Acapulco and Cancun: Two Models of Tourism Development 1920-2010

Barry Carr University of California-Berkeley, EUA & Australia National University, Canberra, Australia

Mesa: Historias de turismo en Mxico Presidente: William Beezley Sesin: sbado 30 de octubre, 8:00 a 10:10 am

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1|Barry Carr

The historical evolution of Acapulco and Cancn can be seen as occupying different ends of a continuum (with all the disadvantages of using continuums in historical analysis). This can be helpful in identifying major issues for research. What follows is a preliminary attempt to identify some of the most significant characteristics of the tourist histories of both sites and to place Acapulco and Cancn at different points in a continuum of developments in tourist history of Mexico. This not an attempt to provide a succinct or comprehensive history of the two sites.
1

Rather it is an effort to set an agenda for research and to identify some of the

salient characteristics of the development histories that connect with the broad issues discussed in an earlier article by this author. Both Acapulco and Cancn developed into major resort areas of national and international significance. 2However, the development path they adopted differs in a number of important

History of tourism in Mexico is underdeveloped both as regards to published scholarly research as well as in the degree of institutional and academic recognition given to the topic. In Spanish there are no global, solidly documented and researched books devoted to reconstructing the historical development of tourism in Mexico. An exception would be the excellent article on Mexico City tourism in the 1920s by Ricardo Prez Montfort , Down Mexico Way. Estereotipos y turismo norteamericano en el Mxico de 1920, Patrimonio Cultural y Turismo: Cuadernos 14: Planeando sobre el turismo cultural (Mxico: CONACULTA, 2006), pp. 13-32. For some useful accounts of legislation dealing with tourism and the changing perspectives of Mexican politicians see Eugenio E. McDonald, Turismo; una recopilacin historiogrfica de conceptos pronunciados por gobernantes mexicanos desde 1823 (Mxico: Editorial Bodoni, 1981) and Gloria Salazar Chiapino, Memoria geneolgica cronolgica e historia del turismo en Mxico de 1929 a 1979 (Mxico, 1984), 2 vols. Alfonso de Jess Jimnez, Turismo, estructura y desarrollo (Mxico, 2nd edition, 1992). A prominent tourism industry historian, Hctor Manuel Romero, has published several useful compendiums of historical anecdotes: Crnica Mexicana de turismo, Vols. 1 y 2 (Mxico, 1977); Enciclopedia Mexicana del Turismo, primera y segunda parte (Mexico: IPN-Limusa, 1988); Miguel Alemn y el turismo (Mexico: Asociacin Mexicana de Hoteles y Moteles, 1983). Another account, essentially made up of personal memoirs, is Miguel Guajardo Bonavides, Relatos y desarrollo del turismo en Mxico (Mxico: Porra, 1995). In English, there are recent signs of serious interest by U.S. historians; as witnessed by the work of Dina Berger. Andrew Wood and Alex Saragoza. See Dina Berger, The Development and Promotion of Mexico's Tourism Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night (New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2006); Andrew Wood & Dina Berger (eds.), Holiday in Mexico: Historical Perspectives on Tourism and Tourist Encounters (Duke University Press, 2009). Alex Saragoza, "The Selling of Mexico: Tourism and the State, 19291952." in Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov (eds.), Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 91-115. 2 The tourism history of Acapulco, neglected for most of the port citys history except for the work of a number of cronistas and aficionados like Alejandro Gmez Maganda , has recently attracted a number of professional scholars. Francisco R. Escuderos, Origen y evolucin del turismo en Acapulco (Mexico City: Universidad Americana de Acapulco, 1998 is not the work of an academic historian but it is an immensely valuable compendium of data on Acapulco; Osbelia Alcaraz Morales, La arquitectura de los hotels de Acapulco 19271959 (Chilpancingo: Universidad Autnoma de Guerrero, 2007) is the first published study of hotel development, a much neglected topic; On environmental issues (and useful but brief discussions of conflict over land between

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2|Barry Carr ways especially with regard to the towns prior histories, their reliance on private and state resources, the interface between visitors and permanent residents, degree of dependence on domestic and national tourism and, finally, the two resort areas engagement with Mexicos archaeological and pre-Hispanic heritage. A Acapulco In Acapulco tourism drew on a very long prior history of non-tourist political, cultural and economic development that was organised around the Spanish colonial trading route linking Asia with New Spain via the Manila Galleon fleets. Acapulco existed as a small coastal town, albeit a very isolated one that was dependent on sea-based communication until the late 1920s and on visits by ships on the route from California to Panama, as well as on local cabotage, a hundred years before the tourist industry developed in a major way in the 1940s. However, Acapulcos isolation prior to the 1930s should not be exaggerated as it has tended to be thus far in the sketchy literature on the towns history. It is true that until the completion of the first road from Mexico City in late 1927 travellers from and to Acapulco faced long (three to seven day) journeys by sea, rail and rough track. However, the port town of Acapulco had always been tightly linked to the Pacific and its nineteenth century elites were nurtured by successive waves of Spanish and North American immigrants that gave the town a strikingly cosmopolitan character from the late nineteenth century onwards almost certainly a major factor in the ports successful insertion into international tourism circuits later in the twentieth century.3
ejidatarios and land developers in the 1940s and 1950s), see the much cited Juan Manuel Ramrez Saz, Turismo y medio ambiente (Mexico City: UAM, 1986). See also Francisco Gmezjara, Acapulco: despojo y turismo, Problemas del Desarrollo, UNAM, No. 19, agosto-octubre, 1974, pp. 126-145. The multi-author collection of essays edited by the German geographer, Erdmann Gormsen, El turismo como factor del desarrollo regional en Mxico (Mainz, 1977) provide valuable empirical data on Acapulco and early Cancn in the mid 1970s. In English recent articles on Acapulco include: Andrew Sackett, The Two Faces of Acapulco During the Golden Age in Gilbert Joseph & Timothy Henderson (eds.), The Mexico Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 500-511; Stephen Niblo & Diane Niblo, Acapulco in Dreams and Reality, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 24: 1, Winter 2008, pp. 31-51; and chapters by Andrew Sackett and Barbara Kastelein in the new collection of essays Holiday in Mexico.
3

Commerce, import exports and ship handling, as well as textile manufacture and many local haciendas were in the hands of merchants from Spain (many from the Basque country) including the Hermanos Fernndez, the

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3|Barry Carr The ancien rgime in Acapulco was certainly seriously challenged by the development of the citys tourist industry following the opening of the first modern road from Mexico City to the port in late 1927. After the early 1930s, the economic benefits derived from tourism would be shared both by selected members of the citys established elites (the Sutter, Link, and Hudson families for example) as well as, increasingly, by new immigrants from Mexico City and elsewhere in Mexico, the U.S. and Europe.
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Representative figures included the

