From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama by Carla Guerrón-Montero

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama by Carla Guerrón-Montero Elizabeth Manley From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama. By Carla Guerrón-Montero. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2020, p. 224, $54.95. In Carla Guerrón-Montero's historical ethnography, Afro-Antillean residents of Bocas del Toro, Panama take center stage in the drama of tourism development that, since the 1990s has attempted to draw travelers' attention to the archipelago for, among other things, its unique and blended cultural heritage. Her study, which combines ethnographic analysis of tourism providers, residents, visitors, and lifestyle migrants with archival contextualizations, argues that tourism provides a unique lens on the construction of nationalism in the face of threats to sovereignty and on the processes of transnational, diasporic identity formation among marginalized groups. Framing her research around the idea of "tourism regimes" (tourism as a constantly shifting social phenomenon and as a mode of economic development), Guerrón-Montero focuses on the ways these lived realities impact a group – Afro-Antilleans – that has been historically silenced, and even removed, from the Panamanian national narrative. She centers on cultural heritage specifically and the ways the state and private sector have mobilized the perceived uniqueness of Afro-Antillean lifeways in service to an industry seeking to sell a "cosmopolitan, tropical paradise" (66). However, she also demonstrates that Afro-Antilleans in Bocas are far from silent actors and consistently engage with these formulations to gain access, cultural capital, and advancement. While Panama is sometimes neglected in studies of the Caribbean at large, its long history of receiving working migrants from the region, as well as its contemporary orientations toward tourism, make its narratives of belonging (or not) a critical part of a global system in which "the mobilities of some … rely on the immobilities of others" (14). As Guerrón-Montero points out, with the turn to tourism in Panama, there was a "realization of the appeal of being geographically and historically linked with the Caribbean" (8). And yet, those links have always been present, particularly relative to tourism. As Blake Scott argues, Caribbean tourists continue to travel "in a world shaped by the Panama Canal" as well as by the country's early-century contributions to the industry (Blake Scott, "From Disease to Desire: Panama and the Rise of the Caribbean Vacation," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, Austin, 2016: 34). Moreover, the place of Afro-Antilleans in building the canal and the diasporic routes of both tourism and black internationalism, as Lara Putnam points out, demand that we take seriously the ways the state has sought to characterize [End Page 417] Bocas as both cosmopolitan and authentic, as both Panamanian and international (Lara Putnam, Radical Moves Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Using the 1993 Tourism Development Master Plan as a starting point for the considerable growth of a visitor industry in Bocas, Guerrón-Montero argues that the development of "intellectual heritage routes" (67) and a focus on the Caribbeanness of the archipelago pushed Afro-Antilleans into the spotlight as one of the "three roots" – Latino/mestizo, indigenous, Black (8) – that comprised a unified and marketable Panamanian identity. In contrast to the many preceding decades, stressing the contributions of this population of former migrants offered an advantage to a state hoping to capitalize on high-end heritage travel. Identified as a key tourism zone, Bocas allowed the state to foreground the nation's neoliberal multiculturalism but also present its diversity as "'staged' and available for consumption" (17). Like the many other locales that have sought to highlight both unity and diversity through this kind of heritage tourism, the paradoxes abound. Centrally, while discursively investing in certain ethnic or racial groups, generally all previously marginalized from national narratives, the industry itself displaces many of them from their homes given massive foreign investment, rising costs of living, and globalized/Westernized cultural norms and lifestyles. In an effort to understand this and other paradoxes of tourism, Guerrón-Montero works through both historic...