payne said the project is meant to take community service further than the local community. A handful of students in the class are international, hailing from countries like Israel and Colombia.
Georgaki, who is from Greece, said the class hopes to soon translate the Web site into Spanish.
Payne said Torres has arranged for more students to stay in Rosarito for three weeks over the summer.
Both Payne and Georgaki said they hope to open the summer trip to undergraduate students and graduate students outside the class.
The initial “Rosarito Seven” who visited in the spring had no budget for their trip and no financial help from the college.
Payne said he was shocked that those who went were willing to pay their own way.
Georgaki said the students who went on the trip weren’t just those who could easily afford it.
Many returned to America at 8:00 a.m. on a red-eye, overnight flight and went straight from the airport to work.
“We can actually try to solve a case by being pro-active,” Payne said. “The students were so unselfish. Those that are scraping money for tuition paid for their own tickets.”
Payne said he hopes the project will last a year if not longer, and will eventually students from other local colleges.
“Community service means global community, not just Boston” Payne said. “For people like Konstantina, she can put that she worked on a project beyond Boston, a project that has legs. It opens the door for more possible employment opportunities.”
Payne first began bringing students abroad in 1992 when he accompanied Emersonians to the Olympics in Barcelona. Subsequent Olympic trips were to Nagano, Japan in 1998, Sydney, Australia in 2000 and Athens, Greece in 2002.
After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, Payne created the Saudi-American Exchange.
The Boston-based organization, of which Payne serves as general director, seeks to eliminate the perceptions of difference between Americans and Saudi Arabians in a post 9/11 world.
In 2002 Payne took sophomores and juniors to Saudi Arabia and was part of the first public diplomacy group to take Jewish students to the country after Sept. 11.
Georgaki said Torres was honored that a New England college was interested in their city’s situation.
“Instead of getting something from Mexico they now see Americans are coming down saying, “We want to give you something,” Payne said. “We are not trying to cover up any problems. We are making sure the problems that are the accurately portrayed and not sensationalized.”
Gernot Trolf, a real estate broker with NBC Realty-Baja, an Irvine, Calif.-based firm that sells Baja California properties to people in the United States, said he feels the negative portrayal of Rosarito in American media stems from violence between drug dealers and the police.
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