night club and restaurant pioneers, Alfred. C. Blumenthal (Blumy) and Teddy Stouffer 5, and several United State land investors, including early real estate developers such as the Texan land investor, Albert B. Pullen, and Wolf Scheonborn who arrived in Acapulco in 1937 and purchased an entire hillside which he developed into one of the earliest and most successful residential areas Club Deportivo.6 Schoenborns wife in the 1950s and 1960s was a New York heiress and art benefactor and the couple quickly became a key element in Acapulcos high society. Another early US millionaire who developed a passion for Acapulco was the oil mogul, Paul Getty who was associated with the development of the first major hotel on Revolcadero Beach in the Puerto Marqus area that he had first encountered in 1941; the Hotel
Alzuyeta family (owners of the large Ciudad de Oviedo store), and the US immigrants, W.M. Hudson and the Stephenson family. The Sutter family of Sacramento fame (among whom there was a nineteenth century U.S. consul in Acapulco), was another North American family whose descendants married into local polite society. Ricardo Morlet Sutter, the great grandson of the first of the Sutters to settle in Acapulco, was a mayor of Acapulco in the 1960s. 4 On the Hudson family, originally from Arkansas, see Concha Hudson Batani, Del Acapulco de Antes (no place or date of publication). 5 Teddy Stouffer, a Swiss band leader, born in Berne, arrived in Mexico in 1942 via Tijuana. After a few years in Mexico City where he made his first connections with the capitals ne wly burgeoning nightlife and musical scene, Stouffer moved to Acapulco where his career involved managing the La Perla restaurant and cabaret at the Hotel Mirador (the earliest three star hotel in Acapulco) as well as the elegant Hotel Casablanca and, in the 1950s, at the Villa Vera hotel; Alfred Cleveland [A.C.] Blumenthal (Blumie) was a restaurant and night club pioneer in Mexico City in the early 1940s where he began at the Hotel Reforma and its renowned night club Ciros. In Acapulco he managed the hill-side Hotel Casablanca, the first really luxurious hotel constructed in the resort town that opened at Christmas, 1946, and its nightclubs Ciros which was based on his Mexico -City success, and the Beachcomber (with its notorious tortoise races held in the Casablancas swimming pool). Blumenthal had been an immensely successful film and theatrical executive in Hollywood and New York in the 1920s and 1930s and for a while had been married to the Ziegfeld showgirl Peggy Fears. From all accounts, Blumenthal fled to Mexico in early 1941 after experiencing financial difficulties over tax issues; Time Magazine referred to him in 1946 as a taxpatriate, Time, February 11, 1946; New York Times, April 22, 1941, p. 23. In Mexico Blumy developed a close relationship with president-to be Miguel Alemn. Lucius Beebe, Along the Boulevards, Gourmet, April. 1947. Mike Shorris, The Life and Times of Mexico (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), pp. 316-317; Mike Olivers Acapulco, 37-38. See also Dina Bergers excellent essay (A Drink Between Friends) on Mexico City night life in the early and mid 1940s in Nicholas Bloom (ed.), Pleasure, Profit, and Refuge: American Adventures in Post-War Mexico (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 6 Mike Olivers Acapulco, (Writers Press, 2001), p. 19.

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4|Barry Carr Pierre Marqus opened late in 19567. The U.S. businessman, Carl Renstrom, used most of his fortune made in manufacturing hair curlers in the 1930s and 1940s to develop the important Villa Vera Hotel (1954) which attracted Hollywood luminaries in the 1950s and 1960s in the same way as the older Hotel Flamingo had been doing since the 1940s.8 The early involvement in Acapulco in the mid and late 1940s of several key entertainment figures in particular Blumenthal and the Hollywood agent, Bo Roos guaranteed that the film and entertainment worlds love affair with the port town was launched with powerful friends. 9 Cancn (Nest of Serpents in Mayan), on the other hand was, at least superficially, virtually virgin territory before its development as a major beach resort. Hence the frequent references in the publicity and media literature of its early days to Cancn being a utopian project, una poblacin que surgi de la nada, a city of nothing but immigrants - no natives here, all of these being excellent examples of a boosterism that permeated the Mexican and international imagination for several decades from the early 1950s. The area was, indeed, sparsely populated; the total population of the immediate Cancun area, the municipality of Puerto Jurez, was only 117 in 1969. The local population in the hinterland, made up of peasant agricultural producers, was mostly engaged in activities such as extraction of lumber and chicle from nearby forests (80% of the first construction workers were Mayaspeaking chicleros) and on shifting corn (milpa) cultivation. However, the tourist boom was in fact, only the latest of a series of cyclical commodity booms that had long bound the coast of Yucatn and Quintana Roo to the global economy.10
7 8

J. Paul Getty, My Life and Fortunes (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1963). Albert Byron Pullen, originally from Texas, started his real estate career in Mexico City in 1930 and began investing in Acapulco in the mid and late1930s when he bought 750 acres of land on the Las Playas area of Caleta peninsula through his real estate company Fraccionadora de Acapulco. In 1945 Pullen built the Hotel Las Amricas and two years later acquired a financial interest in the operation of the newly-opened Hotel Del Prado in Mexico City. In the 1950s, Pullen and his sons operated the Hotel Tequesquitengo in Morelos. Wolfgang (Wolf) Schoenborn, born in 1904 was a German immigrant who arrived in Mexico in 1935. He made a fortune from sale of real estate in Acapulco. After his arrival in Acapulco in 1937 he bought a huge swathe of land inland from what is now a core area of Acapulco Dorado and developed a golf club, tennis courts and a major land subdivision known as Club Deportivo. Barry Carr, Two Pioneer Real Estate Developers in Acapulco: Al Pullen and Wolf Schoenborn, unpublished ms; 2009; Mike Olivers Acapulco, p. 19. 9 The veteran Acapulco journalist, Mike Oliver, has written: Bo Roos & Blumy had so much influence in Hollywood that almost every movie or television celebrity who had to flee, go on vacation, or on honeymoon, chose Acapulco, Mike Olivers Acapulco, p. 38. 10 For a warning about not exaggerating the empty space dimension of the Mexican Caribbean see Michael Redclift, A Convulsed and Magic Country: Tourism and Resource Histories in the Mexican Caribbean,

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5|Barry Carr Cancn was a state-supervised effort to build an integrated tourist development pole. It was selected, so it has been claimed, by computer on the basis of its climate, beautiful beaches and geographical location vis a vis the US east and southeast and Western Europe, whereas Acapulco, and indeed Mexico tourism before the 1970s, had drawn on California, the South West and especially Texas. Cancn from the very beginning was planned as a resort that would target the US east coast and south-west and, then, western Europe. The first stage of planning of Cancn goes back to 1966-1967 when economists of the central bank, Banco de Mxico, undertook a study of tourism opportunities in Mexico in the context of the boom of tourism in Florida, the Caribbean (Bahamas, Puerto Rico), Hawaii, and Spain. The study was a response to a desperate need to capture foreign exchange and provide employment. By the mid 1960s tourism growth in Mexico - which had traditionally, at least as far as beach tourism was concerned, been based on Acapulco- was worryingly well below the booming levels achieved elsewhere. It grew only 11% in the 1961-1967 period, for example, compared with 24% in the Far East and 46% in Pacific islands (especially Hawaii).
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A paltry 60,000 tourists visited the whole of the Yucatn and Quintana Roo in 1968, while

four million tourists, mostly norteamericanos, flooded Caribbean resorts in the same year. The contrast was both striking and disturbing.12 Antonio Enrique Savignac (1931-2007), a young banker at the Banco de Mxico, was the first key researcher on the Cancn project and travelled extensively throughout Mexico and overseas in 1967 and 1968 as part of a small group which was investigating suitable sites for the development of new integrated tourism development poles. By the end of the 1960s
Environment and History, 11, 2005, pp. 83-97 and the same authors Frontiers: Histories of Civil Society and Nature (Boston: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 131-192. On the chicle industry in the Puerto Morelos area south of the modern town of Cancun see Jennifer Mathews and Lilia Lizama-Rogers, Jungle Rails: A Historic NarrowGauge Railway in Justine Shaw and Jennifer Matthews (eds.), Quintana Roo Archaeology (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005), pp. 112-124. 11 There is an abundant literature on Cancn although almost none of it is written by historians. A sample would include: Daniel Hiernaux-Nicolas, Cancn Bliss, in Dennis R. Judd & Susan F, Feinstein, The Tourist City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 124-139; Rebecca Torres & Janet Henshall Momsen, Gringolandia: Cancn and the American Tourist in Nicholas Bloom, Adventures into Mexico, pp. 58-73; Alicia R. Cruz, The Thousand and One Faces of Cancn, Urban Anthropology, Vol. 25 (3), 1996, pp. 284-310. Mara Bianet Castellanos, Adolescent Migration to Cancn: Reconfiguring Maya Households and Gender Relations in Mexicos Yucatn Peninsula, Frontiers, 2007. 12 The anxieties caused by the boom in Caribbean tourism are forcefully expressed in a 1970 editorial of the trade journal. Hoteles Mexicanos, xxix, 294, March 1970, p. 3.

