Rethinking Tourism Reform: Territorial Politics and Maya Alternatives to Capitalist Recovery in Southern Mexico

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the fragility of tourism-dependent economies and intensified calls for sustainable transformations. This paper examines state-led post-pandemic tourism reforms in Mexico’s Fourth Transformation, particularly around the Maya Train project in the Yucatán Peninsula. Drawing on critical approaches to reformism and J.K. Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies framework, we discuss Mexico’s post-pandemic tourism initiatives as conventional tourism reforms: incremental changes towards capitalist recovery that treat tourism as an unquestioned engine of growth and deploy infrastructure as a geopolitical technology of territorialisation over Indigenous space. We contrast this state-led approach with two Maya-led initiatives that exemplify paths for alternative, anti-colonial reforms and territorial politics. First, ser camaleón (chameleon) practices in community-based tourism cooperatives, where participants strategically leverage Maya identity and understandings of solidarity while redefining community boundaries in rural inland settings threatened by tourism growth. Second, housing strategies that reject mortgage indebtedness and formal housing markets in the tourist city of Cancún. Both cases show existing community economies working within and at a distance from capitalist structures as modalities of Indigenous geopolitics reconstituting the terms of land, labour, and democracy towards emancipatory horizons that challenge tourism’s conflation with extractive growth.