This article explores email dialogue between students from the University of Guanajuato and the University of Leeds who shared critical incidents from their personal experience and travels. While the students struggled with essentialism in their exchanges, they retained a willingness to critique specific local cultural practices and challenged some of the usual discourses and familiar tropes associated with mobility and intercultural contact. The data highlights the importance of place in the students' reading and navigation of the world, the dialogic and iterative reformulation of their positions, their ability to deal with complexity through a critical cosmopolitan perspective, and a growing reflexive and ethical consciousness. This affirms our belief in the value of open-ended student dialogue as a strategy to encourage critical cosmopolitan dispositions, and underlines the need for greater nuance around conceptualising essentialism.