The quest for the other: ethnic tourism in San Cristobal, Mexico

Abstract

Every year, millions of tourists scan the world for exotic locales where they can escape their own world and encounter the other. One such place is San Cristobal de las Casas, in Chiapas, Mexico, where you can observe German tourists struggling with chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant, to the accompaniment of pseudo-Chinese music played on an African thumb piano by a black American from San Francisco. While eating, diners may purchase bows and arrows from Lacandon Indians pushed out of their native forests by the hum of chain-saws and advancing herds of Brahman cattle. San Cristobal is one of the frontiers of ethnic tourism where the privileged, moneyed, and leisured meet the poor, struggling, and Pierre van den Berghe, who first visited San Cristobal in 1959, found that between his visits in 1977 and 1987 the town had moved from seeing a small daily volume of mostly back-pack tourists to accommodating a daily flow of hundreds of tourists of all descriptions. He decided to investigate the impact of tourism in the area, and the result is the first study of its kind dealing with Mexico, as well as the first book-length study of ethnic tourism - tourism motivated by an active search for the ethnically exotic. Van den Berghe skillfully combines interviews, statistics, observation, and analysis to produce a vivid and insightful picture of the interaction between tourists, the indigenous Maya population, and the ladinos who act as the middlemen between the other two groups. The Quest for the Other contains many implications for tourism policy, both specifying the conditions of success and warning of potential dangers. San Cristobal is, in many ways, a best-case scenario. Almosteveryone is better off, if only marginally, through the development of tourism. Ethnic tourism, writes the author, not only debases and destroys what it touches, it also renews and transforms it in profoundly creative ways. The staged authenticity of tourist shows can sometimes bec

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