Welcome, First Time in Korea? is a realty television-travel show that features foreigners to visit Korea for the first time and observes them traveling around the country on their own. This study offers a critical analysis of being a “global citizen” in the cosmopolitan ambience by focusing on Mexican visitors who show up in this program. Despite geographical, cultural and psychological distance, they are received and recognized as new neighbors for Koreans while racialized as folkloric, thus more traditional and less contemporary. In doing so, a racial hierarchy has been established between Korea and Mexico on the basis of level of modernization. This show demonstrates that the global citizen, whose idea promises a democratic and egalitarian relationship among all the people across the globe regardless of nation, race and ethnicity, is permeated with the Eurocentric thinking that still functions as the universal parameter in a globalized world. Thus, the encounter of South-South in Welcome, First Time in Korea? catches a glimpse of hospitality and mutual understanding. However, at the same time, it shows the limit of cosmopolitan ideal as revealing the current realities of inequality, conflict and cacophony.

Keywords: Global Citizen/ Travel Narrative/ South-South/ Racial Politics/ hierarchy