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6|Barry Carr the Banco de Mxico specialists (significantly they completely ignored the federal Tourism Department completely!) had chosen six possible development sites: Baja California Sur (centered on Los Cabos and Loreto), two sites in the state of Oaxaca (Puerto Escondido and Huatulco), Ixtapa (in Guerrero state -170km north of Acapulco and next door to the older resort village of Zihuatanejo) and, first cab off the rank, Cancn in Quintana Roo. Savignac later became the first Director of FONATUR and then, Minister of Tourism during part of the Miguel de la Madrid presidency. B Acapulcos tourism evolution is slow and uneven, beginning in the late 1920s with the completion of the first Mexico City-Acapulco road in a very rough form in November 1927, although it was not really fully petrolizado and passable until 1935. The port did not take off until the early and mid 1940s, accelerating during the alemanista sexenio in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and reaching its peak development and prestige in the 1960s and early 1970s. The city slowed down in the rest of the 1970s and stagnated thereafter as a result of negative publicity concerning its severe problems of environmental degradation and overcrowding. Acapulco initially drew its tourists from Mexico City 13 where, from the late 1940s, road travel time to the port was becoming short enough (9-10 hours in 1948, reduced to 7 hours by 1954 and in recent years, with the completion of the Autopista del Sol toll road, just 4 hours) to take brief holidays and even long weekend trips feasible, and from an increasing number of US tourists who arrived both by road and increasingly by air via Mexico City. However, the major breakthrough occurred quite late in the piece in the mid 1960s - when direct air services were finally opened from Acapulco to many US cities for the first time. Cancn is very much a late development. Its first hotels welcomed guests in 1974-1975 after a furious four-year burst of infrastructure development. The nearby island of Cozumel is actually the pioneer of beach tourism in this region; it was developed from 1956 onwards on a small scale by, among others, a scion of the important Barbachano family and benefited from

13

In 1932, the Mexico City to Acapulco bus took an uncomfortable 14 hours. See the advertisement at the end of Vito Alessio Robles influential Acapulco en la historia y en la leyenda (Mexico, 1932).

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7|Barry Carr an airstrip built by the US during the Second World War. The islands created the fantasies, and Cancn capitalized on them, two specialists have aptly noted. 14 Overall, the south-east of Mexico -Yucatn, Campeche and Quintana Roo- had long been an underdeveloped area as far as domestic and international tourism was concerned. Although the Yucatn capital, Mrida, and several large monumental Mayan archaeological sites attracted small numbers of tourists in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, the Yucatn peninsula (Yucatn and the Territory and then state of Quintana Roo) had for decades been poorly connected with the rest of Mexico. Moreover, economic conditions in the Yucatn peninsula had worsened in the 1950s and 1960s, with the traditionally important henequn (sisal) industry stagnating badly with a serious impact on rural employment. Not unsurprisingly, then, the Banco de Mxico research team hoped that the development of a major tourist pole would promote regional economic development in the greater Cancn hinterland. Long before Cancn arrived on the scene there had been waves of government and private interest in promoting an ambitious, integrated Caribbean southeast Mexican and Central American tourist transport network, including the planned establishment of ferry boat services from northeastern Yucatn to Cuba, although nothing came of these plans which were given various labels such as Circuito del Caribe. By the early 1960s, the breaking of relations between the U.S. and the Castro-led government followed by the imposition of a U.S. trade embargo on Cuba effectively denied US tourists access to that island, With mounting evidence of tourist saturation in Acapulco, and Mexicos complete failure to tap the expanding Caribbean market, federal government strategy during the presidencies of Gustavo Daz Ordaz (1964-1970) and Luis Echeverra (1970-1976) embraced the development of a Mexican Caribbean resort as vital to the countrys development strategy.15 Cancn has had a more or less continuous and rapid development, admittedly with some serious interruptions due to natural disaster most recently Hurricane Katrina (in 2005); in September 1988 Hurricane Gilbert also caused massive damage. The original resort zone is now considered to be over-built experiencing the same fate as Acapulco (so much for planned development!), and recent initiatives have shifted investment and public attention
14 15

Dachary & Arnaz, El Caribe mexicano, 1998. Schwartz, Pleasure Island, pp. 190-203.

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8|Barry Carr further south of Cancn along the so-called Maya Riviera a cleverly chosen name whose origins are still unclear. C Acapulco was largely the result of a series of uncoordinated private sector investments

over a period of 60 years, albeit that some of the pioneer investors were influential politicians and their cronies. Indeed, tourism was one of the most important areas in which a fragment of the new revolutionary bourgeoisie first consolidated a position in the private sector from the late 1920s onwards partly through the increasingly politicised allocation of bank loans from development bodies like the Banco de Mxico and Nacional Financiera, and through the distribution of profitable government contracts for infrastructure development (particularly road building).
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The expropriation of ejidal land close to the ocean was also a crucial mechanism in the development of private tourism and hotel properties as well as in the development of real estate in general. Indeed, the best known, although still insufficiently studied, example of tourisms impact on urban development and land tenure via the expropriation of ejidatarios is that of Acapulco. The core urban center of Acapulco (or fundo legal) in the early 1940s was small and surrounded by a series of ejidos (land reform units) that had been granted to peasants, agricultural workers and small holders in the agrarian reforms of the late 1920s and 1930s. Much of this ejidal land stretched to and along the coats-line. The tourist expansion of the city beyond the small historic core centered on the Zcalo and ayuntamiento, therefore, in so far as it required access to peasant-held land, was effectively blocked by the ejidal heritage which had been designed to improve the welfare of the agrarian poor and to build a political support basis for the young revolutionary state. The solution to this problem found in the mid 1940s was simple if brutal. The powerful Junta Federal de Mejoras Materiales (JFMM), which drove the tourist development of Acapulco under the leadership of Melchor Perrusqua, argued, successfully, that the best way to gain access to beach front and near beach land and to raise money to cover the urbanisation and infrastructure of a modern tourist city was through expropriation of ejidal landholdings in
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Carlos Martnez Assad et al., Revolucionarios fueron todos (Mexico City: SEP-80, 1982), see especially the chapter on Almazn by Mario Ramrez Roncao.

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9|Barry Carr the public interest (por utilidad pblica), land which the JFMM argued, was not in any case being used for agricultural purposes (a wild exaggeration), and to sell the resulting land parcels for residential and tourist development. In this way, by paying ejidatarios almost nothing and selling the resulting land parcels at high prices, the Junta would be able to raise the substantial cash sums necessary for infrastructure development that would otherwise not have been available. 17 Although the first expropriations of ejidal land took place in 1932 as well as in the last year of the Crdenas sexenio (when the first of several incremental attacks on the Icacos ejido was made) and in the early 1940s, the major assault came once President Miguel Alemn assumed the presidency. On January 28, 1947, just two months after Alemn took office, the federal government gazetted its approval of the JFMM plan for the gradual expropriation of eleven ejidos, Pie de la Cuesta, El Jardn, Santa Cruz, El Progreso, El Placer, La Garita, Icacos, El Veladero, Las Cruces, El Marqus and Revolcadero for subsequent urban development by the Junta.18 Five years later, most of the ejidatarios had lost their land in exchange for a house and promises of modest financial compensation, some of which was never delivered. For example, in the case of the ejidatarios of the Puerto Marqus ejido that had been created in June 1931 using lands taken from the Stephenson Brothers (an influential local acapulqueo family of US origins), only a portion of the ejido residents were recognized as eligible for compensation. Many of the peasants who did receive compensation ended up working as laborers on the granjas established by the new private owners, or abandoned agriculture completely. Protest by ejidatarios and peasant organizations were generally unsuccessful.19

17

Melchor Perrusqua was an absolutely fundamental actor in the development of Acapulco in the 1940s and 1950s. As head of the Junta Federal de Mejoras Materiales he enjoyed unfettered access to Miguel Alemn who became a close personal friend. The JFMM ruled with an iron fist (so its critics argued) over the development of the public works infrastructure and land resources of the port city. Perrusqua remained a powerful figure long after Alemn left the presidency. He was, for example, one of the three key actors involved in the early planning and execution of the bold Ciudad Satlite residential development north west of Mexico City in the mid 1950s on land much of which belonged to Alemn. Mario Pani, Historia oral de la Ciudad de Mxico, 1940-1990 (Mexico City: Instituto Mora, ), p. ?? 18 Diario Oficial de la Federacin, 28 enero de 1947, tomo CLX, no. 23. 19 A flavor of the administrations response to peasant complaints is given in the corre spondence between Melchor Perrusqia and Alemn in 1949 concerning the La Garita, Archivo General de la Nacin (AGN), Mexico City, Fondo Presidencial Miguel Alemn, v 545.22/30.

