Here’s some more good news for Mexico’s embattled tourism industry: Arthur Frommer has added his voice to the “No really, Mexico is safe for travelers” contingent. In a recent blog post, Frommer admits that hearing about his daughter’s planned trip to Mexico gave him a moment of fear and worry—but he goes on to explain why that fear was largely irrational, noting that she “returned singing the praises of Mexican vacationing and stressing the relative calm of the country.”

Of course, there could be more at work here than just knee-jerk concern about Mexico. After all, don’t parents—even guidebook-publishing parents of grown children—always worry when their kids travel overseas? As Rick Steves noted in our interview with him awhile back, “It’s natural for a parent to be nervous… I just have to always reason with myself and think, I was 18 and my parents were freaking out and I was capable at the time.”

Nice story in the Global Post about a particularly potent sister city relationship between Ashland, Oregon, and Guanajuato, Mexico:

While other cross-continental matchings are largely symbolic, this relationship has fostered academic and musical exchanges, helped build houses—and even led to 79 marriages.

I gotta say, Ashland couldn’t have picked a better sister city than Guanajuato. The Spanish colonial city doesn’t get the attention it deserves—it’s one of my favorite places in Mexico.

REUTERS/Jorge Dan Lopez

Mexican federal police detain Jose Flores, accused of hijacking an Aeromexico plane carrying more than 100 passengers from Cancun to Mexico City yesterday. The Bolivian-born suspect reportedly said he was on a divine mission. He was arrested upon landing and nobody was injured. In fact, passengers said they were unaware of the hijacking until after the plane touched down.

Its focus is Zapatistas and coffee. Mostly coffee.

Photo by adpowers via Flickr (Creative Commons)

And no, I don’t mean the resort-goers’ daily fight for the best tanning spot. In the New York Times, Mark Lacey takes a look at Cancun’s shrinking beaches—and the lengths to which some hotels are going in an effort to keep their share of what’s left.

Photo by JOE M500 via Flickr, (Creative Commons)

We’ve written before about the sometimes tough plight of L.A.‘s taco trucks. Fortunately, taco trucks these days are ascendant—thanks in part to the mobility patterns of young urbanites.

So let us now turn our attention to L.A.‘s Mexican street-food vendors. They’ve never had it easy, what with gang battles sometimes raging around them and the watchful eye of health inspectors threatening their livelihoods.

Public radio’s Marketplace recently put together a fine little profile on the struggles of one tamal vendor who works the tough neighborhood of MacArthur Park.

Tamalero Antonio, who sells tamales out of a box mounted on a tricycle, told the show: “It’s dangerous. It’s very, very dangerous. You have to be careful with the gangs, you have to be careful with the police, you have to be careful with the cars. There are a lot of dangers in the street.”

(Via Boing Boing)

This time, according to The Onion, it’s the Mexican government that’s building a wall, and the move is going ahead despite fears for the tiny guitar, novelty sombrero and three-foot tall plastic margarita cup industries. Get all the details in this (sub-titled) video report:

It’s official: We can go to Mexico again. The CDC has removed the Mexican travel health warning for Novel H1N1 Flu, aka swine flu, as of this morning. The travel notice was replaced with a general warning about the global status of the virus, which the World Health Organization raised to a pandemic on June 11.

Although I didn’t have a chance to make a trip across the border while the hysteria over the outbreak was crippling the Mexican tourism industry, I was there in March, when throngs of Spring Breakers were warned not to go because of drug-related violence. As usual, I found the Yucatán to be quiet, hospitable, and safer than the Washington, D.C., streets I was leaving behind. Still nervous? Think of it as a way to earn good travel karma, and go anyway. The L.A. Times’ Andrés Martinez makes a convincing moral case to help out our neighbors and indulge in some empathy tourism. And the Washington Post has put together a list of some of the best deals designed to inject a much needed boost into the tourism industry as part of the Mexican government’s nearly $100 million “Vive Mexico” tourism campaign.