On (over)tourism
This week Kyle Chayka, one of my favorite critics, wrote a long piece about Iceland and overtourism for Vox. Why does it feel like we’re all going to the same cities, and what does becoming a destination do to a place? Iceland is a particularly apt locale to examine these questions; it has 300,000 residents and received 2.3 million visitors in 2018. But after many years of booming growth, tourist numbers are slowing down. Chayka catches people in a reflective moment: Appreciative of what tourism has made possible (as one Reykjavik resident observes, you need “a certain mass of people”—like, more than the population of Iceland—to sustain the third-wave coffee shops and innovative restaurants she and her friends also enjoy) while taking stock of what it has wrought and what it may now be leaving behind.
You can’t live in Mexico City in 2019 and not think about tourism. In 2016, the city was number one in The New York Times’s 52 Places to Go list. The impact was almost instantaneous. The already gentrified neighborhoods of Condesa and Roma filled with gringos visiting for a long weekend or digital nomading for a few months. My neighborhood of Juárez, which was in the process of gentrifying, is now packed with Airbnbs, trendy restaurants, and work-cafés. It used to be that when a friend or even a friend-of-a-friend visited, I would often spend multiple whole days with them, showing them around and discovering new things myself. Now there are far too many people who come, and anyway, they already know what they want to do. They’ve seen it on Instagram or asked their ten friends who recently visited for recommendations. A fellow gringa-in-DF recently told me she correctly recited some visiting friends’ entire weekend itinerary before they told her a single thing they had planned.
Mexico City is an amazing place, and it deserves every single tourist dollar spent here and more. I’m glad its international reputation has transformed from “terrifying urban hellscape where you’ll definitely be kidnapped and also get food poisoning” to “must-see cultural and culinary hotspot (where, ok, you might still get food poisoning).” But it’s also resulted in some truly weird developments. Chayka writes, “Countries and cities must constantly perform their identities in order to maintain the flow of tourists.” Yesterday and today Mexico City is hosting its Day of the Dead parade, an event that looked so authentic in a James Bond movie that it became real (in, you guessed it, 2016). Go to Pujol, the cathedral of Mexican food, and there won’t be a Mexican in sight, except for the waiters. And do not even get me started on the transformation of radical queer communist Frida Kahlo into a kitsch object whose image you can buy on keychains, magnets, coasters, T-shirts, and any other mass-produced souvenir you could possibly dream of.
These things bother me, clearly. While tourism isn’t solely responsible for inequality in Mexico City (ha!), it isn’t helping. Airbnbs and coworking spaces are displacing people from their homes. Uber is capitalizing on convenience—not previously one of Mexico City’s strengths, to say the least—to introduce new kinds of precarity into a labor market that has always been insecure and low-paying. The divide between the central, tourist-friendly neighborhoods and the city’s periphery, where “no one goes” but so many people live, has never felt more extreme. Those effects are real and shouldn’t be ignored. What I like about Chayka’s piece, however, is that it isn’t only a critique of overtourism. It’s also a critique of authenticity, and of what foreigners actually want when we claim to be looking for it. It’s really something that just when international tourism is becoming a possibility for people who aren’t rich and white, rich white people declare places they once loved and championed to be “over” and “ruined.” Chayka writes:
“The stigma of overtourism is contingent on the sense that a place without as many tourists is more real, more authentic, than it is with them. It poses tourists as foreign entities to a place in the same way that viruses are foreign to the human body. From the visitor’s side, overtourism is also a subjective concern based on a feeling: It’s the point at which your personal narrative of unique experience is broken, the point at which there are too many people — like yourself — who don’t belong in a place.”
Way to rip me to shreds, Kyle Chayka. Because of course overtourism didn’t ruin Mexico City. What it ruined was my secret, embarrassing certainty that I was the only foreigner who knew how great Mexico City was. It ruined how special living here made me feel. It eats me up that I, eight years, a husband, and a permanent residency visa later, could be mistaken for them, who are just passing through to check off some boxes on the 50 Best list. But only because we always had much more in common than I like to admit.
Recommendations
“Present and Absent.” Speaking of what foreigners do in Mexico City—art parties! I wish I could excise the two lamentable and borderline racist sentences about Tenochtitlan from this essay, because otherwise it is a perfect evocation of my early twenties.
“I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle.” For those looking for a slightly more optimistic take on climate change than the one I offered last week. This was published when I was in the jungle, so I had the pleasure of reading a deservedly viral essay months after (apparently) everyone was talking about it.
“The One Cool Trick All Men Need to Know to Do Yoga.” My yoga studio has been packed lately, which is great because it’s the best. (Uno Yoga! Eres la mejor Mariana!) But there have definitely been some days that have reminded me of this internet classic and its timeless question, “Is it possible for men to notice when they’re the only one making noises?” RIP The Awl. I miss you every day.