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10 | B a r r y C a r r The drive to privatise ejidal land continued to disrupt the internal economy and political unity of ejidos throughout the rest of the century, facilitating the growth of new private land subdivisions to the south of the city center especially in the new luxury Punta Diamante development launched in the period 1990-2010. The tourism industry, contrary to expectations and promises, has been unable to absorb the labor force created by the displaced ejidatarios and the continuing expropriation of ejidal land at La Poza, Barra Vieja, Llano Largo and Plan de los Amates ejidos has intensified socio-economic and environmental damage. 20 In fact, the first urbanizations for private housing in Acapulco had begun in the late 1930s in the Las Playas area between La Quebrada and the Caleta beach area in the older north-western area of the town. In the 1940s and 1950s, more private housing fraccionamientos (for example, Mozimba, Vista Alegre, Costa Azul, El Faralln, Magallanes, Playa Encantada, Granjas del Marqus, Club Deportivo) were opened towards the broader expanses of the long beach front (Playa Hornos) to the south-east where the main thrust of development would take place in the 1950s, 1960s and beyond in what would become known as Acapulco Dorado. The history of modern Acapulco is also, in part, the history of the development of the burguesa revolucionaria, the constellation of politicians and military men who used their ties to the increasingly interventionist federal state to enrich themselves and their friends and families. Two revolutionary generals- Abelardo Rodrguez (military commander and then state governor in Baja California and a major promoter of casino and tourist development in Tijuana, Mexicali and Ensenada), and Juan Andreu Almazn, were among the many early revolutionary politicians to become tourist entrepreneurs. Almazns involvement in Acapulco dates from 1931-2 when he was Minister of Communications and Public Works in the Pascual Ortz Rubio presidency. Among the road building projects he supervised was a program of improvements to the still rather primitive road to Acapulco first opened in late 1927. Shortly after arranging the visit to Acapulco of President Ortiz Rubio in February 1931, a trip that lasted two full weeks and in which a
20

Mara Teresa Vzquez Castillo, Land Privatization in Mexico: Urbanization, Formation of Regions and Globalization in Ejidos (London: Routledge, 2004), chapter provides an excellent account of the privatisation carried out through expropriation at the La Poza ejido on the south-west edge of Acapulco.

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11 | B a r r y C a r r presidential comitiva of no fewer than 56 people travelled to the port city, Almazn benefited from one of the first expropriations of private (not ejidal in this case) land in the port city. construction of the Papagayo hotel.
22 21

He acquired a large block of property alongside the Hornos beach where he would soon begin Almazns investments in Acapulco (the real estate company, Compaa Impulsora de Acapulco, and the Hotel Papagayo, the first significant hotel to be built close to a beach) and in Monterrey (Nuevo Len state) grew steadily through the late 1930s and 1940s. However, they came unstuck during the presidency of Miguel Alemn, when Almazn fell foul of the Veracruz politician and his crucial Acapulco ally, Melchor Perrusqua, the second head of the key Acapulco planning and investing body, Junta Federal de Mejoras Materiales, which controversially dominated tourism development from its foundation in 1942 until the mid 1970s. Another once powerful politician and entrepreneur who also felt the wrath of President Miguel Alemn was Maximino Avila Camacho, the brother of Manuel Avila Camacho who had preceded Alemn as president in 1940-1946. Maximino occupied the sensitive and strategic Ministry of Communications from 1941 until his death (from poisoning it was rumored) in 1945 and he had a long established relationship with private businessmen, including the cinema investor, William Jenkins, and the print and radio media entrepreneur, Rmulo OFarrill. In 1949 President Alemn ordered the dismantling of a bridge that linked the Caleta beach to a vulgar luxury house that Maximino had built, illegally, on a small island facing Caleta; the house was later confiscated from Maximinos widow.23

21

On this extraordinary presidential junket to Acapulco, the first really large presidential acknowledgment of the port citys significance, see the daily coverage in Exclsior, January 3- 17, 1931. 22 Fideicomiso Plutarco Elias Calles-Fernando Torreblanca, PEC, Exp 192, Inventario 192, Leg 2/2, Irene Viuda de Escudero al General P. E. Calles, December 25, 1931. Irene Escudero accused Almazn of being in league with President Abelardo Rodriguez, the state governor of Guerrero and a group of capitalistas de la region lagunera; Justino Fernndez, Aportacin a la monografa de Acapulco (originally published in 1932 and issued in a facsimile edition by CONACULTA/INBA in 2004); Anituy Rebolledo Ayerdi, El casino de Almazn, El Sur (Acapulco), February 2, 2006. 23 The first head of the Junta was former President Emilio Portes Gil. The Junta Federal de Mejoras was frequently referred to as a state within a state by critics and allies alike. See Palpitaciones, The original contract which gave Margarita Richardi a twenty six year long lease on the island and permission to operate beach concessions on Caleta and Caletilla is in AGN: Ramo Miguel Alemn Valdes, 545.22/43. A U.S. entrepreneur, Morris Silverman, resident in Acapulco since 1946, built and operated a small aquarium and zoo for a number of years in the early 1950s using Maximinos island palacete

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12 | B a r r y C a r r Even more strategic political allies were to be found among the family and business associates of President (1946-1952) Miguel Alemn himself. These included Ramn Beteta, Minister of Hacienda who was one of the earliest non-military politicians to build a magnificent house in the town; Gilberto Limn, Minister of Defense and a major player in a controversial expropriation of the Icacos ejido for use by the army; Senator Carlos Serrano, a close confidant of Alemn, the head of Mexicos first national security agency, the Direccin Federal de Seguridad, and a gangster-like figure widely believed to be involved in drug trafficking; Antonio Ruz Galindo, another Alemn cabinet minister who was a manufacturer of metal office furniture, a hotel operator in Veracruz, and founder of the peak body of Mexican hoteleros, the Asociacin Mexicana de Hoteles AMT; Fernando Casas Alemn, Mayor of Mexico City and a fellow jarocho; Antonio Carrillo Flores; Soledad Avila Camacho, wife of President Manuel Avila Camacho; Manuel Gual Vidal, Minister of Education; Antonio Daz Lombardo, Alemns Director of the new social security fund, IMSS, and a major pioneer in Mexicos bus transport industry, as well as a founder in September 1934 of the airline Aeronaves de Mxico which pioneered air travel from Mexico City to Acapulco, and many other allies. 24 The Alemn sexenio in fact proved to be one of the most influential and long lasting political recruiting grounds and networks in the post 1930s era and a passion for Acapulco, tight cohabitation between politicians and businessmen and a taste for showy lifestyles and beautiful women were the distinguishing marks of this generation.25 Among the Alemn business associates who invested early in Acapulco were Gilberto Guajardo, the Mexico City Chevrolet distributor and Acapulco franchisor for Pepsi Cola, who was also the major shareholder in the handsome seven-story Hotel Club de Pesca which opened in Acapulco in 1945-6.
24

26

Another was the Asturian immigrant, Manuel Surez

Ramn Betetas home in Acapulco was built well before President Alemn obtained his own ocean -front house in Puerto Marqus in late 1949, with its private beach and mooring for the presidential yacht Sotovento (which he purchased in 1947 at a cost of US$600,000). Daz Lombardo built the Hotel La Marina in 1934-5, the earliest modern hotel located in the old city center of Acapulco. 25 Jorge Gil, Samuel Schmidt and Jorge Castro, La red de poder mexicano: El caso de Miguel Alemn, Revista Mexicana de Sociologa, Vol. 55:3, Julio-Septiembre 1993, pp. 103-117; Rod Ai Camp, Education and Political Recruitment in Mexico: The Alemn Generation, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 18:3, August 1976, pp. 295-321. 26 The Hotel no longer exist, its place having been taken by a residential development built around a marina.

