Stuck with Tourism

Space, Power, and Labor in Contemporary Yucatan

Matilde Córdoba Azcárate

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520975552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Tourism has become one of the most powerful forces organizing the predatory geographies of late capitalism. It creates entangled futures of exploitation and dependence, extracting resources and labor, and eclipsing other ways of doing, living, and imagining life. And yet, tourism also creates jobs, encourages infrastructure development, and in many places inspires the only possibility of hope and well-being. Stuck with Tourism explores the ambivalent nature of tourism by drawing on ethnographic evidence from the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, a region voraciously transformed by tourism development over the past forty years. Contrasting labor and lived experiences at the beach resorts of Cancún, protected natural enclaves along the Gulf coast, historical buildings of the colonial past, and maquilas for souvenir production in the Maya heartland, this book explores the moral, political, ecological, and everyday dilemmas that emerge when, as Yucatán's inhabitants put it, people get stuck in tourism's grip.

ONE

Beach Enclosures

MANUFACTURING A CARIBBEAN PARADISE

A DESTINATION UNDER THE WEATHER

George is a middle-aged Canadian national who works for a well-established real estate agency in Cancún. The day we first met, in October 2010, he was wearing designer glasses and the typical work attire of the regional tourist industry: a guayabera, slacks, and polished shoes. He had been working in Cancún for just a month after being transferred from Mexico City. His work routine consisted of showing luxury apartments in two new twenty-story oceanfront towers and managing the online presence and marketing of the project.

Seated in an air-conditioned glass office right at the gate of the towers, and obviously bored, George promptly accepted my request to visit an apartment on a higher floor, so I could take some aerial pictures of the beach. We took one of the two elevators and went up to the thirteenth floor. To my surprise, the elevator did not open into a lobby but right into the apartment’s American-style kitchen. Perhaps sensing my surprise as a sign that I could be a potential buyer, or simply wanting to rehearse his seller’s pitch, George took the opportunity to give me a full tour of the model apartment. Always talking to me in English, he began by proudly pointing at the all-glass walls, which afforded a mesmerizing view of the blue Caribbean Sea blending into an even bluer sky. He then escorted me room by room, enthusiastically elaborating on the construction materials used in the carvings on the door’s frames, the selection of designer furniture from Brazil, and the modern bathroom tiles.

After touring the interior, we moved to the balcony. Before opening the sliding doors, George warned me to leave my bag inside and to grab the camera firmly with one hand while holding the balcony’s rail with the other. Outside, the wind gusted strongly. Securing the door against the wind with the weight of his body, George pointed at the Jacuzzi in the corner of the balcony and smiled. As our gazes crossed paths, he realized that I was not looking at the Jacuzzi but at the shantytown down below, sitting next to the luxury towers. Perhaps interpreting my look as a sign of concern, George exclaimed, “Don’t worry about the shantytown over there! The next storm will move the water towards them. People will be relocated. We’ll have a nicer view, extended golf courses, and one more swimming pool over there.” The noise from the wind was so strong that he was almost shouting.

George’s comments are an example of the predatory tourist geographies that shape everyday encounters in Cancún. His words, like many others that echo them on a daily basis, are the result of historical practices of exclusion that have shaped the urban development of the city since the Mexican government created it, almost from scratch, in 1974 as Mexico’s first integrally planned tourism center for development.

The creation of Cancún was a watershed moment for the Yucatán Peninsula. As people often say in the region, “There is a before and an after Cancún.” As home to more than half a million residents and host to five million tourists in 2017, Cancún’s centrality for the regional and national economies is captured in colloquial expressions that describe the city as “the engine,” “the goose that lays the golden eggs,” or a “money-making machine.” These expressions reflect the speed, efficiency, and brute mechanical force with which planned tourism development has dominated nature, the built environment, and those that dwell in it. It is this blatant force that explains sales pitches like George’s: it is assumed that the economic growth created by tourism necessitates social displacement, and that the destruction caused by storms will bring opportunities to develop larger and fancier tourist spaces that will in turn sustain the city as a competitive Caribbean beach destination in the global tourist market.

This reality became painfully evident right after my visit with George. The blue sky of the morning had turned gray by afternoon, and it had started to rain hard. The afternoon rain and the morning’s wind gusts, which had forced George and me to grip the balcony rail, foreshadowed the arrival of Hurricane Paula. The Category 3 hurricane reached landfall in Cancún on October 12, 2010, just two days after our meeting. Evacuations were mandatory for Isla Holbox and Isla Cantoy, two islands located a few kilometers north of Cancún. All sea transportation and hundreds of national and international flights were cancelled later that day.

