Barry Carr - Acapulco and Cancun: Two Models of Tourism

DR © El Colegio de México, A. C.

Acapulco and Cancun:

Two Models of Tourism Development 1920-2010

Barry Carr

University of California-Berkeley, EUA

& Australia National University, Canberra, Australia

Mesa: Historias de turismo en México

Presidente: William Beezley

Sesión: sábado 30 de octubre, 8:00 a 10:10 am

1 | B a r r y C a r r


The historical evolution of Acapulco and Cancún can be seen as occupying different ends of a

continuum (with all the disadvantages of using continuums in historical analysis). This can be

helpful in identifying major issues for research. What follows is a preliminary attempt to

identify some of the most significant characteristics of the tourist histories of both sites and to

place Acapulco and Cancún at different points in a continuum of developments in tourist

history of Mexico. This not an attempt to provide a succinct or comprehensive history of the

two sites. 1 Rather it is an effort to set an agenda for research and to identify some of the

salient characteristics of the development histories that connect with the broad issues

discussed in an earlier article by this author.

Both Acapulco and Cancún developed into major resort areas of national and international

significance. 2However, the development path they adopted differs in a number of important

1 History of tourism in Mexico is underdeveloped both as regards to published scholarly research as well as in

the degree of institutional and academic recognition given to the topic. In Spanish there are no global, solidly

documented and researched books devoted to reconstructing the historical development of tourism in Mexico. An

exception would be the excellent article on Mexico City tourism in the 1920s by Ricardo Pérez Montfort , “Down

Mexico Way. Estereotipos y turismo norteamericano en el México de 1920”, Patrimonio Cultural y Turismo:

Cuadernos 14: Planeando sobre el turismo cultural (México: CONACULTA, 2006), pp. 13-32. For some useful

accounts of legislation dealing with tourism and the changing perspectives of Mexican politicians see Eugenio E.

McDonald, Turismo; una recopilación historiográfica de conceptos pronunciados por gobernantes mexicanos

desde 1823 (México: Editorial Bodoni, 1981) and Gloria Salazar Chiapino, Memoria geneológica cronológica e

historia del turismo en México de 1929 a 1979 (México, 1984), 2 vols. Alfonso de Jesús Jiménez, Turismo,

estructura y desarrollo (México, 2nd edition, 1992). A prominent tourism industry historian, Héctor Manuel

Romero, has published several useful compendiums of historical anecdotes: Crónica Mexicana de turismo, Vols.

1 y 2 (México, 1977); Enciclopedia Mexicana del Turismo, primera y segunda parte (Mexico: IPN-Limusa,

1988); Miguel Alemán y el turismo (Mexico: Asociación Mexicana de Hoteles y Moteles, 1983). Another

account, essentially made up of personal memoirs, is Miguel Guajardo Bonavides, Relatos y desarrollo del

turismo en México (México: Porrúa, 1995). In English, there are recent signs of serious interest by U.S.

historians; as witnessed by the work of Dina Berger. Andrew Wood and Alex Saragoza. See Dina Berger, The

Development and Promotion of Mexico's Tourism Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2006); Andrew Wood & Dina Berger (eds.), Holiday in Mexico: Historical

Perspectives on Tourism and Tourist Encounters (Duke University Press, 2009). Alex Saragoza, "The Selling of

Mexico: Tourism and the State, 1929–1952." in Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov (eds.),

Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940 (Durham: Duke University Press,

2001), pp. 91-115. 2 The tourism history of Acapulco, neglected for most of the port city’s history except for the work of a number

of cronistas and aficionados like Alejandro Gómez Maganda , has recently attracted a number of professional

scholars. Francisco R. Escudero‟s, Origen y evolución del turismo en Acapulco (Mexico City: Universidad

Americana de Acapulco, 1998 is not the work of an academic historian but it is an immensely valuable

compendium of data on Acapulco; Osbelia Alcaraz Morales, La arquitectura de los hotels de Acapulco 1927-

1959 (Chilpancingo: Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, 2007) is the first published study of hotel development,

a much neglected topic; On environmental issues (and useful but brief discussions of conflict over land between



ways especially with regard to the towns‟ prior histories, their reliance on private and state

resources, the interface between visitors and permanent residents, degree of dependence on

domestic and national tourism and, finally, the two resort areas‟ engagement with Mexico‟s

archaeological and pre-Hispanic heritage.

A Acapulco

In Acapulco tourism drew on a very long prior history of non-tourist political, cultural and

economic development that was organised around the Spanish colonial trading route linking

Asia with New Spain via the Manila Galleon fleets. Acapulco existed as a small coastal town,

albeit a very isolated one that was dependent on sea-based communication until the late 1920s

and on visits by ships on the route from California to Panama, as well as on local cabotage, a

hundred years before the tourist industry developed in a major way in the 1940s.

However, Acapulco‟s „isolation‟ prior to the 1930s should not be exaggerated as it has

tended to be thus far in the sketchy literature on the town‟s history. It is true that until the

completion of the first road from Mexico City in late 1927 travellers from and to Acapulco

faced long (three to seven day) journeys by sea, rail and rough track. However, the port town

of Acapulco had always been tightly linked to the Pacific and its nineteenth century elites

were nurtured by successive waves of Spanish and North American immigrants that gave the

town a strikingly cosmopolitan character from the late nineteenth century onwards – almost

certainly a major factor in the port‟s successful insertion into international tourism circuits

later in the twentieth century.3

ejidatarios and land developers in the 1940s and 1950s), see the much cited Juan Manuel Ramírez Saíz, Turismo

y medio ambiente (Mexico City: UAM, 1986). See also Francisco Gómezjara, “Acapulco: despojo y turismo”,

Problemas del Desarrollo, UNAM, No. 19, agosto-octubre, 1974, pp. 126-145. The multi-author collection of

essays edited by the German geographer, Erdmann Gormsen, El turismo como factor del desarrollo regional en

México (Mainz, 1977) provide valuable empirical data on Acapulco and early Cancún in the mid 1970s. In

English recent articles on Acapulco include: Andrew Sackett, “The Two Faces of Acapulco During the Golden

Age” in Gilbert Joseph & Timothy Henderson (eds.), The Mexico Reader (Durham: Duke University Press,

2002), pp. 500-511; Stephen Niblo & Diane Niblo, “Acapulco in Dreams and Reality‟, Mexican Studies/Estudios

Mexicanos 24: 1, Winter 2008, pp. 31-51; and chapters by Andrew Sackett and Barbara Kastelein in the new

collection of essays Holiday in Mexico.

3 Commerce, import exports and ship handling, as well as textile manufacture and many local haciendas were in

the hands of merchants from Spain (many from the Basque country) including the Hermanos Fernández, the



The ancien régime in Acapulco was certainly seriously challenged by the development

of the city‟s tourist industry following the opening of the first modern road from Mexico City

to the port in late 1927. After the early 1930s, the economic benefits derived from tourism

would be shared both by selected members of the city‟s established elites (the Sutter, Link,

and Hudson families for example) as well as, increasingly, by new immigrants from Mexico

City and elsewhere in Mexico, the U.S. and Europe. 4Representative figures included the

night club and restaurant pioneers, Alfred. C. Blumenthal („Blumy‟) and Teddy Stouffer 5, and

several United State land investors, including early real estate developers such as the Texan

land investor, Albert B. Pullen, and Wolf Scheonborn who arrived in Acapulco in 1937 and

purchased an entire hillside which he developed into one of the earliest and most successful

residential areas Club Deportivo.6 Schoenborn‟s wife in the 1950s and 1960s was a New York

heiress and art benefactor and the couple quickly became a key element in Acapulco‟s high

society. Another early US millionaire who developed a passion for Acapulco was the oil

mogul, Paul Getty who was associated with the development of the first major hotel on

Revolcadero Beach in the Puerto Marqués area that he had first encountered in 1941; the Hotel

Alzuyeta family (owners of the large Ciudad de Oviedo store), and the US immigrants, W.M. Hudson and the

Stephenson family. The Sutter family of Sacramento fame (among whom there was a nineteenth century U.S.

consul in Acapulco), was another North American family whose descendants married into local polite society.