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13 | B a r r y C a r r (Miguel Alemn was padrino to one of his sons) who had bought the Casino de la Selva in Cuernavaca from former president Abelardo Rodrguez in the mid 1930s after its casino concession had been overturned in the first days of the new Cardenas administration, as well as the Hotel Mocambo in Veracruz in the 1930. His construction company Techo Eterno Eureka made its first big foray in Acapulco in the late 1930s and above all in the middle of WWII when it was awarded the contract for increasing the perennially scarce water supply for the city. In later years Surez managed to buy up a large body of land in the La Laja area. The radio and then TV magnate, Manuel Emilio Azcrraga (El Tigre), also became a major investor in Acapulco; among his many properties were two major hotels, the Hotel Ritz and Auto Hotel Ritz. The banker and industrialist Carlos Trouyet who acted as Alemns de facto private financial adviser was also a major investor in Acapulco where he initiated the development of the residential fraccionamiento and later hotel complex known as Las Brisas in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. business figure. 28 Together this coterie of businessmen, investors and movers and shakers was the core of a newly shaped urban bourgeoisie that flourished during the alemanista frenesi of development in the late 1940s and early 1950s. For the first time since the coming of the Mexican revolution in 1910-11 the ethos of the clase politica was oriented towards a frank embrace of money making, and conspicuous money making at that. The post-WWII import substitution industrialization push, fuelled by government contracts and substantially increased investments by US and international capital provided rich opportunities for profit making and graft. The presidents own fascination for the world of stage and especially screen (and its female stars!), the combination of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema and the emergence of
27

27

Finally, the Hollywood and Las Vegas personality, Moe Morton

who often represented Miguel Alemn in business transactions, was another early Acapulco

Carlos Trouyet was a key shareholder in the Banco Comercial Mexicano and in enterprises such as Telmex and the Compaa Industrial de Orizaba. The Diamond-Studded Coyote, Time, December 6, 1963. Together with the Hilton Hotel executive and ex U.S. Army Intelligence operative, Colonel Frank M. Brandstetter, Trouyet developed the Las Brisas hotel (it opened in December 1954) into one of the most successful and profitable emblems of Acapulcos status as a premier resort of wealthy politicians, entertainment stars and business tycoons. Brandy, Our Man in Acapulco: The Life and Times of Colonel Frank M. Brandstetter; Olga Valenzuela, El tesoro de Acapulco, El Universal, May 30, 2004. 28 Weekend (Mexico City), Vol. 1: 3, Christmas 1946-1947, p. 14; Caleta Rotogrfico Turstico, tomo iii, no 46, May 1965 and tomo iv, no. 55, May 1966.

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14 | B a r r y C a r r new media like television combined with the arrival in Mexico of American-style advertising and marketing strategies to give the alemanista bourgeoisie and its lifestyle an uninhibited and showy texture.29 Potent symbols of the new bourgeoisie included the development of a new residential area in southern Mexico City known as the Jardines Del Pedregal that was constructed on the bizarre volcanic landscape on which the new Ciudad Universitaria was also built in the last years of the Alemn regime. It was no coincidence that many of the leading figures in the alemanista business circle, such as Carlos Trouyet and Bernardo Quintana (an architect and founder of the ICA building and construction company) bought houses in the new Pedregal fraccionamiento. They and Mario Pani, Alemans favorite architect, made both Acapulco and the new fraccionamiento of the Pedregal impressive showpieces of Mexican modernism. But the greatest booster and also one of the largest beneficiaries of Acapulcos development was President Miguel Alemn himself. During his presidential campaign tour of 1945, tourism issues were given unprecedented attention and it was no coincidence that the tourism panels of his Round Table campaigning tour in 1945, which met with local business people and functionaries all over the country, were held at Acapulco. Once installed in the presidential palace Alemn showed an extraordinary level of interest in Acapulco making no fewer than 32 visits to the city on both business and pleasure. His major ally and executor there was Melchor Perrusqua who would soon boast of being the second president of Mexico. The crowning event was Alemns presidential visit to Acapulco in February 1949 when he inaugurated the expensive and impressive sea front drive or promenade that would soon carry his name - Costera Miguel Alemn. 30 While Alemn was greeted with wild enthusiasm by the fuerzas vivas on this 1949 visit, voices of dissent were already raising issues about the uneven benefits flowing from tourist development. Apart from protests by ejidatarios facing expropriation, there were already public campaigns led by poor urban residents (some of them involving Mara de la O
29

Julio Moreno, Yankee Dont Go Home. Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Alfonso Prez Mndez & Alejandro Aptiln, Las Casas del Pedregal 1947-1968 (Mxico: Editorial Gustavo Gilli de Mxico, 2007), chapter 3. 30 For coverage of the visit, see Palpitaciones Porteas, no. 112, 28 de febrero de 1949, p. 3, no 113, marzo de 1949, p. 1.

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15 | B a r r y C a r r as a community leader), as well as a general sentiment that major infrastructure projects, especially the Costera, were destroying public access to large areas of beach front where the clases populares had traditionally exercised their rights to leisure and pleasure. 31 The substantial increase in tourist visits to the city, especially by automobile (and which derived most benefit from the road works introduced by the Junta) soon pushed protests into the background, at least temporarily. Whereas before 1949 an average of 15-20,000 tourists visited Acapulco in the busy Semana Santa puente, after the opening of the Costera in 1949 that figure almost doubled immediately to 30,000.32 The random, laissez-faire approach taken in Acapulco, so critics have always maintained, encouraged uncoordinated development, excessive population growth that was not regulated, uneven and often very delayed development of infrastructure (especially electricity supply, and drinking water), as well as poor control over the disposal of urban waste and aguas negras. 33 Indeed, it was partly as a reaction against the chaotic development approach taken in Acapulco that the Mexican government opted for very different, top-down, state-centered model in the case of Cancn and the other integrated megaprojects launched in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact the enormous power exercised in Acapulco by the Junta Federal de Mejoras Materiales between 1942 and the early 1970s invites a comparison with the role of FONATUR in Cancn. Cancn, on the other hand, was, from the start, an initiative of a federal government body; FONATUR was established in 1974 but it was preceded by several earlier versions e.g. INFRATUR (founded in 1969). FONATUR and its predecessor bodies laid out the basic infrastructure and direction of the project, and secured and distributed funding to private investors. Later, private capital (local and foreign) dominated development in Cancn

31

Los Acapulqueos son expulsados de Acapulco, Acapulco. Revista Quincenal Ilustrada del Sur, no. 10, 1 de diciembre de 1949, p. 8; No son regalo las obras en el puerto, Palpitaciones Porteas, no. 115, abril de 1949, p. 1; Las mejoras de Acapulco se fincan sobre lgrimas, miserias y atropellos, Acapulco. Revista Quincenal Ilustrada, no. 20, 1 de mayo de 1950. 32 30,000 turistas tuvo Acapulco, Palpitaciones Porteas, no. 112, 28 de febrero de 1949, p. 4. 33 Ernesto Valenzuela Valdiviesos description of Acapulcos planning and architectural style is eloquent: tipologa arquitectnica discordante, imagen urbana deteriorada, mobiliario urbano escaso y de tipologas diferentes, contaminacin visual por sealamiento commercial y publicitario, escaso aprovechamiento de entornos paisajsticos de alto valor escnico, See his Los intereses part iculares y las cuestiones polticas como obstculos para el ordenamiento territorial el caso de Acapulco, Guerrero (unpublished paper).

