Gender,Indigeneity,and the Performance of Authenticity in Latin American Tourism

On a trip to Mexico City in September 2009, I traveled to Teotihuacán with my eight-year-old daughter. As we considered buying an obsidian statuette for my son back home, the vendor explained to me that he had learned his craft from his father and he from his father before him, all the way back to the Aztecs. In our brief conversation he regularly used the first person plural when referring to the builders of the impressive monuments around us, and I could see my daughter’s eyes go from the man’s face to the pyramids behind us and back again. In this simple transaction, which could be reproduced on virtually any archaeological site in Latin America, what was being sold was not simply the object at hand but the putative authenticity of its maker. Beyond the obsidian statuette I was buying a piece of Aztec culture crafted by the hands of a genuine descendant of the Aztecs if not quite a genuine Aztec himself. We bought the statuette, and it was duly presented to my son as “an Aztec statue, the god of the moon, that holds the moonlight within it.”

On the same day we came across two young Mexicans walking barefoot among the pyramids. I asked them why they were barefoot, and they responded, “It is a custom,” a means of identifying with their ancestors. I asked if the Aztecs didn’t have leather sandals, and I was told that, yes, the Aztecs did, but “we are Mexicans, so we identify with the slaves who were made to walk along this route.”

These two experiences caused me to reflect on the commodification of authenticity, whether of the object purchased or the experience pursued, in Latin American tourism. Ronda Brulotte (2012) has recently written about the ways in which vendors of handicrafts position themselves as authentic producers of native culture just like the vendor in Teotihuacán—a strategic positioning vis-à-vis pre-Columbian ancestors the echoes of which we see in many of the essays in this issue as indigenous and other subaltern peoples turn essentialist notions to their advantage. Tourists’ desire for the authentic, the primitive, and the natural can take the form of purchasing handicrafts, as in the essays of Florence Babb and Annelou Ypeij, but may extend to the commodification of indigenous spirituality, as in the essays by Macarena Gómez-Barris and Elizabeth Bell.

The essays in this issue explore the various ways in which tourists and local people, principally in Peru, Mexico, and Guatemala, engage in a complex choreography of commoditization, gender, and ethnicity. In their introduction, Tamar Diana Wilson and Annelou Ypeij point us to Swain’s (2001) work and the relationship, often an intimate one, between tourists and their objects of consumption, not to mention the many women and men who are engaged in catering to tourists. The papers explore in imaginative and sometimes challenging ways the complex relationships between tourists and whatever it is they are traveling to see and experience. Even as they underline the unequal power relations involved, they point out—in a rather Foucauldian way—that power is never exercised unambiguously and that images can change, spaces can open up, and power relations can be challenged by the very tropes that set them up in the first place. This point of view is most clearly expressed in Elizabeth Bell’s contribution on “spiritual tourism” in Guatemala, where Kaqchikel Mayas seize the opportunity afforded them as objects of tourism to fight the foreign influence of that tourism.

Tourists in Guatemala rarely reflect on the politics of the Maya situation, in which the state offers a discourse of Maya “belonging” to attract tourists but is less keen on this idea when it comes to economic issues and land reform. In a similar vein, the cultures and crafts that are sold in the Andes are themselves products of colonial and neocolonial relationships. Tourists marvel at the high quality and low prices of the labor-intensive weavings and rarely pause to wonder why labor is so cheap in these countries, with economies so marginalized that people are forced to pose for the camera in Cuzco’s main square (Ypeij in this issue). The tour guides take this relationship in a particular direction, but all these groups are operating in an economy of desire (see Cabezas, 2009), feeding a Western demand for the premodern, the authentic, and the natural that is constructed and created through a (neo)colonial relationship. The exchanges are unequal and underpinned by a globalized tourist economy that is as extractive an industry as any other, and yet subaltern women and men can exercise considerable agency within these relationships: bricheros may earn money and even sexual status for engaging in liaisons with tourists, and women may have access to market economies that would otherwise be difficult to penetrate and in some cases make considerable gains.

Lynn Meisch (1995), in her work on Otavalo, notes that the benefits to sexual partners of tourists are much more than simply economic, and her analysis supports Babb’s and Ypeij’s thesis that exoticization of Indianness may, at least in certain contexts, offer opportunities for challenging and overturning structures of power that have historically disadvantaged certain people. In the Andes, in sharp distinction from the Caribbean and Brazil, the bodies of racial subalterns have not been eroticized. There is no parallel with the sensuous and eroticized mulata; instead, as in Mesoamerica (see Nelson, 1999), white elites have seen Indians’ bodies as ugly, and there is a strong public preference for bodies that are European in form and color (Canessa, 2012; Wade, 2009). What Meisch noted for Otovaleños may very likely be true for bricheros and other Andeans who enter into liaisons with tourists: being desired by high-status “beautiful” white Westerners can be intoxicating for people who have been brought up believing that they are ugly in the eyes of the social and racial elite. It may also have a significant political dimension in that local mestizos and whites may be puzzled about why tourists should desire these people whom they consider ugly. This is one of those spaces, as suggested by Florence Babb, in which the exoticization of Indians may be used to undermine postcolonial structures of power, but—and this cannot be forgotten—it reifies the unequal power relations between tourists and those they come to see. What is interesting about the bricheros is that even as they index Indianness to attract foreign women, they do not, in other contexts, identify themselves as indigenous at all. In fact, as Ypeij notes, they are overwhelmingly educated people and, even if of indigenous descent, not only maintain a certain social distance from indigenous people but may be quite racist toward them. At the same time they may be subverting the colonial model of creole men’s exercising sexual rights over indigenous women, which not only has been a key mode of behavior since the arrival of Europeans but has provided the very language of domination. The actions of the bricheros thus subvert one hierarchy even as they instantiate another.

