Tourism and Indigenous Heritage in Latin America

As Observed through Mexico's Magical Village Cuetzalan

Casper Jacobsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351614771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Following the surge of regional multiculturalism and indigenous political mobilization, how are indigenous Latin Americans governed today? Addressing the Mexican flagship tourist initiative of 'Magical Villages, ' this book shows how government tourism programs do more than craft appealing tourist experiences from ideas of indigeneity, tradition, and heritage. Rather, heritage-centered tourism and multiculturalism are fusing into a strategy of government set to tame and steer indigenous spaces of negotiation by offering alternative multicultural national self-images, which trigger new modes of national belonging and participation, without challenging structural political and social asymmetries.

By examining contemporary Mexican tourism policies and multiculturalist ideals through policy analysis and ethnographic research in a mestizo municipalcapital in a majority indigenous Nahua municipality, this book shows how mestizo nationalism is regenerated in tourism as part of a neoliberal governmentality framework. The book demonstrates how tourism initiatives that center on indigenous cultural heritage and recognition do not self-evidently empower indigenous citizens, and may pave the way for extracting indigenous heritage as a national resource to the benefit of local elites and tourist visitors.

This work is of key interest to researchers, advanced students, and critically engaged practitioners in the fields of Latin American studies, indigenous studies, social anthropology, critical heritage studies, and tourism.

1 Introduction

Observations, objectives, and empirical vantage points

Tourism, as it is panning out for indigenous Latin Americans following the multicultural turn of the 1990s, is increasingly being advanced as an empowering and liberating gesture of cultural recognition that brings social development and economic opportunities to rural indigenous communities and undoes ethnic discrimination associated with colonial and national pasts. As indigenous heritage is being cast as a raw material awaiting extraction, the cultural recognition of indigeneity is invested with the potential to spark a parallel economic appreciation of indigenous communities. In this new synergy, which fuses multicultural politics of recognition with tourism through conceptualizations of indigenous heritage, cultural richness converts into monetary riches and drives for preserving, revitalizing, and performing indigenous heritage become self-evident procedures for boosting ethnic self-pride, social well-being, and economic prosperity. In other words, multiculturalism has given way to multicultourism.

This conceptual framework, its means of spatial and temporal distribution, and its social consequences are the analytical concerns of the present book. A central theoretical premise is that conceptual frames are sites of government; they govern and thus need to be governed. Accordingly, this book shows how the sketched framework structures contemporary life in Latin America by mobilizing diverse agents and agencies in the implementation of its vision, and it sets out to highlight the paradoxical and divisive effects of this immanent device and social technology.

I find this selective focus warranted due to the tacit assumption that guides such governance, namely that the recognition of indigenous cultural heritage – through tourism or otherwise – will automatically benefit indigenous citizens. Importantly, the discursive means through which the politics of recognition has gained a widespread appeal in Latin America should not be mistaken for its practical and social effects on the ground. Public appreciations of indigeneity do not self-evidently send profits from tourism into the pockets of citizens who would typically be categorized as indigenous. Rather, as a key resource to new modes of national belonging and to the expanding yet omnipresent industry of tourism, indigeneity is up for grabs as a common national good. As Nancy Fraser argues, redistribution cannot be assumed to follow automatically from recognition (Fraser 1995), and since indigenized identities are increasingly coming into vogue, the symbolic (re)source of indigeneity is not the exclusive property of indigenous agents. One effect of the widespread adoption of a multiculturalist framework of recognition in Latin America is its way of facilitating an increasing incursion into the intangible and symbolic territories of indigenous identities. Thus, rather than seeing the emergence of a tourism organized around indigenous heritage as reflective of a radical multiculturalist reorganization of Latin American society in which indigenous citizens stand central and may finally be accommodated, this book invites the reader to consider the ways in which tourism regenerates dispossessive patterns of extraction by framing such processes as benevolent and respectful gestures set to heal troubled pasts and emancipate indigenous citizens.

Within such a framework, indigenous subjects are understood as chiefly concerned about ‘their culture,’ which must be recognized at all costs, while economic transactions are seen as less relevant to indigenous lives. In practice, this social order means that often it is the recognizer who is financially rewarded by fellow recognizers, while an abstracted indigenous subject is granted a symbolic act of recognition. This counterintuitive mechanism of what I term the recognition economy may be clarified by way of an anecdote.

While preparing to write this book, Sandra, a Danish woman, told me she had been living in Mexico and loved the country. She approached me because she was planning to launch a webshop that would sell items “that represent the traditional Mexico, but in a modern version.” Having read in a newspaper “how indigenous Mexicans are embarrassed about their original languages, such as Nahuatl,” Sandra requested my help in finding a name in Nahuatl for her webshop to show Nahuas in Mexico that she thought “their history and culture are fantastic.” In fact, conveying her webshop to her “suppliers” through the use of a Nahuatl name would only make her “proud.”