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16 | B a r r y C a r r although FONATURs omnipresent influence and its insistence on setting rules and shaping policy has created what some critics call a state within a state in Cancn, which raises interesting questions about the nature of the urbanisation process itself. Indeed, while Cancn has effectively become a very large urban settlement in a very short period with rates of population growth that exceed all other areas in Mexico, the term city to describe Cancn is quite problematic especially in view of the marked failure to develop the medical, educational/cultural, leisure and political infrastructure let alone the provision of adequate housing for its permanent residents that we associate with the term city. Income data for Cancn, and indeed for all the global integrated tourism poles, clearly show that the bulk of government resources were channeled to FONATUR rather than the local municipal government during the period 1974-1990. 34 E. Acapulco was primarily directed towards servicing Mexican domestic markets although it has always had an attraction for world elites (especially in the film entertainment industry) and particularly in its earliest stage (1947-1960).
35

Today, it still is a resort that offers

accommodation for Mexicans of modest means, and is quite unique in this respect as anyone can see if they watch the buses leave the Southern Bus Station in Taxquea, a suburb of

34

Alfonso de Jess Jimnez Marinez, Desarrollo turstico y sustentabilidad: el caso de Mxico (Mxico: Miguel Angel Porra, 2005), pp. 33-37. After 1990 municipal income began to outstrip resources available to FONATUR in Cancn. 35 The role played by wealthy deep sea fishermen and the mainly Hollywood film community in developing an image of glamour and exclusivity to Acapulco awaits its historian. Acapulcos reputation as a fishermans paradise was already well established by 1937 and 1938, and news of the extraordinarily rich opportunities for catching such varieties as pez vela brought a steady stream of fishing enthusiasts to the port even before World War II. Mexican American Review, December 1938, pp. 12, 22. While writers like Zane Gray had discovered Acapulco and Zihuatanejo in the 1930s, the earliest film stars to discover Acapulco were Errol Flynn, whose yacht excursions to the port cover the period period 1942-1948. Early U.S. films to use Acapulco as a backdrop included Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948) whose star, Johnny Weissmuller, would make Acapulco his home in the 1960s; Lady From Shanghai, starring Rita Hayworth and directed by Orson Welles (who also acted in the film) from October 1946 to Spring 1947 and partly filmed on board Errol Flynns yacht Zaca; Captain From Castille (filmed in 1947 and released the next year starring Tyrone Power and Jean P eters; John Fords The Fugitive (1947 starring Dolores del Ro and Henry Fonda). Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, a community of Hollywood film personalities (John Wayne, his agent and prominent Las Vegas personality, Boo Roos; film actors, Johnny Weissmuller, Merle Oberon (who later married Bruno Pagliai, one of the key alemanista insider businessmen) and Cary Grant, were just some of the figures involved) would establish their lairs in hotels like the pioneering Flamingo on La Quebrada (which was actually closed to the general public for about six years between 1954 and 1960) and the Villa Vera Racquet Club. Hollywood Reporter, November 19, 1946 See Hollywood en Acapulco, Nao. La Revista de Acapulco,Vol. 1, No. 3, 1 de diciembre, 194?

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17 | B a r r y C a r r Mexico City, every 10 minutes in peak hours and even more frequently during the mad semana santa dash to the coast by families. The eminently popular character of Acapulco is also, to some extent, facilitated by the citys location vis a vis Mexico City; since the early 1950s weekend travel to Acapulco has been one of the lifelines of the resort, all the more so now that the town is only 4-5 hours by car or bus from the monster capital of Mexico City and its 21 million inhabitants.36 Cancn, however, was designed from the start to appeal to international and domestic grand tourism especially from Canada and the U.S. but also from the wealthiest Mexican groups; two thirds of the first 21 hotels built in Cancn were luxury 5 star properties. Its emergence happened in the aftermath of the loss of Cuba as a resort area after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, which removed an important tourist destination from the U.S. gaze between 1959 and 1960, and also alongside the vigorous growth of the wider Caribbean as a major resort zone (especially the Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Dutch West Indies etc). Beginning in the 1980s, Cancn also became a major showpiece of modern Mexico and was used by successive Mexican governments as the location for ministerial, presidential, Heads of State and high-level executive meetings, rivalling even Mexico City.37 The Maya Riviera, south of Cancn, then developed in the early 1990s as an attraction for more adventurous tourists, including many Europeans. The Riviera Maya has come to rival the supersaturated Cancn and it now stretches south all the way to Tulum (with the town of Playa del Carmen in the middle). By 2008 the Riviera Maya will have more hotel rooms than the original Cancn development itself. This development is closely tied up with the growing popularity of alternative tourism and eco-tourism of the Post-Fordist variety that has spawned numerous alternative tourist projects in this area. The top end of the market became much less vital a component of the market with the move to a broader mass-based tourism based on ever more air charters (which began in 1984-6) and with the arrival of cheap allinclusive packages, the rise of time-shares, condominiums (the second home market), and

36 37

Cindy Pacheco y Citlal Giles, Turismo nacional, el oxgeno de Acapulco, La Jornada, June 4, 2007. Fernando Mart, Cancn: un utpico proyecto de banqueros convertido en realidad, Uno Ms Uno, March 21, 1985.

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18 | B a r r y C a r r above all the development of the Spring-Breakers market which brought thousands of U.S. college students to the resort for a week of heavy partying and hedonism. 38 At Acapulco visitors and residents and workers have lived within viewing distance of each other. Since much of the core area of the city on the ocean-front or close to it was occupied by peasant ejidatarios until the late 1940s, the expansion of tourism brought conflict between hotel owners, real estate developers (fraccionadores) and peasant land reform beneficiaries. Unlike in Cancn, therefore, tourism necessarily involved long and bitter struggles between newer entrepreneurs and existing claimants. From the mid 1950s rapid urbanization and immigration produced a sharp growth of land invasions (paracaidismo) and the founding of informal settlements on the hills above the bay, especially in the so-called Ampitheatre, from where magnificent views of the harbor could be had!). The earliest and by far the most spectacular example of a squatter movement was that led by Alfredo Lpez Cisneros, El Rey Lopitos, a wily squatter leader in the La Laja colonia which he had helped found in January 1958 and over which he ruled as a successful cacique at the service of his favored PRI politicians until his murder in 1967.
39

The development of squatting increased pressures for

resettlement of the workers and public servants who lived in the new colonias of the hilly area known as the Ampitheatre, and the first major segments of the hillside residents of La Laja, 120,000 people, were relocated, after a struggle, to a newly, although poorly, urbanised area on the south-eastern edge of the city known as Renacimiento in 1980. This resettlement and the establishment of the El Veladero national park to the northeast of the Anfiteatro that was designed to halt irregular urban settlement did nothing to halt the waves of occupation of higher ground and the hillsides around the old core of Acapulco soon sprouted new colonias as can be seen on any casual inspection of the city today. Given the increased vulnerability of residents in the poorer areas of the city were, not surprisingly, they were among the most badly affected by natural disasters such as Hurricane Paulina which killed over 180 residents

38

For an anxious report on the declining per capita average expenditures of tourists to Cancn in the last 5 years, Se reconocen prdida de importancia de Cancn como generador de divisas, May 14, 2006. http://www.noticaribe.com.mx/cancun/2006/05/reconocen_perdida_de_importanc_html#more 39 Guerrero. Un estado dentro de otro, Poltica, ao iii, no. 60, 15 de octubre de 1962, pp. 27-28. For a biographical sketch of Lopitos see Enrique Daz Clavel, El Rey Lopitos (Acapulco: Comisin Editorial Municipal,1997).