Ricardo Morlet Sutter, the great grandson of the first of the Sutters to settle in Acapulco, was a mayor of

Acapulco in the 1960s. 4 On the Hudson family, originally from Arkansas, see Concha Hudson Batani, Del Acapulco de Antes (no place

or date of publication). 5 Teddy Stouffer, a Swiss band leader, born in Berne, arrived in Mexico in 1942 via Tijuana. After a few years in

Mexico City where he made his first connections with the capital‟s newly burgeoning nightlife and musical

scene, Stouffer moved to Acapulco where his career involved managing the La Perla restaurant and cabaret at the

Hotel Mirador (the earliest three star hotel in Acapulco) as well as the elegant Hotel Casablanca and, in the

1950s, at the Villa Vera hotel; Alfred Cleveland [A.C.] Blumenthal („Blumie‟) was a restaurant and night club

pioneer in Mexico City in the early 1940s where he began at the Hotel Reforma and its renowned night club

Ciros. In Acapulco he managed the hill-side Hotel Casablanca, the first really luxurious hotel constructed in the

resort town that opened at Christmas, 1946, and its nightclubs Ciro‟s which was based on his Mexico-City

success, and the Beachcomber (with its notorious tortoise races held in the Casablanca‟s swimming pool).

Blumenthal had been an immensely successful film and theatrical executive in Hollywood and New York in the

1920s and 1930s and for a while had been married to the Ziegfeld showgirl Peggy Fears. From all accounts,

Blumenthal fled to Mexico in early 1941 after experiencing financial difficulties over tax issues; Time Magazine

referred to him in 1946 as a „taxpatriate‟, Time, February 11, 1946; New York Times, April 22, 1941, p. 23. In

Mexico „Blumy‟ developed a close relationship with president-to be Miguel Alemán. Lucius Beebe, “Along the

Boulevards”, Gourmet, April. 1947. Mike Shorris, The Life and Times of Mexico (New York: W.W. Norton,

2004), pp. 316-317; Mike Oliver‟s Acapulco, 37-38. See also Dina Berger‟s excellent essay („A Drink Between

Friends”) on Mexico City night life in the early and mid 1940s in Nicholas Bloom (ed.), Pleasure, Profit, and

Refuge: American Adventures in Post-War Mexico (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 6 Mike Oliver’s Acapulco, (Writers Press, 2001), p. 19.



Pierre Marqués opened late in 19567. The U.S. businessman, Carl Renstrom, used most of his

fortune made in manufacturing hair curlers in the 1930s and 1940s to develop the important

Villa Vera Hotel (1954) which attracted Hollywood luminaries in the 1950s and 1960s in the

same way as the older Hotel Flamingo had been doing since the 1940s.8 The early

involvement in Acapulco in the mid and late 1940s of several key entertainment figures – in

particular Blumenthal and the Hollywood agent, Bo Roos guaranteed that the film and

entertainment world‟s love affair with the port town was launched with powerful friends. 9

Cancún (Nest of Serpents in Mayan), on the other hand was, at least superficially,

virtually virgin territory before its development as a major beach resort. Hence the frequent

references in the publicity and media literature of its early days to Cancún being a „utopian

project”, “una población que surgió de la nada”, a “city of nothing but immigrants - no

natives here”, all of these being excellent examples of a boosterism that permeated the

Mexican and international imagination for several decades from the early 1950s. The area

was, indeed, sparsely populated; the total population of the immediate Cancun area, the

municipality of Puerto Juárez, was only 117 in 1969. The local population in the hinterland,

made up of peasant agricultural producers, was mostly engaged in activities such as extraction

of lumber and chicle from nearby forests (80% of the first construction workers were Maya-

speaking chicleros) and on shifting corn (milpa) cultivation. However, the tourist boom was in

fact, only the latest of a series of cyclical commodity booms that had long bound the coast of

Yucatán and Quintana Roo to the global economy.10

7 J. Paul Getty, My Life and Fortunes (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1963).

8 Albert Byron Pullen, originally from Texas, started his real estate career in Mexico City in 1930 and began

investing in Acapulco in the mid and late1930s when he bought 750 acres of land on the Las Playas area of

Caleta peninsula through his real estate company Fraccionadora de Acapulco. In 1945 Pullen built the Hotel Las

Américas and two years later acquired a financial interest in the operation of the newly-opened Hotel Del Prado

in Mexico City. In the 1950s, Pullen and his sons operated the Hotel Tequesquitengo in Morelos. Wolfgang

(„Wolf‟) Schoenborn, born in 1904 was a German immigrant who arrived in Mexico in 1935. He made a fortune

from sale of real estate in Acapulco. After his arrival in Acapulco in 1937 he bought a huge swathe of land inland

from what is now a core area of Acapulco Dorado and developed a golf club, tennis courts and a major land

subdivision known as Club Deportivo. Barry Carr, “Two Pioneer Real Estate Developers in Acapulco: Al Pullen

and Wolf Schoenborn”, unpublished ms; 2009; Mike Oliver‟s Acapulco, p. 19. 9 The veteran Acapulco journalist, Mike Oliver, has written: “Bo Roos & Blumy had so much influence in

Hollywood that almost every movie or television celebrity who had to flee, go on vacation, or on honeymoon,

chose Acapulco”, Mike Oliver’s Acapulco, p. 38. 10

For a warning about not exaggerating the „empty space‟ dimension of the Mexican Caribbean see Michael

Redclift, „A Convulsed and Magic Country‟: Tourism and Resource Histories in the Mexican Caribbean”,



Cancún was a state-supervised effort to build an integrated tourist development pole. It was

selected, so it has been claimed, by computer on the basis of its climate, beautiful beaches and

geographical location vis a vis the US east and southeast and Western Europe, whereas

Acapulco, and indeed Mexico tourism before the 1970s, had drawn on California, the South

West and especially Texas. Cancún from the very beginning was planned as a resort that

would target the US east coast and south-west and, then, western Europe.

The first stage of planning of Cancún goes back to 1966-1967 when economists of the

central bank, Banco de México, undertook a study of tourism opportunities in Mexico in the

context of the boom of tourism in Florida, the Caribbean (Bahamas, Puerto Rico), Hawaii, and

Spain. The study was a response to a desperate need to capture foreign exchange and provide

employment. By the mid 1960s tourism growth in Mexico - which had traditionally, at least

as far as beach tourism was concerned, been based on Acapulco- was worryingly well below

the booming levels achieved elsewhere. It grew only 11% in the 1961-1967 period, for

example, compared with 24% in the Far East and 46% in Pacific islands (especially Hawaii).

11 A paltry 60,000 tourists visited the whole of the Yucatán and Quintana Roo in 1968, while

four million tourists, mostly norteamericanos, flooded Caribbean resorts in the same year. The

contrast was both striking and disturbing.12

Antonio Enrique Savignac (1931-2007), a young banker at the Banco de México, was

the first key researcher on the Cancún project and travelled extensively throughout Mexico

and overseas in 1967 and 1968 as part of a small group which was investigating suitable sites

for the development of new integrated tourism development poles. By the end of the 1960s

Environment and History, 11, 2005, pp. 83-97 and the same author‟s Frontiers: Histories of Civil Society and

Nature (Boston: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 131-192. On the chicle industry in the Puerto Morelos area south of the

modern town of Cancun see Jennifer Mathews and Lilia Lizama-Rogers, “Jungle Rails: A Historic Narrow-

Gauge Railway” in Justine Shaw and Jennifer Matthews (eds.), Quintana Roo Archaeology (Tucson: University

of Arizona Press, 2005), pp. 112-124. 11

There is an abundant literature on Cancún although almost none of it is written by historians. A sample would

include: Daniel Hiernaux-Nicolas, “Cancún Bliss”, in Dennis R. Judd & Susan F, Feinstein, The Tourist City

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 124-139; Rebecca Torres & Janet Henshall Momsen,

“Gringolandia: Cancún and the American Tourist” in Nicholas Bloom, Adventures into Mexico, pp. 58-73;

Alicia R. Cruz, „The Thousand and One Faces of Cancún‟, Urban Anthropology, Vol. 25 (3), 1996, pp. 284-310.

