The Tourism Encounter: Fashioning Latin American Nations and Histories (review)

In the past decade there has been a growing awareness of the role of culture-based development throughout Latin America region and beyond. Anthropologists have been at the forefront of these discussions, documenting how this turn to 'culture' as economic development engine is affecting people across the region as it launches new industries, such as new forms of tourism, and reconfigures old ones, like craft production and the arts. One of the newest and most contradictory of these new developments is the rise of tourism in post-socialist, postrevolutionary and post-conflict areas such as Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru, and it is the subject of Florence Babb's new book.

The author draws from her sustained scholarly engagement in these four different societies, where she has conducted research throughout her career around issues of gender and development, and these issues come through in her current investigation. Yet, neither gender nor development per se is the author's central concern. Instead, it is the role that tourism plays in societies that once were ambivalent toward—or openly shunned—capitalism and tourism, but have now seemingly adopted it as a necessary evil. These changes take place against a larger context of globalization and the rise of global neoliberal market logics, which have been accompanied by a lack of economic development alternatives in and for the region. Unfortunately, the work's breadth limits the author's discussions of different countries' political economies in ways that do not provide the fullest view of the unique role that tourism plays in each of these economies. We get very little information of the economies of tourism in each country, and about the nuts and bolts of how it is affecting people's jobs, livelihoods, and incomes. Likewise, we learn little about the specificities of tourism in each country; the author's regionally based comparative perspective comes at the cost of detailed analysis of the different ways in which these strategies become raced and gendered according to regionally specific racial and nationalist ideologies. The point is that all four societies find themselves seeking avenues for economic development that do not entirely refashion their histories and identities, but rather help to anchor them for locals as well as outside visitors to see, respect, and appreciate. This is one of the most important insights the author shares with us: how tourism functions not solely as an economic strategy but rather as a central tool through which these countries are coming to terms with and actively negotiating revolutionary pasts, the effects of tortuous guerrilla warfare, and the survival of indigenous cultures and peoples amidst globalization, the advancement of capitalism, and neoliberal global economic logics that continue apace.

The author uses the trope of tourism as "encounter" to provide a more nuanced view of tourism that does not privilege Western nations and visitors as the only agents, but that also accounts for the ways in which locals maneuver through tourist projects, dynamics, and exchanges. Throughout, the author gives ample proof that power, difference, and inequality are embedded in all tourism encounters; her examples of distinctions and unequal access to tourism's benefits and effects point to differences in gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality and are ample throughout the text. We see how some tourist projects favor men over women (as in Peru, where it is men who have been favored in NGO-led experiential tourism projects); how Cuban tourism has led to social apartheid in services and resources aimed for tourists rather than locals; and how the growth of expatriate villages is leading to the "North-Americanization" of entire regions in Nicaragua. The encounter trope allows the author some room to address the ambivalence and paradoxes that permeate the case studies, but she is careful not to succumb to facile conclusions.

Indeed, there are many paradoxes at play in post-socialist and postrevolutionary tourism; the fact that it is exactly these societies' history of...