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19 | B a r r y C a r r and displaced nearly 300, 000 others, mostly precaristas in October 1997.40 The areas of resettlement, such as Ciudad Renacimiento, colonias La Sbana, Emiliano Zapata and Llano Largo were among the worst affected. In contrast, Cancn, planners intended from the start to separate tourists from the permanent residents. The first stage of the development plan placed all the luxury hotels on a barrier island, a long almost 12 km. strip of beach-front land that enclosed a lagoon. The hotel workers and town resident occupied a town centre located to the west and north-west of the lagoon, a bus or taxi ride away from the hotel strip. 5. Acapulco did not draw on its hinterland for cultural and historic resources that might attract tourists. It was purely an enclave, oriented towards the ocean and making use of water and beaches. There is little archaeological and pre-Hispanic infrastructure close by at least of the monumental kind that attracts tourists and state financial resources for research and restoration. A few museums have been established, the oldest and the most visited site being the fortress of San Diego which was opened as a museum in 1954; a newish archaeological museum has been inaugurated in the last six years but it appears to have had little impact on tourists. There are now signs that there is a concerted strategy to reinsert Acapulco into the circuit of historically anchored tourist sites with elaborate plans for commemorating the Acapulco-Manila Nao or Galleon route. Cancn, on the other hand, is located in a huge zone of enormous archaeological significance, known as Mayaland/Yucatn. The key sites are: Chichn Itz, Uxmal, and closer to Cancn, the site of Tulum, 140 km to its south on the Caribbean coast of the state of Quintana Roo. Tulum, in fact, which overlooks the beaches and turquoise waters of the Caribbean is, one recent account put its, arguably Mexicos most heavily visited archaeological site with 8,000 visitors per day in the peak tourist season, exceeding even the visitor figures for Teotihuacn.41 Proximity to such a rich archaeological patrimony provides Cancn and Riviera Maya visitors with an opportunity for instant historical and archaeological gratification in sharp contrast with Acapulco. Indeed, the very earliest government tourism

40

Virginia Garca Acosta (coord.), La construccion social de riesgos y el huracan Paulina (Mexico City: CIESAS, 2005). See especially the chapter by Claudia Villegas Delgado, Recuperando el paraso perdido. 41 Cameron Walker, Marketing Maya Heritage, Anthropology News, 46 (5), May 2005, p. 10;

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20 | B a r r y C a r r publicity campaigns proclaimed that Cancn was the site where Mayan Kings wintered, a claim that elicited derisive responses from local archaeologists although the modest vestiges of the ancient Maya civilization visible even within the tourist-centered areas of the city (two platforms of a Maya ruin located on the 12th hole of Pok-Ta-Pok golf course, as well as pieces of a Mayan shrine cleverly incorporated into the architecture of the Hotel Camino Real) serve to remind tourists of the primordial origins of the Yucatan peninsula .42 While the archaeological hinterland was less important in Cancns earliest years in the 1970s, as post-Fordist tourists began to demand more than just sol y playa - sand and sea (plus, one should add, sex), the archaeological patrimony and heritage tourism, especially in the eco-tourism arena, proved to be a godsend - albeit that these new tourism niches are embedded in and can further deepen economic, political and socio-cultural power relations that undermine the benevolent intentions of their proponents. Many of the less well known archaeological sites between Tulum and Playa del Carmen are located on private lands sometimes ejidal land but more often land owned by commercial investors for example, Pole in Xcaret and half of the ruins of Xel-Ha which are located within the Xel-Ha ecopark mass tourism can inflict enormous damage on ecologically sensitive archaeological sites.
43

And

44

Nevertheless, in the endless search for distinctive features and specialized niches that can increase the market appeal of tourist locations, the proximity of Cancn and the Riviera Maya to major archaeological sites was difficult to ignore and, most importantly, it clearly distinguished Caribbean Mexico from other tourist locations in the Bahamas, Jamaica, Cuba,
42

Marlise Simons, Letter from Cancn Island, Washington Post, June 15, 1976. The quotations are from Fodors 2005 edition of its Cancn, Cozumel, Yucatan Peninsula guide (Random House, 2005), p. 6. 43 Naomi Adelson, Viaje a las playas prohibidas: la Riviera Maya: slo para los muy ricos, La Jornada, 20 de mayo de 2001 44 Cameron Walker, Archaeological Tourism; Looking for Answers Along Mexicos Maya Riviera, National Association for the Practice of Anthropology Bulletin, Vol. 23, no. 1, 2005, pp. 60-76 (a version of this article appeared as a chapter in Tim Wallace (ed.), Tourism and Applied Archaeology: Linking Theory and Practice (NAPA, 2005).. For a critical examination of ecotourism in the era of neoliberalism, see Paige West and James G. Carrier, Ecotourism and Authenticity: Getting Away from it All?, Current Anthropology, Vol. 45: no. 4, August-October 2004, pp. 483-498; Aline Magnoni, Traci Ardren and Scott Hutson, Tourism in the Mundo Maya: Inventions and (Mis)Representations of Maya Identity and Heritage, Archaeologies, Vol. 3:3, 2007, pp. 353-383; Adolf W. Ehrentraut, Maya Ruins, Cultural Tourism and the Symbolism of Collective Identities, Culture, XVI (I), 1996, pp. 15-30. Quetzil E Castaeda has been one of the most prolific critical scholars who have examined the functioning of Chichn Itz, In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichen Itz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). One of the many merits of Castaedas work is its insistence on seeing Mayan subalterns as active participants and agents in the tourism process.

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21 | B a r r y C a r r Puerto Rico, the Dutch and French West Indies and the Dominican Republic where the material culture and especially the monumental architecture of Mesoamerican civilizations is lacking. A key feature in the cultural repertoire of Mexican nationalism from the late porfiriato (1890s to-1911) onwards has been the excavation and reconstruction of archaeological sites and monuments of the pre-Hispanic past a process that has always been closely integrated into the nationalist project that accompanied the Mexican Revolution. Even in the city of Cancn itself, now a large metropolis of nearly 900,000 people, there were attempts from the very beginning to recall the Mayan pre-Columbian past with Cancns major streets named after Mayan archaeological sites, gods and other symbols (hence Avenidas Bonampak, Cob, Palenque etc). The Yucatn peninsulas Mayan heritage had been a tourism asset as far back as the 1920s and 1930s. The key Yucatecan family the large Barbachano clan that includes several tourism pioneers in Yucatn as well as artists, film makers and politicians had played a major role in promoting tourism at Chichn and Uxmal and in Mrida. In 1923 the earliest of the family tourism pioneers, Francisco Barbachano Gmez Rul, with the support of the socialist state governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto, built the first dedicated road which connected the rail line stop at Dzits to Chichn; his son-in law, Fernando Barbachano Pen, set up the first tourist hotel at the site, Mayaland in the early 1930s and the Mayaland, together with another hotel conversion carried out at the Hacienda Chichn Itz which had been used by the archaeologists and the scientists of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in the 1920s and 1930s, have since then enjoyed a privileged position as accommodation providers right on the edges of the Mayan site. 45
45

Kukulcan,

A flavor of the journey required to reach Chichen Itz in 1931 is given by this extract from Stuart Chases classic account Mexico: A Study of Two Civilizations We take a little Yucatecan train on a narrow-gauge track, with a wood-burning engine sporting a Civil War smokestack like an inverted umbrella. Four hours and 140 kilometers from Merida, the city of windmills, east across the low, thorny, flower-draped jungle, brings us to Dzitas, a charming Maya village of oval huts, whitewashed and palm-roofed, set in immaculately clean compounds. From here a Ford truck bumps us twelve miles deeper into the bush, until suddenly the cream- and orange-streaked pyramid of Chichn looms over the trees. Stuart Chase, Mexico: A Study of Two Civilizations, chapter II, DR El Colegio de Mxico, A. C.

22 | B a r r y C a r r The current heirs of the family have also been waging a long-standing battle over claims to ownership of the land on which the Chichn Itz site is located. During the controversy over ownership of the site, INAH officials acknowledged that over two thirds of the archaeological sites over which it exercised custodianship were in private hands. By the end of 2007 INAH seemed poised to expropriate the land on which the Chichn site stood.
46

But

while the Barbachanos appear to have lost the battle over ownership of the land at Chichn Itz, some of its younger members continue to be successful tourist promoters and land developers; Fernando Barbachano Herrero, son of Fernando Barbachano Gmez Rul, was one of the earliest developers of land on the Riviera Maya where he bought 27 hectares of beachfront land for six cents a metre (which was worth US$400 a metre by 2003) and on it he constructed the first major tourism development at Playa del Carmen, Playacar 1.47 Heritage, or patrimony tourism, enhanced sometimes by listing of sites as World Heritage locations, raises a variety of issues about who controls the production of meaning and authenticity. This was seen particularly clearly in the course of 2007 in the much publicized (at least in Mexico) competition for the naming of a new group of international wonders of the world, a competition strongly supported by the Mexican federal government and by Mexican television networks. Chichn Itz was voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. 48 So important have the archaeological pilgrimages become that tourist industry spokespeople have frequently suggested that the solution to inadequate funding of archaeological research and maintenance of sites by INAH is privatization of the Mayan sites.49 The proximity of Cancn to archaeological sites also allows the Mexican state and operators of tourism promotion infrastructures to advertise the zone as a multi-purpose tourist area. Hence the importance of concepts like the Ruta Maya developed initially in the early

46

The best detailed reconstruction of the complex legal, economic and political saga surrounding the Mexican government, U.S. citizens like Edward Thompson and Silvanus Morley, INAH and the Barbachano family is Lisa Breglia, Monumental Ambivaalence: The Politics of Heritage (Austin: University of Texas Press, 200), chapter three; David Usborne, Mexican Standoff: The Battle of Chichn Itz, The Independent on Sunday, Nov 7, 2007 (consulted via internet, December 20, 2007). 47 Redclift, Frontiers, p. 15.
49

See, for example, the comments made in June 1990 by a former head of the national peak body of chambers of commerce in Mexico, CONCANACO, Eduardo Garca Surez. Proceso, No. 712, 25 June 1990. Denise Brown, 'Mayas and Tourists in the Maya World', Human Organisation, vol. 58, no. 3, (1999), pp. 295-310.

