Rethinking Tourism Reform
Territorial Politics and Maya Alternatives to Capitalist Recovery in Southern Mexico
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19477223 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Matilde Córdoba Azcárate (0000-0003-3680-8717, University of California San Diego, corresponding author), M Bianet Castellanos (University of Minnesota United States) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-27 |
| Publication date | 2026-06-17 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Geopolitics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14650045.2026.2685599 |
| OpenAlex | W7165049245 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 37 |
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
Capitalism · Geopolitics · Indigenous · Maya · Politics · Solidarity · Sustainable tourism · Tourism · Tourism geography · Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research · Migration, Aging, and Tourism Studies · Politics and Society in Latin America
Covid-19 and tourism vulnerability
Housing beyond land rent
Indigenous organizing for housing justice
The “war over tourism”
Overtourism and Tourismphobia
“Post-viral tourism’s antagonistic tourist imaginaries”
The Neoliberal Imperative of Tourism
Communities Constructing Their Own Alternatives in the Face of Crisis
Indigenous Urbanisms in Pandemic Times
Resetting tourism post-Covid-19
The growth of Aboriginal tourism in remote Australia
Cartographies of the Colonial/Capitalist State
Westphalian Vs. Indigenous Sovereignty
Indigenous Natures and the Anthropocene
Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry
Diverse economies
Indigenous tourism research, past and present
Pathways to post-capitalist tourism
The touristic transformation of postcolonial states
Tourism geopolitics
International development and tourism geographies
Tourism geopolitics
The Geopolitics of China's Maritime Silk Road Initiative
U jeets'el le ki'ki' kuxtal
Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure
Housing Finance Reform and Increasing Socioeconomic Segregation in Mexico
From Territory to Rights
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |