Business and Bureaucracy: Mexican Tourism Policy in the Age of Neoliberalism

• In Event: Public Policy in Brazil and Mexico

Abstract

This presentation examines Mexican tourism policy, especially with respect to beach tourism, since the founding of the Secretary of Tourism in 1976 under President Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970-76), and through the presidential administrations of José López Portillo (1976-82), Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado (1982-88), and Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-94). During this period, the federal government adopted policies which merged state-led “development” with private investment, often through transnational sources of capital, to promote the notion of the citizen-consumer. While most scholarship on modern Mexico has focused on the revolution of 1910 and the postrevolutionary decades of the 1930s and 1940s, studying more recent modalities of tourism helps us to better understand what a new wave of revisionist scholars (following Nora Hamilton) has termed the limits of state autonomy, authoritarianism without adjectives, or "dictablanda." Situating these problems within a wider Latin American and Caribbean context, this paper argues that tourism represented a particular form of nation-state formation which sought to integrate Mexico’s regional poles—among them, the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca and the peninsulas of Yucatán and Baja California—by bringing them closer to the center and effectively transforming them from “peripheries” into “paradises.”

Author

• Carlos R Hernandez, Yale University