María Bianet Castellanos, “Adolescent Migration to Cancún: Reconfiguring Maya Households and Gender

Relations in Mexico‟s Yucatán Peninsula”, Frontiers, 2007. 12

The anxieties caused by the boom in Caribbean tourism are forcefully expressed in a 1970 editorial of the

trade journal. Hoteles Mexicanos, xxix, 294, March 1970, p. 3.



the Banco de México specialists (significantly they completely ignored the federal Tourism

Department completely!) had chosen six possible development sites: Baja California Sur

(centered on Los Cabos and Loreto), two sites in the state of Oaxaca (Puerto Escondido and

Huatulco), Ixtapa (in Guerrero state -170km north of Acapulco and next door to the older

resort village of Zihuatanejo) and, first cab off the rank, Cancún in Quintana Roo. Savignac

later became the first Director of FONATUR and then, Minister of Tourism during part of the

Miguel de la Madrid presidency.

B Acapulco’s tourism evolution is slow and uneven, beginning in the late 1920s with the

completion of the first Mexico City-Acapulco road in a very rough form in November 1927,

although it was not really fully „petrolizado‟ and passable until 1935. The port did not take off

until the early and mid 1940s, accelerating during the alemanista sexenio in the late 1940s and

early 1950s, and reaching its peak development and prestige in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The city slowed down in the rest of the 1970s and stagnated thereafter as a result of negative

publicity concerning its severe problems of environmental degradation and overcrowding.

Acapulco initially drew its tourists from Mexico City 13

where, from the late 1940s, road travel

time to the port was becoming short enough (9-10 hours in 1948, reduced to 7 hours by 1954

and in recent years, with the completion of the Autopista del Sol toll road, just 4 hours) – to

take brief holidays and even long weekend trips feasible, and from an increasing number of

US tourists who arrived both by road and increasingly by air via Mexico City. However, the

major breakthrough occurred quite late in the piece – in the mid 1960s - when direct air

services were finally opened from Acapulco to many US cities for the first time.

Cancún is very much a late development. Its first hotels welcomed guests in 1974-1975 after

a furious four-year burst of infrastructure development. The nearby island of Cozumel is

actually the pioneer of beach tourism in this region; it was developed from 1956 onwards on a

small scale by, among others, a scion of the important Barbachano family and benefited from

13

In 1932, the Mexico City to Acapulco bus took an uncomfortable 14 hours. See the advertisement at the end of

Vito Alessio Robles‟ influential Acapulco en la historia y en la leyenda (Mexico, 1932).



an airstrip built by the US during the Second World War. „The islands created the fantasies,

and Cancún capitalized on them‟, two specialists have aptly noted. 14

Overall, the south-east of Mexico -Yucatán, Campeche and Quintana Roo- had long

been an underdeveloped area as far as domestic and international tourism was concerned.

Although the Yucatán capital, Mérida, and several large monumental Mayan archaeological

sites attracted small numbers of tourists in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, the Yucatán peninsula

(Yucatán and the Territory and then state of Quintana Roo) had for decades been poorly

connected with the rest of Mexico. Moreover, economic conditions in the Yucatán peninsula

had worsened in the 1950s and 1960s, with the traditionally important henequén (sisal)

industry stagnating badly with a serious impact on rural employment. Not unsurprisingly,

then, the Banco de México research team hoped that the development of a major tourist pole

would promote regional economic development in the greater Cancún hinterland.

Long before Cancún arrived on the scene there had been waves of government and private

interest in promoting an ambitious, integrated Caribbean southeast Mexican and Central

American tourist transport network, including the planned establishment of ferry boat services

from northeastern Yucatán to Cuba, although nothing came of these plans which were given

various labels such as Circuito del Caribe. By the early 1960s, the breaking of relations

between the U.S. and the Castro-led government followed by the imposition of a U.S. trade

embargo on Cuba effectively denied US tourists access to that island, With mounting evidence

of tourist saturation in Acapulco, and Mexico‟s complete failure to tap the expanding

Caribbean market, federal government strategy during the presidencies of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz

(1964-1970) and Luis Echeverría (1970-1976) embraced the development of a Mexican

Caribbean resort as vital to the country‟s development strategy.15

Cancún has had a more or less continuous and rapid development, admittedly with some

serious interruptions due to natural disaster – most recently Hurricane Katrina (in 2005); in

September 1988 Hurricane Gilbert also caused massive damage. The original resort zone is

now considered to be over-built – experiencing the same fate as Acapulco (so much for

planned development!), and recent initiatives have shifted investment and public attention

14

Dachary & Arnaíz, El Caribe mexicano, 1998. 15

Schwartz, Pleasure Island, pp. 190-203.



further south of Cancún along the so-called Maya Riviera a cleverly chosen name whose

origins are still unclear.

C Acapulco was largely the result of a series of uncoordinated private sector investments

over a period of 60 years, albeit that some of the pioneer investors were influential politicians

and their cronies. Indeed, tourism was one of the most important areas in which a fragment of

the new „revolutionary bourgeoisie” first consolidated a position in the private sector from the

late 1920s onwards – partly through the increasingly politicised allocation of bank loans from

development bodies like the Banco de México and Nacional Financiera, and through the

distribution of profitable government contracts for infrastructure development (particularly

road building). 16

The expropriation of ejidal land close to the ocean was also a crucial mechanism in the

development of private tourism and hotel properties as well as in the development of real

estate in general. Indeed, the best known, although still insufficiently studied, example of

tourism‟s impact on urban development and land tenure via the expropriation of ejidatarios is

that of Acapulco. The core urban center of Acapulco (or fundo legal) in the early 1940s was

small and surrounded by a series of ejidos (land reform units) that had been granted to

peasants, agricultural workers and small holders in the agrarian reforms of the late 1920s and

1930s. Much of this ejidal land stretched to and along the coats-line. The tourist expansion of

the city beyond the small historic core centered on the Zócalo and ayuntamiento, therefore, in

so far as it required access to peasant-held land, was effectively blocked by the ejidal heritage

which had been designed to improve the welfare of the agrarian poor and to build a political

support basis for the young revolutionary state.

The solution to this problem found in the mid 1940s was simple if brutal. The powerful

Junta Federal de Mejoras Materiales (JFMM), which drove the tourist development of

Acapulco under the leadership of Melchor Perrusquía, argued, successfully, that the best way

to gain access to beach front and near beach land and to raise money to cover the urbanisation

and infrastructure of a modern tourist city was through expropriation of ejidal landholdings in

16

Carlos Martínez Assad et al., Revolucionarios fueron todos (Mexico City: SEP-80, 1982), see especially the

chapter on Almazán by Mario Ramírez Roncaño.



the public interest (por utilidad pública), land which the JFMM argued, was not in any case

being used for agricultural purposes (a wild exaggeration), and to sell the resulting land

parcels for residential and tourist development. In this way, by paying ejidatarios almost

nothing and selling the resulting land parcels at high prices, the Junta would be able to raise

the substantial cash sums necessary for infrastructure development that would otherwise not

have been available. 17

Although the first expropriations of ejidal land took place in 1932 as well as in the last

year of the Cárdenas sexenio (when the first of several incremental attacks on the Icacos ejido

was made) and in the early 1940s, the major assault came once President Miguel Alemán

assumed the presidency. On January 28, 1947, just two months after Alemán took office, the

federal government gazetted its approval of the JFMM plan for the gradual expropriation of

eleven ejidos, Pie de la Cuesta, El Jardín, Santa Cruz, El Progreso, El Placer, La Garita,

Icacos, El Veladero, Las Cruces, El Marqués and Revolcadero for subsequent urban

development by the Junta.18

Five years later, most of the ejidatarios had lost their land in

exchange for a house and promises of modest financial compensation, some of which was

never delivered. For example, in the case of the ejidatarios of the Puerto Marqués ejido that

had been created in June 1931 using lands taken from the Stephenson Brothers (an influential

local acapulqueño family of US origins), only a portion of the ejido residents were recognized

as eligible for compensation. Many of the peasants who did receive compensation ended up

working as laborers on the granjas established by the new private owners, or abandoned

agriculture completely. Protest by ejidatarios and peasant organizations were generally

unsuccessful.19

17

Melchor Perrusquía was an absolutely fundamental actor in the development of Acapulco in the 1940s and

1950s. As head of the Junta Federal de Mejoras Materiales he enjoyed unfettered access to Miguel Alemán who

became a close personal friend. The JFMM ruled with an iron fist (so its critics argued) over the development of

the public works infrastructure and land resources of the port city. Perrusquía remained a powerful figure long

after Alemán left the presidency. He was, for example, one of the three key actors involved in the early planning

and execution of the bold Ciudad Satélite residential development north west of Mexico City in the mid 1950s on

land much of which belonged to Alemán. Mario Pani, Historia oral de la Ciudad de México, 1940-1990 (Mexico

City: Instituto Mora, ), p. ?? 18

Diario Oficial de la Federación, 28 enero de 1947, tomo CLX, no. 23. 19

A flavor of the administration’s response to peasant complaints is given in the correspondence between

Melchor Perrusqíia and Alemán in 1949 concerning the La Garita, Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Mexico

City, Fondo Presidencial Miguel Alemán, v 545.22/30.