Sandra’s request for assistance and the idea of giving her webshop a Nahuatl name were pitched through references to indigenous Mexicans feeling embarrassed about their languages and Sandra’s intention of proudly flagging Nahua culture through the enterprise of her webshop. Sandra’s private business venture is implicitly framed as countering a disregard in Mexico of indigenous minorities, which indigenous Mexicans have since internalized, and she endows her business with an activist role within a larger project of cultural recognition toward indigenous people, making them value their culture and giving them a sense of belonging. Sandra thus substitutes her own key role within her private business initiative for the generic figure of the indigenous Mexican or Nahua. She thereby draws in indigenous Mexicans as external agents to her business agenda, and as independent sources they are made to bear witness to the importance of her actions. Within this order, the Nahuas become beneficiaries of her personal enterprise, while Sandra presents herself as a benefactor setting up the webshop – at least in part – due to her concern for the well-being of indigenous Mexicans. Importantly, there is no reason to believe that Sandra does not experience a genuine concern over indigenous issues and that her intention of naming the webshop in Nahuatl is not reflective of that. On the contrary, the fascinating thing is that she in all likelihood is concerned about these issues and wants to do good by offering cultural recognition to indigenous minorities. Nonetheless, the paradox is that the seemingly altruistic cultural recognition the webshop offers to imaginary indigenous beneficiaries is simultaneously what exactly constitutes its business strategy. Selecting a name in Nahuatl for a shop that sells “traditional” Mexican crafts is an effective way of subliminally communicating to like-minded shoppers that they are purchasing products made by indigenous artisans. Trading with Nahua artisans, however, did not figure in the business plan.

The anecdote illustrates how indigenous citizens come to be discursively centered as symbolic sources in the construction of economic relations within which expressions of indigenous cultural heritage – and not necessarily indigenous citizens –take part. In short, nationalized modes of recognizing indigenous heritage assist in dispossessing indigenous agents of the emerging resource of indigeneity,and this disempowering process is assisted by a political framework, which is perceived to emancipate and empower the very same citizens. Such a format is particularly vivid in current constructions of cultural tourism in Latin America.

Setting aside the intuitive inclination to identify expressions of indigenous cultural heritage with indigenous agents and the propensity to think that such agents must therefore be in the best position to mobilize and profit from said heritage in the tourism industry, there is nothing to suggest that indigenous Latin Americans should automatically hold an obvious advantage in the articulation of indigenous identity. That is, as a contested resource, indigeneity should not be seen as the autonomous indigenous terrain it might otherwise appear to be when gazed at panoramically.

Since identities are fluid, mobile, and continuously inflected in relation to the surrounding economic, political, and social settings, expressing and constructing indigeneity is not the exclusive privilege of indigenous citizens. As anthropologists Jacques Galinier and Antoinette Molinié note (Galinier and Molinié 2013) concerning a growing tendency they term “neo-Indianism,” urban mestizos increasingly embrace, practice, and reinvent nationalized indigenous identities through New Age spiritualist interpretations of indigenous heritage. Yet indigeneity is not only an emerging resource for middle-class Latin Americans through which to attain new senses of belonging and existential well-being. Indigeneity equally figures as a social device for mobilizing popular protests against transnational capitalism and extractive economies (Norget 2010; McNeish 2013), and, most famously in the plurinational state of Bolivia, claims to indigeneity constitute fundamental parts of contemporary state-political projects (Canessa 2016). With indigeneity increasingly turning into an encompassing translocal identity project across Latin America, codified in national terms, the identity political debate about “who is indigenous” seems to become ever-more complex and ambiguous (Canessa 2007; Forte 2013). It is, however, instructive that this direction in the blurring of boundaries between dichotomously arranged historical characters in Latin America – mestizo versus indigenous – has been codified into national political climates after indigeneity has emerged as an effective means through which to frame political struggles and to stimulate national economies.

Nonetheless, the increasing ambiguity of indigeneity, it would appear, also pertains to the divergent and intersecting scales at which indigenous citizenship and identities are codified. Departing from the international human rights setting, indigeneity has emerged as a global term and hegemonic conceptual framework (Tilley 2002), yet this international process is filtered into specific state practices across Latin America, as national governments look for ways to address ethnic identity-based rights claims, whether in their national constitutions, institutional organizations, or political practices. In other words, rights claims departing from hegemonic notions of indigeneity require some degree of codification in national terms, and the nationalization of indigeneity across Latin America is becoming an identity project that is open, albeit not equally accessible, to all (Canessa 2016). This process attests to the astonishing mobility of mestizaje, which, through its characteristic capacity to encompass the totality (Rogers 1998), manages to embrace cosmopolitan ideas about multicultural citizenship and coexistence and adapt them to a national recognition of indigeneity. In an ironic twist of the national project of “Deep Mexico” as envisioned by anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla (1989), the recognition of indigenous citizens now materializes as a quest for mestizos to recognize and practice the indigeneity within. Through the frame of the nation, contemporary indigeneity figures as the lost past of the mestizo and the heritage and national history of all, as mestizo citizens and diverse indigenous groups are brought into a figurative kinship relation that casts mestizos as the offspring of indigenous contemporaries.