Bricheros and traders perform indigeneity, and Ypeij introduces the notion that this performance is much more related to the self and has more of a transformative effect than is often supposed. This is an intriguing suggestion and points to a need for further research on the way the self is implicated in these performances in the Andes and in tourist sites across the world. Ypeij’s work raises the question, implicit in all the other papers, what this performed indigeneity is. In few of the cases described here is it clearly related to the lives of real people; it is, at best, a refraction of those lives. It seems to be better represented in tourists’ notions of the “Other” than in any lived reality. This is not surprising, as indigeneity is highly contextual and authenticity does not appear to be guaranteed even with people who are “obviously” indigenous (e.g., rural Quechua-speakers who live in “traditional” communities). These people may have less access to markets and capital or may simply not understand the “authenticity” that tourists desire and may struggle to turn their identities into something commodifiable.

Florence Babb’s contribution is a fascinating discussion of two contrasting examples of tourism in which local people try to meet outsiders’ demands for the “authentic” as this is diversely interpreted. Revisiting Marisol de la Cadena’s work, she notes that indigenous people in highland Peru do not embody their Indianness equally. Tourism, she points out, may throw into relief the intersections between identity and gender as tourists seek out the authentically indigenous. Thus it has the potential to invert the negative status associated with being indigenous and female. Annelou Ypeij makes a very similar point and suggests that engaging in the tourist economy may raise the status of women in their own communities as well as more broadly. The question remains, however, how much this potential is realized.

In Peru and the Lacandon jungle, Indianness is now something of value, at least to outsiders, and several commentators (e.g., Hodgson, 2010; Martínez Novo, 2006; Zorn, 2004; see also Keck and Sikkink, 1998) have noticed that the higher profile given to indigenous identities in many countries today is due to pressure from people (be they tourists, governments, or nongovernmental organizations) beyond the nation who see indigenous people as embodying authentic cultures, particular values, or an exceptional socioeconomic position. Both Babb and Ypeij see that Indian women in particular can literally and figuratively trade on their being more closely associated with Indianness. In Babb’s words, “being ‘more Indian’ can become a source of cultural capital.” And cultural capital can be converted into economic capital.

Babb offers a number of examples of the way indigeneity is essentialized, especially in its relation to women, but suggests that this essentialization offers the possibility that at least some women will parlay their embodied Indianness into cultural and economic capital. What is striking about her examples is that these women have not already done so more. Especially in Chiapas, where, as she notes, gender has been politicized and efforts made to give women greater roles in politics, women remain marginal in the presentation of their culture even as they are widely regarded as being more authentically Indian. Although she ends her article on an optimistic note, it is puzzling that this optimism has not already been realized. Babb suggests that women are disadvantaged in not having access to education and particularly the language skills they need to engage with tourists, but her work clearly points to the need for further research on women’s continued marginalization even when conditions appear to be propitious.

Elizabeth Bell develops the concept of spiritual tourism in the context of ethnotourism—seeking to observe and participate in different, often distant, cultures. This is quite different from pilgrimage (perhaps the oldest form of tourism) and other forms of travel. We are perhaps now accustomed to seeing tourism as involving the commodification of indigenous people’s material culture and bodies in a set of highly unequal exchanges. Bell makes the important point that it is not only their material culture that is being commodified. It would not, I think, be an exaggeration to say that in many cases spiritual tourists are after rather more than a cultural experience, seeking to acquire something of the “soul” of indigenous people.

In contemporary Guatemala, Maya calendar specialists (daykeepers) are highly critical of spiritual tourists, whom they see as having at best a superficial knowledge of Maya practices. Here as elsewhere, however, tourism is a double-edged sword: tourists provide political and economic legitimacy to Maya cultural practices and force the national government to take Maya culture seriously, at least in some contexts. Bell notes (following Little, 2004) that tourism “replaces the original practice with a simulacrum that, deprived of its original signification, can be consumed by anyone” and that in the consumption of the object of desire, a particular authenticity and spiritual experience, authenticity is inevitably lost. She speaks eloquently of “piracy” not only in the sense of illegitimate appropriation of cultural wealth but also in a rather more modern sense in which that which is pirated is a simulacrum of the original, an ersatz and inevitably cheaper version. But for all her buccaneering metaphors she also notes the complex and nuanced relationship between contemporary commercialization of spirituality and the fact that this commercialization provides a platform from which Maya daykeepers can criticize the global capitalism and resource extraction that threaten many people today. The performances that she describes go beyond Spivak’s (1988) notion of “strategic essentialism” in that the daykeepers insist on undermining the essentialist notions of the tourist industry.

