- CAPITALISM IN PLACE
- GALLERIES
- Imagining Italy
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- Unhoused Atlanta
- Globalized Atlanta
- Racialized Atlanta
- Greenwashed Atlanta
- Georgia Timescapes
- Mississippi Timescapes
- New Mexico Timescapes
- Florida Beachscapes
- California Waterscapes
- Yankee Landscapes
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- New York Streetscapes
- Southern Roadscapes
- Branding Jacksonville
- Crafting the Quarter
- CONTACT
¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
The Contradictions of Cultural Tourism
Cultural tourism has been around a long time. It certainly didn’t begin with capitalism. Yet capitalism has fueled its rapid growth since the end of the Second World War. Cultural tourism reflects a contradiction at the heart of capitalism. I refer to the see-saw relationship between alienation and authenticity. Capitalism alienates us from the work we do, from the things we make and buy and sell, from our fellow workers, from our bosses, from the natural world, even from a healthy sense of life itself. Alienation is the absence of authenticity, and authenticity is the bread and butter of cultural tourism.
What does this word authenticity mean? It means having an immediate and unmediated connection with where you are, what you are, who you are. Lots of people are desperate for such a connection, especially in the First World. These searchers for authenticity help drive the booming market for cultural tourism. They will pay top dollar for an experience of authenticity, even if it's only a vicarious and temporary one. Places in the Third World where vibrant indigenous cultures have survived the onslaught of conquest, colonialism and capitalism are popular tourist destinations. Authenticity is often their biggest selling point.
Cultural tourism draws on multiple sources, from Romanticism and Orientalism to Counter-culturalism and New Ageism. It imagines authentic indigenous culture as existing outside of human time like a geological formation that contains the secrets of our original state of being. While this idea may serve the subjective needs of tourists craving contact with an authentic culture unspoiled by the commercialism of modern life, it distorts the realities facing indigenous people and places. It also prevents us from asking hard questions about the capitalist production of place.
I don’t want to sound overly cynical. I am a First World traveler, after all. Cultural tourism would not be a billion-dollar industry if its promise of authenticity was pure snake oil. But this brings us to another contradiction of capitalism: the surest way to ruin the authentic qualities of any culture, indigenous or otherwise, is to commodify and market it, which is exactly what capitalism and cultural tourism set out to do.
Allyson and I made our first trip to Oaxaca in 2014. We have returned several times since then. The photos you see here were taken in April 2023, which means I have been thinking about cultural tourism, alienation, authenticity and Oaxaca for a decade.
Oaxaca de Juarez is the capital of the state of Oaxaca in the Republic of Mexico, a municipality of over 700,000 souls. A third of the state's population speak one of sixteen major indigenous languages. Cultural tourism is a mainstay of the local economy, especially in the city’s historic center which was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987.
All industries require a material, social and institutional infrastructure. Cultural tourism is no exception. Traditional markets and transportation systems, which in Oaxaca go back to pre-Columbian times, are appropriated by cultural tourism and made to serve its purposes. The gargantuan Central de Abastos, the markets of Benito Juarez and 20 de Noviembre, and the mom-and-pop miscelaneas on virtually every street keep the wheels of of the tourist trade turning. Street vendors circulate through the historic center in hopes of vacuuming up whatever loose tourist change remains. The taxis, colectivos (shared taxis with fixed destinations), buses and trucks are like red blood cells carrying commercial oxygen to all urban extremities. They are packed with tourists and all the things that keep the tourists happy.
When traditional economic infrastructures are subordinated to the logic of cultural tourism, the genie is let out of the bottle. The consequences can be profound.
Consider the case of the handwoven textiles for which Oaxaca is famous. The premier private galleries and rug stores are located on Calle Macedonio Alcalá, the packed pedestrian walkway between the Church of Santo Domingo de Guzmán and the Zocalo. A block away is the Textile Museum of Oaxaca which exhibits historic and contemporary textiles as well as hosting workshops. Launched by billionaire businessman-philanthropist Alfredo Harp Helú in 2008, the nonprofit museum is a good example of how cultural tourism absorbs indigenous traditions into the structures of urban growth machines, neoliberal governance and class power.
Weaving also shows how cultural tourism has created openings for women in traditionally male-dominated crafts. The woman I photographed hard at work with a backstrap loom is a licensed vendor in the Alameda de Leon, a prime location for tourism; she weaves in the open area behind her stall while her teenage daughter deals with the customers up front.
But the feminization of weaving generates social and political tensions. This was explained to me by Pastora Gutierrez who founded the Cooperative Vida Nueva, a remarkable collective of unmarried women weavers in Teotitlan del Valle, the most famous of the Zapotec weaving towns, 20 miles from the city. These women have had to battle against the assumption that the loom is an extension of patriarchal authority and belongs to male household heads. Weavers like the town's internationally renowned maestros Jacobo Mendoza Ruiz and his son Jacobo Mendoza Gonzalez personify the traditional male ideal. In the age-old division of labor, the wives and mothers of weavers, like the one we met in the town's Centro Cultural Comunitario, handle such subsidiary tasks as trimming excess yarn from the rugs and negotiating a final price with the tourists.