In engaging with these issues, this book adopts a translocal perspective that considers how supranational, national, and local processes fuse in concrete social settings through the device of tourism. A translocal approach has the double advantage of situating the study in particular localities with all their complexities, without assuming that localities can be taken as discrete and self-evident analytical units. Arguably, the paradoxes accompanying the translocalization of indigeneity in Latin America are most clearly discerned when observed through concrete social relations and settings, particularly in locations where groups with historically dichotomous identities share space, maneuver diachronically anchored interethnic power relations, and find themselves engaged in direct competition over indigenous identity through tourism. Hence, the sense of indigeneity that is sweeping across Latin America and increasingly organizes identity and place-making in the region should be inspected in concrete locations where differently scaled economic, political, and social processes intersect and give life to situated claims to indigeneity.

A translocal approach assists in tuning in on the multi-scalar processes through which group identities materialize, and it equally facilitates a critical engagement with the current state of affairs in tourism. In line with the UN Millennium Development Goals, scholars working in Latin America have argued that development through tourism should be of benefit to local communities, and community-based tourism is increasingly being conceived as a means for alleviating poverty (Baud and Ypeij 2009:3). Although such tourism initiatives aspire to empower disadvantaged populations through participatory processes, they tend to depart from the unstated assumption of rural communities as egalitarian and homogeneous units in which people have largely equal social positions, common aims, and views (Blackstock 2005). This urban notion of the unitary rural community with a flat social stratigraphy facilitates the idea that ‘the community itself’ is in charge of the kind of tourism ‘it’ wants. Such community-based tourism is thus not likely to inquire critically about which types of citizens are likely to be integrated into, and take control of, participatory processes, and may unwittingly come to enforce asymmetric power hierarchies. Instead, the perceived ability of heritage-based tourism to create jobs for ‘the community’ as a unitary entity is seen as decisively positive and as a common good that benefits the community as a whole. Yet participation in tourism as an economic activity tends to be a privatized matter, and the prime participants tend to be citizens with sizeable and favorably located property and money to invest.

While the subsequent sections of the introduction will chart pertinent developments in Latin America, the intersecting national and local processes will be inspected throughout the book from two empirical vantage points: Mexico’s tourism program Magical Villages, and the Magical Village Cuetzalan (Puebla), a mestizo town and municipal capital in a majority Nahua municipality. When it comes to the political frameworks that surround tourism, heritage, and indigenous peoples in Latin America, Mexico has long played a key influential role as a regional compass. Hence, if one is looking to spot developments and trends in Latin America within said areas, Mexico, which has the largest number of indigenous citizens (ECLAC 2014), receives by far the largest number of tourists (UNWTO 2017), and has the largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites (UNESCO 2017), constitutes a promising vantage point.

Multicultural citizenship in Latin America

In the course of the 1990s, an unprecedented arena of political negotiation emerged for indigenous Latin Americans, as many nations within the region reformed their constitutions to accommodate notions of multiculturalism, officially recognizing the plurality of national citizens (Van Cott 2000:11). Such constitutional reprogramming signaled to the national and international communities a marked change in the anatomy of these nation-states, which was fortified by a surge of multiculturalist ideas in national policies. The changes testified to the official commitment of these nation-states to replace assimilatory and exclusionary policies with policies of cultural diversity, social equality, and inclusion, all of which formed part of a broader democratization process. So, Latin American nation-states articulated a divide between past and present, now and then, and the ancient and the modern nation-state. By denouncing past homogenizing national policies, nation-states loosened their contemporary self-images from troubled national pasts.

While each nation has traveled separate and particularized paths toward various kinds of political multiculturalism, the Latin American transition toward multicultural citizenship is typically attributed to the sustained work of indigenous political movements and NGOs, which organized themselves transnationally beginning in the 1970s, successfully effecting changes in international law, most notably by establishing indigenous rights as human rights through ILO Convention 169 (Van Cott 2000:262–263; Sieder 2002:1–4). In Latin America, only Cuba and Uruguay have yet to ratify this key international convention concerning indigenous rights, but outside the region a total of only six countries have ratified it (Lehmann 2016:1). Within this general explanatory framework, indigenous...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Tourism and Indigenous Heritage in Latin America
• Routledge Advances in Tourism and Anthropology
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Governing frames
• 3 Working the Translocal Field
• 4 The Diachronic Magical Villages Program: Frames and Technologies in Motion
• 5 When Pros Turn Pro: Community Ambassadors and Social Order
• 6 Multicultourism in the Magical Village: Setting Temporality and Translocality
• 7 Networking/rooting: Ritual Co-parenthood in Tzinacapan
• 8 Regenerative Fiesta: Ritual Configuration of History, Identity, and Society
• Epilogue
• Index