Living Currency: Mass Tourism and Local Identity in Cancún

Abstract: This essay studies the dialectics of mass tourism and local identity in Cancún. It carries out a discursive analysis of texts from a variety of disciplines, including Fernando Martí's journalistic account of Cancún's creation; ethnographies of Indigenous communities in Cancún and surrounding areas by M. Bianet Castellanos and Matilde Córdoba Azcárate; and essays and poetry by David Anuar and Marijosé Romero. It identifies a shared critical procedure in these texts' portraits of life in Cancún, in which distinctions are marked between the tourist city, where life revolves around money and pleasure, and the real city, where Cancún's residents construct lives that exceed the tourist city's drive to reduce human existence to economic processes and touristic pleasures. This essay argues that, rather than conceiving local identity in Cancún as a product of such distinctions, it might instead be understood as an open-ended process in which residents repeatedly distinguish between themselves and the tourists, and between their city and the tourist city—but also observe how those distinctions are threatened, eroded, and washed away by the tourist economy. In its final section, it draws on the conceptual framework developed by Pierre Klossowski in Living Currency to outline an approach to local identity that would also account for these moments of indeterminacy.