Abstract

In the following article, I present an alternative version of Cancun’s history that attempts to go beyond the discourse of the foreign enclave of “sea, sun and sand” tourism, by exploring the implications that the project had for national sovereignty as the last pioneering front in the “conquest of the East”. Through a cross-referencing of primary and secondary sources, I propose an ethnography of the history of Cancun, ranging from the implementation of the project and the early years of the city (1968-1977), to the junctures that marked, onwards, the construction of an ad hoc historical present. The objective is to understand how this emblem of international tourism negotiates its local identity by claiming belonging to the nation and the Caribbean, without disregarding the pioneering nativism erected as its foundation myth. This allows us to glimpse to what extent the invention of this new Mexican Caribbean destabilizes or updates the borders of the national narrative.

Keywords New towns; sovereignty; migration; history; national identity