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23 | B a r r y C a r r 1950s, revived by National Geographic Magazine in the 1970s and more recently relaunched under the label of Mundo Maya. The possibility of encountering descendants of the Ancient Maya is a constant discursive current in tourist publicity. In the case of Cancn and the Riviera Maya, this dynamic of the imposition by tourists of the imagined on the real is particularly dramatic. Several authors have documented the way in which performances of Mexican culture, especially in Cancn, often defer to the authority of performances of Mexican culture performed in the U.S. Disneyland theme park. The Ruta Maya proposed by National Geographic magazine in 1989 has now become Mundo Maya, a massive, trans-national tourist product accommodating a variety of tourist styles including adventure, cultural, eco and sun-and-sand tourism across five countries (Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras) which represents very little of the actual world of the contemporary peoples of Maya descent.50 The most bizarre dimension of this instrumentalist exploitation of the May for tourist purposes in the attempt, in El Salvador, a country with almost no historica Maya presence, to represent the countrys Nahua and Lenca peoples as Maya.
51

The Mysterious Maya, a cultural construction that is widespread in

tourism promotion of Yucatn and Quintana Roo, presents the complex and diverse histories of the Mayan peoples as though they constituted a simple unilinear historical development in which the contemporary Maya of Southern and southeastern Mexico are authentic descendants of the classical Maya, an enthusiastic celebration of the essential and Tourist maps of the zone often uninterrupted continuities of Mayan cultural development.

leave out major present day Maya population centres all together.52 A feature of these maps that does not draw comment from many authors, even critical ones, is the de-emphasis of national borders. The waves of inter-ethnic violence and civil insurrection which have shaken
50

T. Ardren, Where are the Maya in Ancient Maya Archaeological Tourism? Advertising and the Appropriation of Culture in Y. Rowan & U. Baram (eds.), Marketing Heritage. Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004), pp. 103-113; Peter Hervik, The Mysterious Maya of National Geographic, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Vol. 4:1, 1998, pp. 166-197. The most recent examination of the uses and misuses of archaeology in Yucatan and Quintana Roo is Cameron Jean Walker, Heritage or Heresy? Archaeology and Culture in the Maya Riviera (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009). 51 A devastating account of this is in Virginia Q. Tilleys Seeing Indians: A Study of Race, Nation, and Power in El Salvador (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), pp. 96-98. 52 Graeme Evans, Mundo Maya: From Cancn to City of Culture. World Heritage in Post-colonial Mesoamerica, Current Issues in Tourism, vol. 7, No. 4-5, 2004, pp. 315-329.

DR El Colegio de Mxico, A. C.

24 | B a r r y C a r r areas like Chiapas and western and northern Guatemala have led to national frontiers, especially the borderlines between Mexico and Guatemala, being progressively militarised. Mexican Mayan peoples citizenship is increasingly contested and they are now threatened with deportation to places they have never known.53 The Mundo Maya for the Maya themselves is anything, then, but a permissive, liminal, borderless zone in which all manner of diversion is possible54. 6. Acapulco reached its peak in the mid 1970s, when environmental issues, pollution, drainage problems, access to potable water etc. intervened to limit growth. Unlike Cancn where there has been a major expansion of tourism development over a 170 km. coastal strip to the south, Acapulcos tourist catchment area has not grown significantly since the incorporation of the Puerto Marqus area and other zones on the way to the airport in the 1950s. Recent developments over the last 20 years, such as the up market Punta Diamante project developed during the governorship of Jos Francisco Ruz Massieu (1987-1992), have occurred within the greater Acapulco region, in the case of the Diamante project along the south-eastern corridor that led to the international airport. A new tourism development pole Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo (170km to the north of the city) was developed by FONATUR in the mid 1970s. But while the small fishing and beach community of Zihuatanejo had attracted some attention from Acapulco-based tourism developers in the 1940s and 1950s (the pioneer hotelero, Carlos Barnard, was an early booster of the small port village), poor communication prevented major development until the 1970s. For example, a fully paved road was not completed until the end of the 1950s. Cancn, on the other hand, has grown without much interruption since the early 1970s and it has benefited from the expansion of the vast Maya Riviera to the south. There are weather limits on growth (frequent hurricanes) and some environmental barriers but not as great as in Acapulco. In spite of environmental problems the Caribbean coast of Yucatn and Quintana Roo has opened up opportunities for experiments in ecologically sustainable and environmentally balanced tourism
53

- eco-tourism - with areas being readied for World

Patricia Lpez Martha, La Guerra de Baja Intensidad en Mxico (Mexico D.F., Universidad Iberoamericana, 1996). Carlos Fazio, El Tercer Vinculo: De la teora del caos a la militarizacin de Mxico, (Mxico: Editorial Joaqun Mortiz, 1996). 54 Tristan Epstein, unpublished paper, La Trobe University, History Programme.

DR El Colegio de Mxico, A. C.

25 | B a r r y C a r r Heritage Site status (like the Sian Kaan Biosphere near Tulum). Here middle class tourists of the post-modern era can indulge their occasional preferences for simplicity, lack of ostentation and a romantic quest for pleasure off the beaten track, close to the exotic with solarpowered hotels etc. There is contact with the authentic Mayan and in a preserved habitat. And then there are the so-called Eco-Parks south of Cancun (like Xel-Ha and Xcaret) which provide a commoditized, Disneyfied encounter with the local ecology and Mayan past a new cenote, underground rivers for swimming, some Mayan ruins, a butterfly pavilion and a botanical garden along with fast food and bright cocktails carrying Mayan names.55 None of this is possible in Acapulco. On the other hand, the revival of tourism in Cuba in the 1990s and 2000s poses a medium term threat that has caused some worry to tourism entrepreneurs. What would happen, for example, if Cuba-U.S. relations were normalized, an eventuality that is, admittedly unlikely in the near future? The huge pent up demand in the U.S. for Cuba travel would, according to recent research, divert substantial numbers of tourists away from resorts in the Bahamas, Jamaica and Cayman Islands. 56

55

Monica Mateos-Vega, INAH: Xcaret propone una visin hollywoodense de la cultura Maya, La Jornada, Jan 26, 2007. In this article, Adriana Velzquez Morlet, an INAH official in Quintana Roo laments the false and historically outdated vision of the Maya presented by many commercial sites which exploit Maya history. In particular the focus of most touristic representations of the Maya continue to emphasise a narrative in which the Maya were exclusively concerned with astronomic observation and religious ritual, ignoring the results of research over the past thirty years which have thrown light on the political and military conflicts which characterized the Maya. The spectacular night-time show offered to tourists at Xcaret, for example, is centered on a reconstruction of a pre-Columbian ball court which draws on a mix of Zapotec, Mixtec, Totonac and other influences, far removed from the Maya world. 56 Art Padilla & Jerome L.. McElroy, Cuba and Caribbean Tourism After Castro. Annals of Tourism Research, 34;3, July 2007, pp. 649-672.

DR El Colegio de Mxico, A. C.