Cultural tourism has also created political openings for women battling against the predatory practices of multiple layers of middle-men extending all the way to CEOs of multinational corporations. Mazatec women embroiderers recently garnered considerable attention in the press when they protested against Levi’s Oaxaca for appropriating their designs without attribution or remuneration as part of a new winter collection for the tourist market. In these multi-scale struggles for women's empowerment, cultural tourism is a significant common denominator.
Even traditions that fall squarely in the female realm are pulled into crosscurrents of cultural tourism. The culinary arts are a good example of this. Family-run cooking classes are available through Airbnb, like the one we signed up for in Soledad Etla, 12 miles from the city center. For those tourists who prefer to stay in Oaxaca de Juarez, the recently opened Centro Gastronómico Oaxaca provides an alternative. This state-sponsored facility houses food stands with basic cooking equipment, enabling women from small pueblos outside the city to prepare and sell comida típica to tourists in the historic district.
But the opening of the Centro was accompanied by controversy. Despite being touted by the State Cultural Heritage Institute as "a place where both Oaxacans and tourists will be able to learn in depth the elements that make our culinary culture rich and value it better," some critics saw the Centro as an interloper. The women food vendors of Mercado 20 de Noviembre, which houses a bustling food court and meat hall south of the Zocalo, claimed that the Centro would cut into their business and undermine "the culinary tradition of which the Oaxacan families who work in our traditional markets, kitchens or restaurants are guardians."
As these cases suggest, cultural tourism has not only created new opportunities for women but also triggered heated debates over what constitutes authentic tradition, who speaks for it, and how it should be marketed to tourists. Who represents the tradition of Oaxacan weaving—Gutierrez, the Gonzalezes or Harp Helú? Who are the true guardians of Oaxaca's culinary tradition—the women of Soledad Etla, the Centro Gastronómico Oaxaca or the Mercado 20 de Noviembre?
Cultural tourism also reconfigures the politics and policing of public space. The historic heart of Oaxaca de Juarez comprises the Zocalo, the Alameda de Leon and the Cathedral. This is where you’ll find the densest concentration of tourists and vendors. Given the critical contribution tourism makes to Oaxaca's economic and fiscal well-being, municipal, state and federal authorities are keen on maintaining public safety in this privileged zone. They know that the slightest hint of danger or unrest will send tourists flocking back home with their dollars and Euros. The presence of municipal police (blue uniforms), National Guard (white camouflage) and the Mexican Army (green camouflage) increases dramatically as you approach the Zocalo. So do the number of military assault weapons in the hands of young uniformed recruits.
The historic district attracts other actors as well. It is the go-to gathering place for protesters of all stripes. In May 2006 the teachers’ union went out on strike as they had each spring for twenty-five consecutive years, demanding higher pay, equitable funding for indigenous schools in rural areas and the resignation of the allegedly corrupt state governor. The teachers pitched their camp in the Zocalo and threatened to stay there until their demands were addressed. A month later police attempted to clear the occupiers with a show of force, which led to violent street battles and the formation of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, an extraordinary experiment in grass-roots mobilization among organized labor, indigenous communities and leftists. The standoff continued until late October, when 11,000 police swept the occupiers out of the Zocalo. Over the five months leading to the final showdown, somewhere between 17 and 27 protesters were killed by security forces.
Here we see yet another variation on the theme of cultural tourism’s contradictions: to keep the historic district safe for tourists who come in search of cultural authenticity, the state and its security apparatus cracked down on a movement that by any standard ranks as one of the most authentic collective expressions of indigenous cultural identity in Oaxaca since the Mexican Revolution.
2006 was not a one-off event. The Zocalo has continued to be a magnate for protesters, occupiers, police and, of course, tourists. While we were there, the teachers set up tents and occupied the street in front of their union headquarters, which is a block away from the Zocalo. The organization of unlicensed street vendors, who are the target of police sweeps, likewise staked out a spot in front of the Cathedral.
These were miniscule actions compared to 2006. According to most observers, the authorities decided to authorize a handful of oppositional Potemkin villages in the historic district in an effort to show that social order and legitimate dissent can co-exist in the same space. This was an exercise in damage control. The negative publicity following the eruption of state violence in 2006, which led to a sharp downturn in tourism, was a wakeup call to the governing class that managing dissent worked better than trying to wipe it out with automatic weapons.
If the contestation and occupation of public space can be counted as an authentic tradition, as it should be, we come back to the point I have been making all along. Under the pressure of cultural tourism, this tradition has survived but largely in symbolic form: its militant content has been neutralized by the state's top-down containment policies.