Bell’s work is complemented by Macarena Gómez-Barris’s article on the spiritual tourism organized by the North American Diane Dunn in the Peruvian highlands. Catering to the desire of foreigners for Andean spirituality seems rather more benign than taking photographs of “Indian women” or buying handicrafts, but, apart from two local people, Juana and Francisco, the principal effect on the local community seem to be rapidly rising property prices as more and more people cater to these spiritual tourists. Beyond the economics of spiritual tourism, as Gómez-Barris points out, is a discourse of appropriating indigenous spirituality in order to spread it around the world: Andean spirituality is commodified and quite explicitly globalized. It is Dunn who travels to export this spiritualism to new markets, not local people. What is striking is that this “authentic” spirituality is acquired so effortlessly: one doesn’t have to learn Spanish or Quechua, much less anything about the local culture or its economic, historical, and political conditions. It is not only Dunn who appears unconcerned by these aspects of local life; her customers seem equally uninterested. In fact, not being able to communicate with locals appears to be something of an advantage in that any kind of intercultural communication might confuse a simple message in which “Q’ero approaches were reduced to a simplified and consumer model of understanding the self in relation to spirituality, a mode that was familiar to the participants.” For his part, Francisco the shaman asserts the importance of “opening” up the esoteric and spreading it around the world. Of course, such an endeavor undermines the very esoteric nature of the ritual that attracts tourists, and this contradiction seems to encapsulate the experience of spiritual tourism. The visitor leaves Peru having learned mysteries and rites but comfortably ignorant, it seems, of any significant detail about the people and culture from which this spirituality is supposed to come.

The contribution of Tamar Diana Wilson, Alba Eritrea Gámez Vázquez, and Antonina Ivanova deals with the very different situation in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where indigeneity does not seem to be a commodity, much less a source of spirituality, even though many of the women vendors speak an indigenous language. Indeed, the authors suggest that indigeneity here merely serves as a source of disadvantage and discrimination. What is striking about the women interviewed is that half of them speak an indigenous language and come from distant parts of Mexico. This raises the important issue of why these women have come so far from predominantly indigenous areas of Mexico to work in Cabo San Lucas and suggests the need for further research on the sending communities: What other options were open to them? What other kinds of work have they done (if any) in the region? What were the networks that brought them to Baja California? In her photo essay Wilson suggests that many of these vendors came from Acapulco, where the street-vending market is saturated, and this might point to a national tourist network of employment even in the marginal informal sector and thus offer an explanation for people’s seeking employment so far from home.

Despite the hot sun and the vagaries of the market, most women value their work, which provides their families with income or offers them some economic independence if they are part of a larger family unit. This raises important questions about the ways in which this kind of informal employment improves women’s status within the family and in society more generally and points to potential for further research on how this kind of employment changes relationships with male partners in a positive way, since this is by no means inevitable: partners may also become jealous (female employment can lead to increased domestic violence) or simply take all the earnings.

Patricia Ávila García and Eduardo Luna Sánchez present a very different take on tourism and offer a detailed case study of the power of neoliberal capitalism to take over the ecologically fragile coast of Jalisco in Mexico with sometimes intense structural violence. They detail how elite economic actors adopt the discourse of protecting the natural environment in order to dispossess local people of their land and prevent others from exercising their historical usufruct. They trace the numerous connections of business and compadrazgo (ritual kinship) that have created an economic logic that seems impossible to oppose, given that it so closely involves the state as well as international capital. The “exotic” here is most certainly not the people but exclusive access to a natural environment, and this case is reminiscent of many others such as that of the Masai in Tanzania (Hodgson, 2010), where the historical occupancy of the land is overlooked in favor of an appeal to elite tourist dollars.

These essays together offer an important contribution to the study of the interaction between tourists and the subaltern people who cater to them in one way or another. All of them focus on the much-less-studied side of the tourist equation—the men and particularly the women who “receive” tourists into their countries and often their homes. They draw out the myriad ways in which the exotics and erotics of tourism are connected and in which gender and sexuality are constantly being worked out as relationships are remodeled and essentialisms challenged. There is a dynamism and agency on the part of these people that does not often come across in tourism studies. These men and women are actively making their lives and engaging in strategic choices on a day-to-day basis as they think about the ethnicity, sexuality, and race through which they earn their living.

The common element of these examples across Latin America, I would argue, is that they all participate in a (neo)colonial economy of desire and consumption in which the Western sovereign individual can seek to satisfy his or her desire for the exotic, the “Other,” and the premodern on a very uneven playing field. And yet, despite these hierarchies and inequalities, many of these contributions demonstrate that there is a capacity to subvert the gendered colonial model and carve out new spaces in which the contributions of women are publicly valued and can be translated into real and not simply symbolic gains.