The drive to privatise ejidal land continued to disrupt the internal economy and political unity

of ejidos throughout the rest of the century, facilitating the growth of new private land

subdivisions to the south of the city center– especially in the new luxury Punta Diamante

development launched in the period 1990-2010. The tourism industry, contrary to expectations

and promises, has been unable to absorb the labor force created by the displaced ejidatarios

and the continuing expropriation of ejidal land at La Poza, Barra Vieja, Llano Largo and Plan

de los Amates ejidos has intensified socio-economic and environmental damage. 20

In fact, the first urbanizations for private housing in Acapulco had begun in the late

1930s in the Las Playas area between La Quebrada and the Caleta beach area in the older

north-western area of the town. In the 1940s and 1950s, more private housing

fraccionamientos (for example, Mozimba, Vista Alegre, Costa Azul, El Farallón, Magallanes,

Playa Encantada, Granjas del Marqués, Club Deportivo) were opened towards the broader

expanses of the long beach front (Playa Hornos) to the south-east where the main thrust of

development would take place in the 1950s, 1960s and beyond in what would become known

as Acapulco Dorado.

The history of modern Acapulco is also, in part, the history of the development of the

burguesía revolucionaria, the constellation of politicians and military men who used their ties

to the increasingly interventionist federal state to enrich themselves and their friends and

families. Two revolutionary generals- Abelardo Rodríguez (military commander and then state

governor in Baja California and a major promoter of casino and tourist development in

Tijuana, Mexicali and Ensenada), and Juan Andreu Almazán, were among the many early

revolutionary politicians to become tourist entrepreneurs.

Almazán‟s involvement in Acapulco dates from 1931-2 when he was Minister of

Communications and Public Works in the Pascual Ortíz Rubio presidency. Among the road

building projects he supervised was a program of improvements to the still rather primitive

road to Acapulco first opened in late 1927. Shortly after arranging the visit to Acapulco of

President Ortiz Rubio in February 1931, a trip that lasted two full weeks and in which a

20

María Teresa Vázquez Castillo, Land Privatization in Mexico: Urbanization, Formation of Regions and

Globalization in Ejidos (London: Routledge, 2004), chapter provides an excellent account of the privatisation

carried out through expropriation at the La Poza ejido on the south-west edge of Acapulco.



presidential comitiva of no fewer than 56 people travelled to the port city, Almazán benefited

from one of the first expropriations of private (not ejidal in this case) land in the port city. 21

He acquired a large block of property alongside the Hornos beach where he would soon begin

construction of the Papagayo hotel. 22

Almazán‟s investments in Acapulco (the real estate

company, Compañía Impulsora de Acapulco, and the Hotel Papagayo, the first significant

hotel to be built close to a beach) and in Monterrey (Nuevo León state) grew steadily through

the late 1930s and 1940s. However, they came unstuck during the presidency of Miguel

Alemán, when Almazán fell foul of the Veracruz politician and his crucial Acapulco ally,

Melchor Perrusquía, the second head of the key Acapulco planning and investing body, Junta

Federal de Mejoras Materiales, which controversially dominated tourism development from its

foundation in 1942 until the mid 1970s.

Another once powerful politician and entrepreneur who also felt the wrath of President

Miguel Alemán was Maximino Avila Camacho, the brother of Manuel Avila Camacho who

had preceded Alemán as president in 1940-1946. Maximino occupied the sensitive and

strategic Ministry of Communications from 1941 until his death (from poisoning it was

rumored) in 1945 and he had a long established relationship with private businessmen,

including the cinema investor, William Jenkins, and the print and radio media entrepreneur,

Rómulo O‟Farrill. In 1949 President Alemán ordered the dismantling of a bridge that linked

the Caleta beach to a vulgar luxury house that Maximino had built, illegally, on a small island

facing Caleta; the house was later confiscated from Maximino‟s widow.23

21

On this extraordinary presidential junket to Acapulco, the first really large presidential acknowledgment of the

port city’s significance, see the daily coverage in Excélsior, January 3- 17, 1931. 22

Fideicomiso Plutarco Elias Calles-Fernando Torreblanca, PEC, Exp 192, Inventario 192, Leg 2/2, Irene

Viuda de Escudero al General P. E. Calles, December 25, 1931. Irene Escudero accused Almazán of being in

league with President Abelardo Rodriguez, the state governor of Guerrero and a group of „capitalistas de la

region lagunera‟; Justino Fernández, Aportación a la monografía de Acapulco (originally published in 1932 and

issued in a facsimile edition by CONACULTA/INBA in 2004); Anituy Rebolledo Ayerdi, „El casino de

Almazán‟, El Sur (Acapulco), February 2, 2006. 23

The first head of the Junta was former President Emilio Portes Gil. The Junta Federal de Mejoras was

frequently referred to as a „state within a state‟ by critics and allies alike. See Palpitaciones, The original contract

which gave Margarita Richardi a twenty six year long lease on the island and permission to operate beach

concessions on Caleta and Caletilla is in AGN: Ramo Miguel Alemán Valdes, 545.22/43. A U.S. entrepreneur,

Morris Silverman, resident in Acapulco since 1946, built and operated a small aquarium and zoo for a number of

years in the early 1950s using Maximino‟s island palacete



Even more strategic political allies were to be found among the family and business

associates of President (1946-1952) Miguel Alemán himself. These included Ramón Beteta,

Minister of Hacienda who was one of the earliest non-military politicians to build a

magnificent house in the town; Gilberto Limón, Minister of Defense and a major player in a

controversial expropriation of the Icacos ejido for use by the army; Senator Carlos Serrano, a

close confidant of Alemán, the head of Mexico‟s first national security agency, the Dirección

Federal de Seguridad, and a gangster-like figure widely believed to be involved in drug

trafficking; Antonio Ruíz Galindo, another Alemán cabinet minister who was a manufacturer

of metal office furniture, a hotel operator in Veracruz, and founder of the peak body of

Mexican hoteleros, the Asociación Mexicana de Hoteles AMT; Fernando Casas Alemán,

Mayor of Mexico City and a fellow jarocho; Antonio Carrillo Flores; Soledad Avila Camacho,

wife of President Manuel Avila Camacho; Manuel Gual Vidal, Minister of Education; Antonio

Díaz Lombardo, Alemán‟s Director of the new social security fund, IMSS, and a major

pioneer in Mexico‟s bus transport industry, as well as a founder in September 1934 of the

airline Aeronaves de México which pioneered air travel from Mexico City to Acapulco, and

many other allies. 24

The Alemán sexenio in fact proved to be one of the most influential and long lasting

political recruiting grounds and networks in the post 1930s era and a passion for Acapulco,

tight cohabitation between politicians and businessmen and a taste for showy lifestyles and

beautiful women were the distinguishing marks of this generation.25

Among the Alemán business associates who invested early in Acapulco were Gilberto

Guajardo, the Mexico City Chevrolet distributor and Acapulco franchisor for Pepsi Cola, who

was also the major shareholder in the handsome seven-story Hotel Club de Pesca which

opened in Acapulco in 1945-6. 26

Another was the Asturian immigrant, Manuel Suárez

24

Ramón Beteta‟s home in Acapulco was built well before President Alemán obtained his own ocean-front house

in Puerto Marqués in late 1949, with its private beach and mooring for the presidential yacht Sotovento (which he

purchased in 1947 at a cost of US$600,000). Díaz Lombardo built the Hotel La Marina in 1934-5, the earliest

modern hotel located in the old city center of Acapulco. 25

Jorge Gil, Samuel Schmidt and Jorge Castro, “La red de poder mexicano: El caso de Miguel Alemán”, Revista

Mexicana de Sociología, Vol. 55:3, Julio-Septiembre 1993, pp. 103-117; Rod Ai Camp, “Education and Political

Recruitment in Mexico: The Alemán Generation”, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 18:3,

August 1976, pp. 295-321. 26

The Hotel no longer exist, its place having been taken by a residential development built around a marina.



