Event overview
A lecture by Matilde Córdoba Azcárate
This talk explores some of the aesthetic entrapments of cultural tourism and its refusals in the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, a region voraciously transformed by tourism development over the past forty years. Here, all-inclusive beach resorts, protected natural enclaves, historical buildings renovated as luxury hotels and completely anew socio-spatial formations such as souvenir factory towns, have trapped locals in moral, political, ecological, and labor dilemmas most representative of the predatory geographies of late capitalism.
The talk follows the transnational networks of knowledge production, financial capital, heritage restoration and Indigenous social activism that have emerged in and around Train Maya, a new state led mega-infrastructure development designed to attract yet more tourism to this region. It uses a critical lens that not only denounces the extractive nature of the industry but that also seeks generative alternatives for transformation. Some of these options build on refusals to transnational Maya heritage revival and are setting the ground for decolonial forms of travelling in the region and beyond.
Matilde Córdoba Azcárate is Associate Professor in the Communication Department and Co-Director of the International Institute’s Nature, Space and Politics group. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and her work focuses on the relations between tourism, space, and capitalism. Her latest publications include Stuck with Tourism: Space, Power and Labor in Contemporary Yucatán (2020), and Tourism Geopolitics: Assemblages of Infrastructure, Affect and Imagination (2021). She is part of the Editorial Collective of Cultural Anthropology (2022-2025) and is currently working on the generative nature of infrastructural refusals in contexts of climate crisis and new age heritage revival.
Image courtesy of Teresa Arozena, instagram: @teresaarozena
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 19 Oct 2023 | 5:15pm - 7:00pm |
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