La interculturalidad en los gobiernos regionales

The tourist resort of Cancún127 was established in the sparsely-populated eastern region of the Yucatan peninsula as part of a new export-oriented economic development strategy driven by the nation-state (Torres and Momsen 2005:315).

The state’s commitment to the tourism industry as a model for economic development has a long history in Mexico, beginning at the latest as early as the 1920s (Berger and Wood 2010:6). The Yucatan peninsula was integrated into the nation-state’s tourism plan long before the construction of the tourist resort of Cancún. With support from the federal government, the region – featuring numerous archaeological sites and colonial cities – was transformed into a site for heritage tourism. However, in order to increase the number of tourists, the focus of the state-led tourism promotion shifted from heritage tourism to beach tourism during the presidency term of Miguel Alemán Valdes in the late-1940s (Berger and Wood 2010:8). This turn has significantly shaped the currently predominant form of export-oriented and

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The account presented in this section focuses on the city of Cancún due to its initiatory role in the international tourism development in the Mexican Caribbean, as well as its significance as a destination of out-migration for the rural sites studied (see chapters 3.2.1 and 5.1.1). However, it is important to note that the tourism development has extended to the coastline south of Cancún promoted as “Rivera Maya”, resulting in rapid coastal urbanization represented by the growth of Tulum and Playa del Carmen.

mass-based tourism in Mexico (cf. Clancy 2001:132).

The beach resort in the Mexican Caribbean was also constructed in line with this orientation. Based on a three-year study by the Banco de México to identify possibilities for increasing foreign exchange earnings, the tourist resort of Cancún was designed and created in the 1970s from the ground up, along with four other facilities in the nation. As a carefully-planned tourism development, the Mexican state played a central role in promoting the industry. The first stage of infrastructure construction in Cancún was financed with 21.5 million dollars from the Inter-America American Development Bank (IDB). Soon after its first hotel opened in 1974, the planned tourism development began to bear fruit. As early as 1975, the resort registered the arrival of more than 27,000 foreign tourists (Clancy 2001:131-137). As the resort was established in the sparsely-populated area, workers were recruited from the surrounding countryside of the peninsula. For its initial construction phase, more than 6,000 workers had been engaged who lived in camps or squatted in the surrounding forest without access to basic infrastructure. Since it started to attract foreign tourists in 1974, Cancún experienced dramatic population growth (see Figure 2). With an increase in skilled jobs in services and construction between 1974 and 1977128, not only people from the rural area of the peninsula but also more experienced workers from other parts of Mexico migrated to Cancún (Castellanos 2010a:82f.).129 As international arrivals to the resort grew at an average annual rate of 38 percent between 1975 and 1984 (Clancy 2001:135), the demand for both high- and low-skilled labor force increased by the early-1980s (Castellanos 2010a:82). Until the early-1990s, the tourism industry also offered possibilities for social mobility for low-skilled rural immigrants. Due to a labor shortage, hotel corporations were interested in training and educating their employees. This situation gradually changed in the late-1990s as

128 _{Between 1975 and 1979, the number of hotels increased from 9 to 42 (Clancy 2001:135).} 129

In 1974, the eastern part of the peninsula – which had previously been the federal territory since 1902 – became the free and sovereign state of Quintana Roo as it met minimum population requirements for statehood, partly owing to the immigration resulting from the establishment of Cancún.

the increased immigration of workers from across the country led to a pool of surplus labor. Accordingly, while some of the early immigrants succeeded in the transition from low-skilled positions to skilled and professional jobs, those who recently arrived in Cancún from rural areas of the peninsula often found themselves stuck in low-wage jobs with a short-term contract (Castellanos 2010a:87).

From its initial construction phase, workers from rural Yucatan have played a significant part in the development of the tourist resort. According to census data, more than 35 percent of the population in the municipality of Benito Juárez in 1980 and 1990 were born in the state of Yucatan. To date, the proportion of immigrants from the state of Yucatan remains high (see Figure 3). However, the impacts of the tourist resort on rural Yucatan are much greater than these figures suggest, as a considerable proportion of the population involved in wage work in the tourist resort does not immigrate entirely to Cancún, but rather keeps residence at the place of origin. As mentioned above, milpa peasants have always been accustomed to making use of other production strategies to overcome the economic uncertainty of milpa agriculture. In this sense, wage work in the tourist resort was added to the repertoire of economic activities carried out to complement the milpa agriculture in the maize-cultivating zone of Yucatan (Re Cruz 1996a:299f.). Thus, out-migration and wage work conducted in this manner do not necessarily mean the abandonment of the milpa agriculture and hence a fundamental change in mode of production. However, it is observed that the young generation rather tend to regard wage work as a way of life without cultivating the milpa or even without acquiring the knowledge related to it, which indeed represents a break in tradition (cf. Re Cruz 1996a:305). In addition, increased female participation can be mentioned as a distinguishing feature of the rural-urban migration after the construction of the tourist resort, which often leads to a shift in gender roles and power relations, including in rural households (see e.g. Castellanos 2010a).

Yucatan, many of the jobs are low wage and based on seasonal short-term contracts with limited access to social mobility. Accordingly, dependence on such employment does not necessarily eliminate the economic insecurity attached to agricultural work (Castellanos 2010a:176f.). The vulnerability inherent to both the milpa agriculture and the tourism industry is often handled by Maya speakers through balancing the two economic activities, leading to frequent population movements between rural communities of Yucatan and Cancún.

As briefly addressed in the introduction, the recently-observed language shift from Yucatec Maya is – among other factors – often attributed to the above-presented regional developments, characterized by the increased interconnectedness of urban and rural spaces (e.g. Pfeiler 2014). The following section presents the language situation in Yucatan and discusses its articulation with the social changes partly demonstrated above.

Figure 2 Population growth 1970–2010 in the in the municipality of Benito Juárez130

130 _{Based on the census dataof INEGI.}

0 100,000 200,000 300,000 400,000 500,000 600,000 700,000 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

Figure 3 Proportion of the population born outside of the state of Quintana Roo in the municipality of Benito Juárez131

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Based on the census data of INEGI. 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% 1980 1990 2000 2010

Population born in the state of Yucatan

Population born outside of Quintana Roo