(Miguel Alemán was padrino to one of his sons) who had bought the Casino de la Selva in

Cuernavaca from former president Abelardo Rodríguez in the mid 1930s after its casino

concession had been overturned in the first days of the new Cardenas administration, as well

as the Hotel Mocambo in Veracruz in the 1930. His construction company Techo Eterno

Eureka made its first big foray in Acapulco in the late 1930s and above all in the middle of

WWII when it was awarded the contract for increasing the perennially scarce water supply for

the city. In later years Suárez managed to buy up a large body of land in the La Laja area. The

radio and then TV magnate, Manuel Emilio Azcárraga („El Tigre‟), also became a major

investor in Acapulco; among his many properties were two major hotels, the Hotel Ritz and

Auto Hotel Ritz. The banker and industrialist Carlos Trouyet who acted as Alemán‟s de facto

private financial adviser was also a major investor in Acapulco where he initiated the

development of the residential fraccionamiento and later hotel complex known as Las Brisas

in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. 27

Finally, the Hollywood and Las Vegas personality, Moe Morton

who often represented Miguel Alemán in business transactions, was another early Acapulco

business figure. 28

Together this coterie of businessmen, investors and movers and shakers was the core

of a newly shaped urban bourgeoisie that flourished during the alemanista frenesi of

development in the late 1940s and early 1950s. For the first time since the coming of the

Mexican revolution in 1910-11 the ethos of the clase politica was oriented towards a frank

embrace of money making, and conspicuous money making at that. The post-WWII import

substitution industrialization push, fuelled by government contracts and substantially increased

investments by US and international capital provided rich opportunities for profit making and

graft. The president‟s own fascination for the world of stage and especially screen (and its

female stars!), the combination of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema and the emergence of

27

Carlos Trouyet was a key shareholder in the Banco Comercial Mexicano and in enterprises such as Telmex

and the Compañía Industrial de Orizaba. “The Diamond-Studded Coyote”, Time, December 6, 1963. Together

with the Hilton Hotel executive and ex U.S. Army Intelligence operative, Colonel Frank M. Brandstetter, Trouyet

developed the Las Brisas hotel (it opened in December 1954) into one of the most successful and profitable

emblems of Acapulco’s status as a premier resort of wealthy politicians, entertainment stars and business

tycoons. Brandy, Our Man in Acapulco: The Life and Times of Colonel Frank M. Brandstetter; Olga Valenzuela,

“El tesoro de Acapulco’, El Universal, May 30, 2004. 28

Weekend (Mexico City), Vol. 1: 3, Christmas 1946-1947, p. 14; Caleta Rotográfico Turístico, tomo iii, no 46,

May 1965 and tomo iv, no. 55, May 1966.



new media like television combined with the arrival in Mexico of American-style advertising

and marketing strategies to give the alemanista bourgeoisie and its lifestyle an uninhibited and

showy texture.29

Potent symbols of the new bourgeoisie included the development of a new

residential area in southern Mexico City known as the Jardines Del Pedregal that was

constructed on the bizarre volcanic landscape on which the new Ciudad Universitaria was also

built in the last years of the Alemán regime. It was no coincidence that many of the leading

figures in the alemanista business circle, such as Carlos Trouyet and Bernardo Quintana (an

architect and founder of the ICA building and construction company) bought houses in the

new Pedregal fraccionamiento. They and Mario Pani, Aleman’s favorite architect, made both

Acapulco and the new fraccionamiento of the Pedregal impressive showpieces of Mexican

modernism.

But the greatest booster and also one of the largest beneficiaries of Acapulco‟s

development was President Miguel Alemán himself. During his presidential campaign tour of

1945, tourism issues were given unprecedented attention and it was no coincidence that the

tourism panels of his Round Table campaigning tour in 1945, which met with local business

people and functionaries all over the country, were held at Acapulco. Once installed in the

presidential palace Alemán showed an extraordinary level of interest in Acapulco making no

fewer than 32 visits to the city on both business and pleasure. His major ally and executor

there was Melchor Perrusquía who would soon boast of being „the second president‟ of

Mexico. The crowning event was Alemán‟s presidential visit to Acapulco in February 1949

when he inaugurated the expensive and impressive sea front drive or promenade that would

soon carry his name - Costera Miguel Alemán. 30

While Alemán was greeted with wild enthusiasm by the fuerzas vivas on this 1949

visit, voices of dissent were already raising issues about the uneven benefits flowing from

tourist development. Apart from protests by ejidatarios facing expropriation, there were

already public campaigns led by poor urban residents (some of them involving María de la O

29

Julio Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home. Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture and the Shaping of

Modern Mexico, 1920-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Alfonso Pérez Méndez &

Alejandro Aptilón, Las Casas del Pedregal 1947-1968 (México: Editorial Gustavo Gilli de México, 2007),

chapter 3. 30

For coverage of the visit, see Palpitaciones Porteñas, no. 112, 28 de febrero de 1949, p. 3, no 113, marzo de

1949, p. 1.



as a community leader), as well as a general sentiment that major infrastructure projects,

especially the Costera, were destroying public access to large areas of beach front where the

clases populares had traditionally exercised their rights to leisure and pleasure.31

The

substantial increase in tourist visits to the city, especially by automobile (and which derived

most benefit from the road works introduced by the Junta) soon pushed protests into the

background, at least temporarily. Whereas before 1949 an average of 15-20,000 tourists

visited Acapulco in the busy Semana Santa puente, after the opening of the Costera in 1949

that figure almost doubled immediately to 30,000.32

The random, laissez-faire approach taken in Acapulco, so critics have always

maintained, encouraged uncoordinated development, excessive population growth that was not

regulated, uneven and often very delayed development of infrastructure (especially electricity

supply, and drinking water), as well as poor control over the disposal of urban waste and aguas

negras. 33

Indeed, it was partly as a reaction against the chaotic development approach taken in

Acapulco that the Mexican government opted for very different, top-down, state-centered

model in the case of Cancún and the other „integrated megaprojects‟ launched in the 1970s

and 1980s. In fact the enormous power exercised in Acapulco by the Junta Federal de

Mejoras Materiales between 1942 and the early 1970s invites a comparison with the role of

FONATUR in Cancún.

Cancún, on the other hand, was, from the start, an initiative of a federal government

body; FONATUR was established in 1974 but it was preceded by several earlier versions e.g.

INFRATUR (founded in 1969). FONATUR and its predecessor bodies laid out the basic

infrastructure and direction of the project, and secured and distributed funding to private

investors. Later, private capital (local and foreign) dominated development in Cancún

31

„Los Acapulqueños son expulsados de Acapulco‟, Acapulco. Revista Quincenal Ilustrada del Sur, no. 10, 1 de

diciembre de 1949, p. 8; „No son regalo las obras en el puerto‟, Palpitaciones Porteñas, no. 115, abril de 1949, p.

1; „Las mejoras de Acapulco se fincan sobre lágrimas, miserias y atropellos‟, Acapulco. Revista Quincenal

Ilustrada, no. 20, 1 de mayo de 1950. 32

‟30,000 turistas tuvo Acapulco‟, Palpitaciones Porteñas, no. 112, 28 de febrero de 1949, p. 4. 33

Ernesto Valenzuela Valdivieso‟s description of Acapulco‟s planning and architectural style is eloquent:

„tipología arquitectónica discordante, imagen urbana deteriorada, mobiliario urbano escaso y de tipologías

diferentes, contaminación visual por señalamiento commercial y publicitario, escaso aprovechamiento de

entornos paisajísticos de alto valor escénico”, See his „Los intereses particulares y las cuestiones políticas como

obstáculos para el ordenamiento territorial el caso de Acapulco, Guerrero” (unpublished paper).



although FONATUR‟s omnipresent influence and its insistence on setting rules and shaping

policy has created what some critics call a state within a state in Cancún, which raises

interesting questions about the nature of the urbanisation process itself. Indeed, while Cancún

has effectively become a very large urban settlement in a very short period with rates of

population growth that exceed all other areas in Mexico, the term city to describe Cancún is

quite problematic – especially in view of the marked failure to develop the medical,

educational/cultural, leisure and political infrastructure let alone the provision of adequate

housing for its permanent residents that we associate with the term city. Income data for