In the days following Hurricane Paula, many of the city’s central streets and surrounding areas were flooded. There was stagnant water everywhere. The local radio reminded the population to stay safe, to look out for hidden electricity cables, and to be vigilant to avoid consuming potentially contaminated water or being bit by mosquitoes, which can carry the dengue virus. Days passed and the stagnant water began to mingle with sewage from broken septic tanks. Mosquitoes multiplied and so did foul smells. Many areas of the city remained without electricity for weeks. Broken trees and debris accumulated on the streets and were only occasionally picked up by drivers on their commutes. Access to potable water was scarce and when available, it was expensive. Everywhere I went there was an eerie sense of waiting, of silence and inaction—aside from big stores’ private security patrols, which were placed at the entrances to banks and supermarkets, such as Walmart and Superama, in downtown Cancún.

The scenario was radically different in the city’s tourist zone, the so-called Hotel Zone. Gardeners, sanitation workers, electrical maintenance personnel, and other uniformed workers were visible everywhere. Tourist police—a branch of the local police exclusively devoted to ensure law and order in the tourist area—established checkpoints at the entrance of the Hotel Zone. In front of all-inclusive hotels, crews of brown-skinned indigenous men trimmed palm trees and bushes, cleaned debris from sewer drains, and fumigated against mosquitoes. Others picked up the red gulfweed (sargazo) that now covered the tourist area of the beach and put it in trucks. Most of them were seasonal migrant workers from inland villages in Yucatán who, as one of them told me as he waited in line at the gates of a well-known resort in order to get a job, had come as soon as they learned the storm was hitting Cancún, to “help clean the hotels and the beach.” They were protected from head to toe, wearing handmade breathing masks made out of old t-shirts and scarfs. No algae was collected from public areas of the beach. In those places, the sand was hardly visible, buried under sargazo where sand fleas thrived.

The ocean remained green and blackish for the rest of the week. The tourists who ventured into the water had to jump over slippery cement blocks covered in black plastic that had been erected to hold the beaches in place after the storm. They complained in my interviews with them about the “difficulties of getting into the sea,” their lack of desire to have a fall “while on vacation” and of “feeling the sand was like mud.” Claudia, a middle-aged Canadian tourist who was trying to climb over the black blocks for an early morning swim when I met her, put it this way: “This is so disgusting and dangerous! You don’t pay to come that far to not find the Caribbean but a hole of mud that resembles the river in my town instead.” Peter, a middle-aged tourist from London, posted a similar complaint in an online review about encountering “the horrible brown/grey you get on the English coast and definitely not something you’d expect from the Caribbean Sea.”¹

Such comments were repeated by many of the tourists whom I interviewed that month. Months and years later, these comments abound, albeit for short times only, on influential travel websites such as TripAdvisor, where they are joined by comments about the friction visitors experience between the imagined Caribbean they expected from tourism brochures and marketing and the reality they encounter. This friction is a new normal for Cancún. Its location in a hurricane-prone area in the age of climate change has rendered Cancún vulnerable to rising sea levels and to increasingly recurrent and virulent tropical storms and hurricanes. And yet, despite the friction between reality and representation, despite the evident deterioration of its infrastructure and beaches, Cancún continues to thrive as a leading Caribbean beach resort destination.² In this chapter I ask how a destination that is so “under the weather” has managed to keep its leading position as a Caribbean beach paradise in the tourism market. What is the labor involved in producing and securing this position? Who is doing this labor? What are the socioeconomic, political, and environmental effects of maintaining this tourist destination? And at what cost is all of this done?

