From the Editor

One of the characteristics of articles published in this journal is their wide-ranging nature: some deal with issue at the national scale, other at the details of micro-regions; others consider theoretical issues, often with subtle methodological underpinnings, and yet others with concrete issues facing real people in the past and present.

The first essay in this issue addresses a very practical question: just how vulnerable are the many new tourist centers established to meet the demands of the ever-increasing millions of tourists who travel to developing world locations? Here a sample coastal site in Nicaragua is analyzed, a site that suffered severely from the tsunami of 1992. Detailed field- research allow the authors to isolate multiple factor that contribute to not only the vulnerability but also the potential sustainability of the site.

Tourism and Nicaragua again provide key foci of the second paper. Here the key question relates to the impact of a Marine Protected Area, established in favor of major tourist developments, on artisanal fishing. Tourists may love the beaches of coastal Pacific Nicaragua, but the offshore riches of fish have long provided hundreds of families with income and traditional lifestyles. Who deserve more attention clearly depends on national versus regional interest groups, the former having much louder voices in this age of electronic information.

For our third Nicaraguan context we move to the northern shore of Lake Managua to the municipality of San Francisco Libre where the community is allegedly attempting to move beyond the binaries of nature/culture to include non-humans in the development of what is termed ecological citizenship. While some may question the role of trees and documents as agents, instead of important contextual factors, the discussion opens a diversity of distinctive opinions and perspectives that enliven the debate concerning political and ecological rights.

We next move to Mexico where, in the first study, the authors assess the spatial segregation affecting one of that country’s most popular tourist destinations. Using indices that categorize segregation they are able to demonstrate that the last two decades have intensified the process with major infrastructural developments and internal population shifts leading to segregated facilities and activities. There are now essentially two Puerto Vallartas: that of the tourist, and that o its service periphery.

Next, we move east to the western periphery of Guadalajara to examine the impacts of educational and economic change as they have affected the population of the town of Atotonilco El Bajo. If one immediately wonders why this settlement’s analysis is significant, one has to remember that it has long been the origin of migrants to Milwaukee in the US, and thus the recent rapid decrease in such migrant flows is highly relevant. Increasing educational attainment and economic diversification in Atotonilco are clearly key explanatory variables, as are labor market diversification and other transnational factors.

We finish our Mexican analyses on the northern border, a region of intense securitization and regulation responding to such issues as drug-related violence, terrorist threats, and the persistent problem of illegal border crossings. The central question of this article is just how have such contextual factors impacted NGOs that operate in the region? We are reminded by the sample of bi-national NGOs studied here that much goes on in the border region that falls outside the normal interpretations of geopolitics. Hyper-militarization has affected multiple efforts at socio-economic assistance.

Now our focus shifts to South America, first to the relatively little-studied nation of Guyana. Here the author examines the sequence of historical development of cattle ranching and trade and its impacts on traditional cultures of the southern Rupununi region. While cattle ranching began as a Guyanese economic practice, once a trail/road had connected the ranching area to Georgetown and the Atlantic, Brazilians saw this as a key portal to open their western Amazonian region to international trade. Internal ‘beef to the Georgetown market’ is increasingly being replaced by ‘Brazilian products to the world market,’ creating multiple and many negative impacts on indigenous populations in Guyana. Roads may become pathways to development but they can also provide uneasy networks of power relations...