Cancún, and indeed for all the global integrated tourism poles, clearly show that the bulk of

government resources were channeled to FONATUR rather than the local municipal

government during the period 1974-1990. 34

E. Acapulco was primarily directed towards servicing Mexican domestic markets although it

has always had an attraction for world elites (especially in the film entertainment industry) and

particularly in its earliest stage (1947-1960). 35

Today, it still is a resort that offers

accommodation for Mexicans of modest means, and is quite unique in this respect as anyone

can see if they watch the buses leave the Southern Bus Station in Taxqueña, a suburb of

34

Alfonso de Jesús Jiménez Maríinez, Desarrollo turístico y sustentabilidad: el caso de México (México: Miguel

Angel Porrúa, 2005), pp. 33-37. After 1990 municipal income began to outstrip resources available to

FONATUR in Cancún. 35

The role played by wealthy deep sea fishermen and the mainly Hollywood film community in developing an

image of glamour and exclusivity to Acapulco awaits its historian. Acapulco‟s reputation as a fisherman‟s

paradise was already well established by 1937 and 1938, and news of the extraordinarily rich opportunities for

catching such varieties as pez vela brought a steady stream of fishing enthusiasts to the port even before World

War II. Mexican American Review, December 1938, pp. 12, 22. While writers like Zane Gray had „discovered‟

Acapulco and Zihuatanejo in the 1930s, the earliest film stars to „discover‟ Acapulco were Errol Flynn, whose

yacht excursions to the port cover the period period 1942-1948. Early U.S. films to use Acapulco as a backdrop

included Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948) whose star, Johnny Weissmuller, would make Acapulco his home in

the 1960s; Lady From Shanghai, starring Rita Hayworth and directed by Orson Welles (who also acted in the

film) from October 1946 to Spring 1947 and partly filmed on board Errol Flynn‟s yacht „Zaca‟; Captain From

Castille (filmed in 1947 and released the next year starring Tyrone Power and Jean Peters; John Ford‟s The

Fugitive (1947 starring Dolores del Río and Henry Fonda). Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, a community of

Hollywood film personalities (John Wayne, his agent and prominent Las Vegas personality, Boo Roos; film

actors, Johnny Weissmuller, Merle Oberon (who later married Bruno Pagliai, one of the key alemanista insider

businessmen) and Cary Grant, were just some of the figures involved) would establish their lairs in hotels like the

pioneering „Flamingo‟ on La Quebrada (which was actually closed to the general public for about six years

between 1954 and 1960) and the Villa Vera Racquet Club. Hollywood Reporter, November 19, 1946 See

„Hollywood en Acapulco‟, Nao. La Revista de Acapulco,Vol. 1, No. 3, 1 de diciembre, 194?



Mexico City, every 10 minutes in peak hours and even more frequently during the mad

semana santa dash to the coast by families. The eminently „popular‟ character of Acapulco is

also, to some extent, facilitated by the city‟s location vis a vis Mexico City; since the early

1950s weekend travel to Acapulco has been one of the lifelines of the resort, all the more so

now that the town is only 4-5 hours by car or bus from the monster capital of Mexico City and

its 21 million inhabitants.36

Cancún, however, was designed from the start to appeal to international and domestic „grand‟

tourism especially from Canada and the U.S. but also from the wealthiest Mexican groups;

two thirds of the first 21 hotels built in Cancún were luxury 5 star properties. Its emergence

happened in the aftermath of the loss of Cuba as a resort area after the 1959 Cuban

Revolution, which removed an important tourist destination from the U.S. gaze between 1959

and 1960, and also alongside the vigorous growth of the wider Caribbean as a major resort

zone (especially the Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Dutch West Indies etc).

Beginning in the 1980s, Cancún also became a major showpiece of modern Mexico and was

used by successive Mexican governments as the location for ministerial, presidential, Heads of

State and high-level executive meetings, rivalling even Mexico City.37

The Maya Riviera, south of Cancún, then developed in the early 1990s as an attraction for

more adventurous tourists, including many Europeans. The Riviera Maya has come to rival

the supersaturated Cancún and it now stretches south all the way to Tulum (with the town of

Playa del Carmen in the middle). By 2008 the Riviera Maya will have more hotel rooms than

the original Cancún development itself. This development is closely tied up with the growing

popularity of alternative tourism and eco-tourism of the „Post-Fordist‟ variety that has

spawned numerous alternative tourist projects in this area. The top end of the market became

much less vital a component of the market with the move to a broader mass-based tourism

based on ever more air charters (which began in 1984-6) and with the arrival of cheap all-

inclusive packages, the rise of time-shares, condominiums (the „second home market), and

36

Cindy Pacheco y Citlal Giles, “Turismo nacional, el oxígeno de Acapulco‟, La Jornada, June 4, 2007. 37

Fernando Martí, “Cancún: un utópico proyecto de banqueros convertido en realidad”, Uno Más Uno, March

21, 1985.



above all the development of the Spring-Breakers market which brought thousands of U.S.

college students to the resort for a week of heavy partying and hedonism. 38

At Acapulco visitors and residents and workers have lived within viewing distance of each

other. Since much of the core area of the city on the ocean-front or close to it was occupied by

peasant ejidatarios until the late 1940s, the expansion of tourism brought conflict between

hotel owners, real estate developers (fraccionadores) and peasant land reform beneficiaries.

Unlike in Cancún, therefore, tourism necessarily involved long and bitter struggles between

newer entrepreneurs and existing claimants. From the mid 1950s rapid urbanization and

immigration produced a sharp growth of land invasions (paracaidismo) and the founding of

informal settlements on the hills above the bay, especially in the so-called Ampitheatre, from

where magnificent views of the harbor could be had!). The earliest and by far the most

spectacular example of a squatter movement was that led by Alfredo López Cisneros,‟ El Rey

Lopitos‟, a wily squatter leader in the La Laja colonia which he had helped found in January

1958 and over which he ruled as a successful cacique at the service of his favored PRI

politicians until his murder in 1967. 39

The development of squatting increased pressures for

resettlement of the workers and public servants who lived in the new colonias of the hilly area

known as the Ampitheatre, and the first major segments of the hillside residents of La Laja,

120,000 people, were relocated, after a struggle, to a newly, although poorly, urbanised area

on the south-eastern edge of the city known as Renacimiento in 1980. This resettlement and

the establishment of the El Veladero national park to the northeast of the Anfiteatro that was

designed to halt irregular urban settlement did nothing to halt the waves of occupation of

higher ground and the hillsides around the old core of Acapulco soon sprouted new colonias as

can be seen on any casual inspection of the city today. Given the increased vulnerability of

residents in the poorer areas of the city were, not surprisingly, they were among the most

badly affected by natural disasters such as Hurricane Paulina which killed over 180 residents

38

For an anxious report on the declining per capita average expenditures of tourists to Cancún in the last 5 years,

“Se reconocen pérdida de importancia de Cancún como generador de divisas”, May 14, 2006.

http://www.noticaribe.com.mx/cancun/2006/05/reconocen_perdida_de_importanc_html#more 39

„Guerrero. Un estado dentro de otro‟, Política, año iii, no. 60, 15 de octubre de

1962, pp. 27-28. For a biographical sketch of Lopitos see Enrique Díaz Clavel, El Rey Lopitos (Acapulco:

Comisión Editorial Municipal,1997).



and displaced nearly 300, 000 others, mostly precaristas in October 1997.40

The areas of

resettlement, such as Ciudad Renacimiento, colonias La Sábana, Emiliano Zapata and Llano

Largo were among the worst affected.

In contrast, Cancún, planners intended from the start to separate tourists from the

permanent residents. The first stage of the development plan placed all the luxury hotels on a

barrier island, a long almost 12 km. strip of beach-front land that enclosed a lagoon. The hotel

workers and town resident occupied a town centre located to the west and north-west of the

lagoon, a bus or taxi ride away from the hotel strip.

5. Acapulco did not draw on its hinterland for cultural and historic resources that might attract

tourists. It was purely an enclave, oriented towards the ocean and making use of water and

beaches. There is little archaeological and pre-Hispanic infrastructure close by – at least of the

monumental kind that attracts tourists and state financial resources for research and

restoration. A few museums have been established, the oldest and the most visited site being

the fortress of San Diego which was opened as a museum in 1954; a newish archaeological

museum has been inaugurated in the last six years but it appears to have had little impact on

tourists. There are now signs that there is a concerted strategy to reinsert Acapulco into the

circuit of historically anchored tourist sites – with elaborate plans for commemorating the

Acapulco-Manila Nao or Galleon route.