In asking these questions, I want to explore what it takes to create and maintain the idealized tourist imaginary of the Caribbean beach paradise in Cancún. I begin by exploring Cancún’s 1974 master plan and analyzing how it was used by the Mexican state and international development institutions to strategically scale up the city for global consumption. Second, I describe how, in practice, this has been achieved by implementing predatory planned tourist development that privatizes land and resources. This development method follows the enclosure model, whereby the leisure industry carves out separate spaces for tourism consumption in cities around the world (Bianchi 2003; Britton 1982, 1991; Telfer and Sharpley 2015; Duffy and Smith 2003).³ I argue that in Cancún this planned tourism development model has generated a system of enclosures within enclosures, or nested instruments of flexible privatization, materialized in what I call architectures of escape, like the all-inclusive resorts and high-rise condominiums that populate the city’s tourist zone. I show how these enclosures within enclosures are a direct result of postdisaster opportunism following Hurricanes Gilbert (1989) and Wilma (2005).⁴ Third, I examine how these enclosures within enclosures rely on processes of disciplining and civilizing institutions and bodies that are similar to those observable in both colonial Yucatán and in modern, flexible, just-in-time labor regimes such as the maquiladoras on both sides of the US–Mexico border.⁵ I discuss how Cancún’s predatory tourism development entraps people in a ghettoized geography of global consumption. Cancún’s inhabitants, governments, and expert knowledge are stuck in a sacrificial logic that naturalizes and legitimates land enclosures as well as the extraction of resources and labor (not to mention class, racial, and gender inequalities) in order to promote the city’s reputation as a global tourist destination.

Finally, in the conclusion, I reflect on the sustainability of Cancún’s tourism development in the face of anthropogenic climate change pressures. I show how Cancún’s absolute dependency on enclosed spaces of global consumption has created a distinctive marketization of urban governance that focuses on securing the short-term survival of the city’s destination as a Caribbean beach resort while systematically disregarding the long-term social and ecological threats that permanently afflict this under-the-weather destination.⁶

THE MANUFACTURE OF PARADISE AND THE RISE OF A TOURIST GHETTO

Planning a Beach Paradise

The creation of Cancún began in the early 1970s with the Cancún Project, also known as the Cancún Master Plan (1970–95). The plan was historically informed by a broader development strategy pursued by the Mexican state during the presidency of Miguel Alemán Velasco (1946–52) that sought to use tourism as a key element in the development of the nation’s productive areas. The 1946 development plan marks the beginning of tourism policy in Mexico, but it was not until the mid-1960s that the First National Tourism Plan (1962) pointed to tourism, and particularly to the creation of new tourism destinations, as a direct incentive for foreign investment. This effort focused on the country’s coasts, and particularly on Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta, and Cozumel, “sea, sand and sun destinations” (Castro Alvarez 2007; Guerrero Rodriguez 2012). By the mid-1970s, the Mexican state focused on diversifying its tourist offerings by developing its “virgin” coastal areas (Talledos Sánchez 2012, 124). This state-planned development strategy, known as the Planned Tourism Destination Policy, created five centros integralmente planeados (CIP) across the nation, for which Cancún was to be the pilot case.⁷

The attention to tourism as a planned development strategy by the Mexican federal government did not take place in a void. By the late 1960s, countries in the Caribbean region like Jamaica, Barbados, and the Bahamas had created and consolidated the first mass tourism resort economies. Such countries found in tourism a viable path of modernization and economic sovereignty in the nascent global order (Pattullo 2005; Wong 2015; Telfer and Sharpley 2015). Moreover, in the context of the import substitution industrialization strategies of the 1970s, tourism emerged in many states in the Caribbean as an “industry without chimneys” that could create economic growth by inviting leisure-seeking visitors to escape to “Third World pleasurable peripheries” within the comfort, safety, and risk-free bubble of the familiar (Turner and Ash 1975). The invitation was preceded by large public and private investments guided by the interventionist role of the state in development and its role, ever since, as entrepreneur and banker in the creation of tourism infrastructure side by side with the business community (Berger 2006; Clancy 2001) It is against this background that Mexico turned to and secured tourism as a national development strategy.

Under the direction of Antonio Enríquez Savignac, a Harvard economist, former employee of the Inter-American Development Bank, and later head of the World Tourism Organization, each Mexican CIP had to meet three economic goals: the generation of foreign currency; the creation of a new source of employment; and the stimulation of an economic multiplier effect within the regions where the planned tourism center would be constructed (FONATUR 1982). Each tourism center, moreover, had to be located in a geographical area that could meet three main criteria. First, the location should allow the CIP to have manageable implementation costs. Second, the area should contain exceptional natural assets. And third, it should be economically disadvantaged, with a low rate of economic development or, as they put it, “severe backwardness and marginality” (Clancy 2001).

In the early 1970s, the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, fully immersed in the henequen crisis, met all three criteria. In an interview commemorating the thirty-five years since the creation of Cancún, Fernandez Hurtado, one of the bankers and main visionaries behind the development, explained the selection of the area as f...