Tourism’s racialized geographies: rest, work, and social reproduction in Central America

Keywords: social reproduction, race, work, rest, tourism, Central America
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

During the last twenty years, studies of globalization have been more cognizant of the role of social reproduction (Hennessy 2018; Bhattacharya 2017; Bakker and Silvey 2008; Mountz and Hyndman 2006) in capitalist accumulation and capitalist crisis (Fraser 2017; Gilmore 2002). The problem of neoliberal destabilization of the spheres of care and social reproduction (Fraser 2017; Gago 2015; Frohlick 2015; Pérez-Orozco 2014) and that of the constant encroachment of capitalist labor and market dynamics into the spheres of life (Federici 2018; Tadiar 2013) have been at the forefront of the discussion. In increasingly complex ways, race has been identified not only as a site of oppression and unequal production of value (Robinson 1983; Hall 2021) but also as a site of exoticization and eroticization (Holland 2012; Sheller 2003; hooks 1992) that is incorporated into the realm of consumption and gets intertwined with social reproduction. Using these bodies of literature as well as some early reflections from ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in key touristic sites of Costa Rica and Guatemala, I argue that the commodification of rest in Third World touristic destinations not only reflects an intensification of the transnational and racialized dimensions of social reproduction, but also that tourism forms part of a global chain of care that squeezes value of racialized, gendered and classed bodies working for the leisure and pleasure of other exhausted and yet privileged bodies.