Cancún, on the other hand, is located in a huge zone of enormous archaeological significance,

known as Mayaland/Yucatán. The key sites are: Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, and closer to Cancún,

the site of Tulum, 140 km to its south on the Caribbean coast of the state of Quintana Roo.

Tulum, in fact, which overlooks the beaches and turquoise waters of the Caribbean is, one

recent account put its, arguably Mexico‟s most heavily visited archaeological site – with 8,000

visitors per day in the peak tourist season, exceeding even the visitor figures for

Teotihuacán.41

Proximity to such a rich archaeological patrimony provides Cancún and

Riviera Maya visitors with an opportunity for instant historical and archaeological

gratification – in sharp contrast with Acapulco. Indeed, the very earliest government tourism

40

Virginia García Acosta (coord.), La construccion social de riesgos y el huracan Paulina (Mexico City: CIESAS,

2005). See especially the chapter by Claudia Villegas Delgado, “Recuperando el paraíso perdido”. 41

Cameron Walker, „Marketing Maya Heritage‟, Anthropology News, 46 (5), May 2005, p. 10;



publicity campaigns proclaimed that Cancún was the site “where Mayan Kings wintered”, a

claim that elicited derisive responses from local archaeologists although the „modest vestiges

of the ancient Maya civilization‟ visible even within the tourist-centered areas of the city (two

platforms of a Maya ruin located on the 12th

hole of Pok-Ta-Pok golf course, as well as pieces

of a Mayan shrine “cleverly incorporated into the architecture of the Hotel Camino Real”)

serve to remind tourists of the primordial origins of the Yucatan peninsula .42

While the archaeological hinterland was less important in Cancún‟s earliest years in the

1970s, as „post-Fordist‟ tourists began to demand more than just sol y playa - sand and sea

(plus, one should add, sex), the archaeological patrimony and heritage tourism, especially in

the eco-tourism arena, proved to be a godsend - albeit that these new tourism niches are

embedded in and can further deepen economic, political and socio-cultural power relations

that undermine the benevolent intentions of their proponents. Many of the less well known

archaeological sites between Tulum and Playa del Carmen are located on private lands –

sometimes ejidal land but more often land owned by commercial investors – for example, Pole

in Xcaret and half of the ruins of Xel-Ha which are located within the Xel-Ha ecopark 43

And

mass tourism can inflict enormous damage on ecologically sensitive archaeological sites. 44

Nevertheless, in the endless search for distinctive features and specialized niches that

can increase the market appeal of tourist locations, the proximity of Cancún and the Riviera

Maya to major archaeological sites was difficult to ignore and, most importantly, it clearly

distinguished Caribbean Mexico from other tourist locations in the Bahamas, Jamaica, Cuba,

42

Marlise Simons, “Letter from Cancún Island”, Washington Post, June 15, 1976. The quotations are from

Fodor’s 2005 edition of its Cancún, Cozumel, Yucatan Peninsula guide (Random House, 2005), p. 6. 43

Naomi Adelson, “Viaje a las playas prohibidas: la Riviera Maya: sólo para los muy ricos”, La Jornada, 20 de

mayo de 2001 44

Cameron Walker, „Archaeological Tourism; Looking for Answers Along Mexico‟s Maya Riviera‟, National

Association for the Practice of Anthropology Bulletin, Vol. 23, no. 1, 2005, pp. 60-76 (a version of this article

appeared as a chapter in Tim Wallace (ed.), Tourism and Applied Archaeology: Linking Theory and Practice

(NAPA, 2005).. For a critical examination of ecotourism in the era of neoliberalism, see Paige West and James

G. Carrier, „Ecotourism and Authenticity: Getting Away from it All?‟, Current Anthropology, Vol. 45: no. 4,

August-October 2004, pp. 483-498; Aline Magnoni, Traci Ardren and Scott Hutson, “Tourism in the Mundo

Maya: Inventions and (Mis)Representations of Maya Identity and Heritage”, Archaeologies, Vol. 3:3, 2007, pp.

353-383; Adolf W. Ehrentraut, “Maya Ruins, Cultural Tourism and the Symbolism of Collective Identities”,

Culture, XVI (I), 1996, pp. 15-30. Quetzil E Castañeda has been one of the most prolific critical scholars who

have examined the functioning of Chichén Itzá, In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichen Itzá

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). One of the many merits of Castañeda‟s work is its insistence

on seeing Mayan subalterns as active participants and agents in the tourism process.



Puerto Rico, the Dutch and French West Indies and the Dominican Republic where the

material culture and especially the monumental architecture of Mesoamerican civilizations is

lacking.

A key feature in the cultural repertoire of Mexican nationalism from the late porfiriato

(1890s to-1911) onwards has been the excavation and reconstruction of archaeological sites

and monuments of the pre-Hispanic past – a process that has always been closely integrated

into the nationalist project that accompanied the Mexican Revolution. Even in the city of

Cancún itself, now a large metropolis of nearly 900,000 people, there were attempts from the

very beginning to recall the Mayan pre-Columbian past with Cancún‟s major streets named

after Mayan archaeological sites, gods and other symbols (hence Avenidas Kukulcan,

Bonampak, Cobá, Palenque etc).

The Yucatán peninsula‟s Mayan heritage had been a tourism asset as far back as the

1920s and 1930s. The key Yucatecan family the large Barbachano clan that includes several

tourism pioneers in Yucatán as well as artists, film makers and politicians had played a major

role in promoting tourism at Chichén and Uxmal and in Mérida. In 1923 the earliest of the

family tourism pioneers, Francisco Barbachano Gómez Rul, with the support of the socialist

state governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto, built the first dedicated road which connected the rail

line stop at Dzitás to Chichén; his son-in law, Fernando Barbachano Peón, set up the first

tourist hotel at the site, Mayaland in the early 1930s and the Mayaland, together with another

hotel conversion carried out at the Hacienda Chichén Itzá which had been used by the

archaeologists and the scientists of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in the 1920s and

1930s, have since then enjoyed a privileged position as accommodation providers right on the

edges of the Mayan site. 45

45

A flavor of the journey required to reach Chichen Itzá in 1931 is given by this extract from

Stuart Chase‟s classic account Mexico: A Study of Two Civilizations “We take a little

Yucatecan train on a narrow-gauge track, with a wood-burning engine sporting a Civil War

smokestack like an inverted umbrella. Four hours and 140 kilometers from Merida, the city of

windmills, east across the low, thorny, flower-draped jungle, brings us to Dzitas, a charming

Maya village of oval huts, whitewashed and palm-roofed, set in immaculately clean

compounds. From here a Ford truck bumps us twelve miles deeper into the bush, until

suddenly the cream- and orange-streaked pyramid of Chichén looms over the trees”. Stuart

Chase, Mexico: A Study of Two Civilizations, chapter II,



The current heirs of the family have also been waging a long-standing battle over claims to

ownership of the land on which the Chichén Itzá site is located. During the controversy over

„ownership‟ of the site, INAH officials acknowledged that over two thirds of the

archaeological sites over which it exercised custodianship were in private hands. By the end of

2007 INAH seemed poised to expropriate the land on which the Chichén site stood. 46

But

while the Barbachanos appear to have lost the battle over ownership of the land at Chichén

Itzá, some of its younger members continue to be successful tourist promoters and land

developers; Fernando Barbachano Herrero, son of Fernando Barbachano Gómez Rul, was one

of the earliest developers of land on the Riviera Maya where he bought 27 hectares of beach-

front land for six cents a metre (which was worth US$400 a metre by 2003) and on it he

constructed the first major tourism development at Playa del Carmen, Playacar 1.47

Heritage, or patrimony tourism, enhanced sometimes by listing of sites as World

Heritage locations, raises a variety of issues about who controls the production of meaning and

authenticity. This was seen particularly clearly in the course of 2007 in the much publicized

(at least in Mexico) competition for the naming of a new group of international wonders of the

world, a competition strongly supported by the Mexican federal government and by Mexican

television networks. Chichén Itzá was voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. 48

So important have the archaeological pilgrimages become that tourist industry spokespeople

have frequently suggested that the solution to inadequate funding of archaeological research

and maintenance of sites by INAH is privatization of the Mayan sites.49

The proximity of Cancún to archaeological sites also allows the Mexican state and

operators of tourism promotion infrastructures to advertise the zone as a multi-purpose tourist

area. Hence the importance of concepts like the Ruta Maya – developed initially in the early

46

The best detailed reconstruction of the complex legal, economic and political saga surrounding the Mexican

government, U.S. citizens like Edward Thompson and Silvanus Morley, INAH and the Barbachano family is Lisa

Breglia, Monumental Ambivaalence: The Politics of Heritage (Austin: University of Texas Press, 200), chapter

three; David Usborne, „Mexican Standoff: The Battle of Chichén Itzá‟, The Independent on Sunday, Nov 7, 2007

(consulted via internet, December 20, 2007). 47

Redclift, Frontiers, p. 15.