At the high point of the 2006 occupation, militant street art flooded the public spaces of the city, building on a tradition associated with Zapotec artist-activist Francisco Toledo and his Graphic Arts Institute of Oaxaca. The most compelling street art in the city today is inspired by memories of the 2006 uprising and by Toledo's politicized aesthetics. Leftist art collectives continue to wheatpaste their woodcuts on the sides of public and private buildings, giving voice and visibility to the struggles of indigenous peoples, the working class and women. In ideological outlook, these collectives and workshops run the gamut from Zapatista to Marxist to Trotskyist to radical feminist. Anarchists who like to keep things simple with their spray-can slogans round out the leftist lineup. All of these groups are defiantly anti-capitalist.
Like so many other cultural forms, the tradition of street art is subject to the contradictions of cultural tourism and capitalism. What originated as "authentic" oppositional art has been seized upon and reprogrammed by state actors and private commercial interests. A lot of the street art you see today in Oaxaca is financed by local authorities and neighborhood associations interested in place branding or by private businesses looking for cheap advertising. Real estate developers have enlisted street art in the service of gentrification, as can be seen in two neighborhoods on the edge of the historic center, working-class Jalatlaco and up-and-coming Ex Marquesado.
In a class by itself—neither exactly political nor commercial—is the visual psychedelia gracing the walls of many structures, much of it inspired by María Sabina, the Mazatec shaman from the Oaxacan town of Huautla de Jiménez who put the healing properties of psilocybin mushrooms on the map for many First World cultural tourists.
One last offshoot of street art should be noted. Go to any gallery or art museum in Oaxaca (or in Paris, London, New York, etc.) and you will find repackaged street motifs hanging on the walls in guilt frames. With big price tags.
Many First World lovers of authentic street art who make the pilgrimage to Oaxaca are unaware that a significant number of the extraordinary works on display frequently serve interests opposed to those advocated by Toledo and his leftist followers. This raises the same question that swirls around the Cooperativa Vida Nueva and the Centro Gastronómico Oaxaca. Who are the keepers of the tradition of Oaxcan street art—anti-capitalist engravers, market-oriented muralists or tripped-out dreamscapists?
Sometimes a simple metaphor can get to the truth of a complicated process. Cultural tourism is like a Oaxacan bartender preparing a Mezcal martini (another worthy tradition, by the way). Two shots of Mezcal, one shot of indigenous weaving, one shot of comida típica, a pinch of woodcut engraving. Shake well and pour over ice. Savor the authenticity.
Or maybe black mole, Oaxaca's signature sauce, is a better metaphor. Its diverse ingredients are ground on a stone metate and simmered patiently over several days, emerging as a richly textured harmony of fragrances and flavors.
Think about these metaphors as you scroll through the photos. The leftist woodcut of an ancient warrior symbolizing indigenous resistance to injustice is a close cousin to posters announcing an upcoming lucha libre match and the collection of luchador t-shirts displayed in boutique windows on Calle Macedonio Alcalá. The turquoise-encrusted skull excavated from Monte Alban and exhibited at the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca finds its modern-day doppelganger in the mask offered for sale by a Zapotec stone carver at the famous archeological site and the images of black clay skulls you'll see in brochures of tour operators who comb the historic center in search of passengers. The rough-hewn alebrijes sold by street vendors around Santo Domingo de Guzmán swim in the same cultural pool as the the colorful advertisement for Recuérdame, a restaurant at the Oaxaca Airport, and the spectacular exhibition pieces produced by Jacobo and Maria Ángeles, maestros of the art whose figures of monkeys with gold-leafed vulvas and penises are meant to question taboos around sex and gender. Representations of the hairless xolo, icon of Mexican nationality, can be found in a highbrow exhibition at the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca and on the side of a Xochimilco residence covered with Zapatista-inspired woodcuts. If you are as lucky as I was, you might cross paths with an honest-to-God xolo on the streets of Oaxaca.
Pre-Columbian warriors, luchadores, Mixtec skulls, Zapotec masks, fantastical animals carved from copal, hairless dogs with soulful brown eyes—these are cultural symbols straddling the line between craft and art, indigenous and cosmopolitan, organic and commercial, authentic and artificial. They illustrate the process that students of globalization call genre bending.
If genre bending has a single exemplar in this hybridized place, it is Lila Downs, the superstar vocalist and reigning diva of Oaxacan culture, whose face is wrapped on local tour buses, adorned with indigenous feathered headdress. Without batting an eyelash, she consented to my taking her picture on a strange night when a violent hail storm appeared from out of nowhere and hammered the city. Allyson and I were in her jazz club at the time, enjoying the music and the view of the mountains to the south. Ms. Downs had recently lost her husband of many years. I was thinking about this when I put my camera on a window ledge, set the timer and photographed the lights shimmering in the distance like so many wandering souls.
These genre-bending symbols and images, in my mind at least, are connected with the Calavera Catrina of Day of the Dead fame, who is hard to miss in Oaxaca, the ultimate wandering soul present at all of life's big moments from the calenda de boda to the final ride in the back of a hearse, reminding us of our mortality and our kinship with the dead.
The culture of Oaxaca is all this and more. A magical culture befitting a magical place. But is it authentic? When so many of the world's cultures are subject to the alienating processes of capital accumulation, who can say what is authentic?