Cancun ... then home

It's easy to hate Cancun -- the "hotel zone" at least. Don't get me wrong. Cancun is fun -- mind-numbing fun. There's as much glitz and glamour here as there is in Vegas. And Vegas doesn't have the beaches. Cancun is so pastiche Americana that you hardly know that you've left the USA. It's safe. It's cheap. It's miles of sandy, bronzed pleasure.

But we were in the hotel zone for 90 minutes, and it made my soul hurt. Perhaps this is because we had spent two weeks talking about the contradictions of tourism -- all of which are front and center in the hotel zone. Perhaps this is because we first went to the city of Cancun where the service workers live. Here we saw a different story than the glitz and glamour. A story of working 20 hours a day and making around $10 a day on average, if lucky. A story of people who don't have city water during the day, so the tourists in the hotel zone can have it. That's right. Miguel told us that his sister (who lives in the city) has to store water each night for the daylight hours because the water to this city is cut off to supply the hotel zone. Can you imagine? 

This is the Cancun tourists never see. It's the Cancun they don't want to see either because they/we are on holiday in Cancun. We have enough problems at home, so the story goes, so please don't bother me with problems somewhere else. 

It's easy to hate Cancun, and it's easy to deride the tourists who stay there. Tourism scholarship has done this for about 40 years now. But, hopefully, this class has taught us to take a step back from this knee-jerk criticism also. Hopefully, we can humanize these tourists too and not just the hosts who serve them/us. Hopefully we can recognize the hypnotic power of the media gaze that constructs these places, a gaze that calls us to the beach, to relaxation, to pleasure (without concern for those who must scrape by to provide us this pleasure.) 

This is not to say that we should not critique Cancun. We should. In fact, we must if tourism is to change. Through this critique, we must find avenues for critical tourist practice. We must find spaces for humanizing dialogue. We should get out of the "hotel zone" to where the people who serve us live. We must begin to understand the price of pleasure, the cost of our relaxation.

 But we must not wag the elitist finger at the mass tourists who get away to Cancun. Doing so neglects our own complicity in the problems of tourism. Doing so misses an opportunity for critical, humanizing dialogue.

...

So, this ends our trip. We've all made it home. We return to our lives. The liminal space of our tour in Mexico has now closed. The blogging is not quite done (stay tuned for links to student photo essays), but the trip is.

Hopefully, this trip has given us pause from the perpetual movement between home and away. Hopefully, it has disrupted our normal rhythms of travel. Hopefully, our gazing has turned into more embodied practice, more critical practice, more humanizing and sustaining practice.

I hope.

Hasta luego....