49

See, for example, the comments made in June 1990 by a former head of the national peak body of chambers of

commerce in Mexico, CONCANACO, Eduardo García Suárez. Proceso, No. 712, 25 June 1990. Denise Brown,

'Mayas and Tourists in the Maya World', Human Organisation, vol. 58, no. 3, (1999), pp. 295-310.



1950s, revived by National Geographic Magazine in the 1970s and more recently relaunched

under the label of Mundo Maya. The possibility of encountering descendants of the Ancient

Maya is a constant discursive current in tourist publicity.

In the case of Cancún and the Riviera Maya, this dynamic of the imposition by tourists

of the imagined on the real is particularly dramatic. Several authors have documented the way

in which performances of “Mexican culture,” especially in Cancún, often defer to the authority

of performances of “Mexican culture” performed in the U.S. Disneyland theme park. The

Ruta Maya proposed by National Geographic magazine in 1989 has now become “Mundo

Maya”, a massive, trans-national tourist product accommodating a variety of tourist styles

including adventure, cultural, eco and sun-and-sand tourism across five countries (Mexico,

Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras) which represents very little of the actual world

of the contemporary peoples of Maya descent.50

The most bizarre dimension of this

instrumentalist exploitation of the May for tourist purposes in the attempt, in El Salvador, a

country with almost no historica Maya presence, to represent the country‟s Nahua and Lenca

peoples as Maya. 51

The „Mysterious Maya‟, a cultural construction that is widespread in

tourism promotion of Yucatán and Quintana Roo, presents the complex and diverse histories

of the Mayan peoples as though they constituted a simple unilinear historical development in

which the contemporary Maya of Southern and southeastern Mexico are „authentic‟

descendants of the classical Maya, an enthusiastic celebration of the essential and

uninterrupted continuities of Mayan cultural development. Tourist maps of the zone often

leave out major present day Maya population centres all together.52

A feature of these maps

that does not draw comment from many authors, even critical ones, is the de-emphasis of

national borders. The waves of inter-ethnic violence and civil insurrection which have shaken

50

T. Ardren, “Where are the Maya in Ancient Maya Archaeological Tourism? Advertising and the

Appropriation of Culture” in Y. Rowan & U. Baram (eds.), Marketing Heritage. Archaeology and the

Consumption of the Past (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004), pp. 103-113; Peter Hervik, “The Mysterious

Maya of National Geographic”, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Vol. 4:1, 1998, pp. 166-197. The most

recent examination of the uses and misuses of archaeology in Yucatan and Quintana Roo is Cameron Jean

Walker, Heritage or Heresy? Archaeology and Culture in the Maya Riviera (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama

Press, 2009). 51

A devastating account of this is in Virginia Q. Tilley’s Seeing Indians: A Study of Race, Nation, and Power in

El Salvador (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), pp. 96-98. 52

Graeme Evans, „Mundo Maya: From Cancún to City of Culture. World Heritage in Post-colonial

Mesoamerica‟, Current Issues in Tourism, vol. 7, No. 4-5, 2004, pp. 315-329.



areas like Chiapas and western and northern Guatemala have led to national frontiers,

especially the borderlines between Mexico and Guatemala, being progressively militarised.

Mexican Mayan people‟s citizenship is increasingly contested and they are now threatened

with “deportation” to places they have never known.53

„The „Mundo Maya‟ for the Maya

themselves is anything, then, but a permissive, liminal, borderless zone in which all manner of

diversion is possible”54

.

6. Acapulco reached its peak in the mid 1970s, when environmental issues, pollution,

drainage problems, access to potable water etc. intervened to limit growth. Unlike Cancún

where there has been a major expansion of tourism development over a 170 km. coastal strip

to the south, Acapulco‟s tourist catchment area has not grown significantly since the

incorporation of the Puerto Marqués area and other zones on the way to the airport in the

1950s. Recent developments over the last 20 years, such as the up market Punta Diamante

project developed during the governorship of José Francisco Ruíz Massieu (1987-1992), have

occurred within the greater Acapulco region, in the case of the Diamante project along the

south-eastern corridor that led to the international airport. A new tourism development pole –

Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo (170km to the north of the city) was developed by FONATUR in the mid

1970s. But while the small fishing and beach community of Zihuatanejo had attracted some

attention from Acapulco-based tourism developers in the 1940s and 1950s (the pioneer

hotelero, Carlos Barnard, was an early booster of the small port village), poor communication

prevented major development until the 1970s. For example, a fully paved road was not

completed until the end of the 1950s.

Cancún, on the other hand, has grown without much interruption since the early 1970s and it

has benefited from the expansion of the vast Maya Riviera to the south. There are weather

limits on growth (frequent hurricanes) and some environmental barriers but not as great as in

Acapulco. In spite of environmental problems the Caribbean coast of Yucatán and Quintana

Roo has opened up opportunities for experiments in ecologically sustainable and

environmentally balanced tourism - eco-tourism - with areas being readied for World

53

Patricia López Martha, La Guerra de Baja Intensidad en México (Mexico D.F., Universidad Iberoamericana,

1996). Carlos Fazio, El Tercer Vinculo: De la teoría del caos a la militarización de México, (México: Editorial

Joaquín Mortiz, 1996). 54

Tristan Epstein, unpublished paper, La Trobe University, History Programme.



Heritage Site status (like the Sian Ka‟an Biosphere near Tulum). Here middle class tourists of

the post-modern era can indulge their occasional preferences for simplicity, lack of ostentation

and a romantic quest for pleasure – off the beaten track, close to the exotic – with solar-

powered hotels etc. There is contact with the „authentic‟ Mayan and in a preserved habitat.

And then there are the so-called Eco-Parks south of Cancun (like Xel-Ha and Xcaret) which

provide a commoditized, Disneyfied encounter with the local ecology and Mayan past – a new

cenote, underground rivers for swimming, some Mayan ruins, a butterfly pavilion and a

botanical garden – along with fast food and bright cocktails carrying Mayan names.55

None of

this is possible in Acapulco.

On the other hand, the revival of tourism in Cuba in the 1990s and 2000s poses a medium term

threat that has caused some worry to tourism entrepreneurs. What would happen, for example,

if Cuba-U.S. relations were normalized, an eventuality that is, admittedly unlikely in the near

future? The huge pent up demand in the U.S. for Cuba travel would, according to recent

research, divert substantial numbers of tourists away from resorts in the Bahamas, Jamaica and

Cayman Islands. 56

55

Monica Mateos-Vega, “INAH: Xcaret propone una visión hollywoodense de la cultura Maya”, La Jornada, Jan

26, 2007. In this article, Adriana Velázquez Morlet, an INAH official in Quintana Roo laments the false and

historically outdated vision of the Maya presented by many commercial sites which exploit Maya history. In

particular the focus of most touristic representations of the Maya continue to emphasise a narrative in which the

Maya were exclusively concerned with astronomic observation and religious ritual, ignoring the results of

research over the past thirty years which have thrown light on the political and military conflicts which

characterized the Maya. The spectacular night-time show offered to tourists at Xcaret, for example, is centered on

a reconstruction of a pre-Columbian ball court which draws on a mix of Zapotec, Mixtec, Totonac and other

influences, far removed from the Maya world. 56

Art Padilla & Jerome L.. McElroy, “Cuba and Caribbean Tourism After Castro”. Annals of Tourism

Research, 34;3, July 2007, pp. 649-672.

Documents

Barry Carr - Acapulco and Cancun: Two Models of Tourism