Encounters over Garbage: Tourists and Lifestyle Migrants in Mexico

Abstract

This article explores a tour to the garbage dump in the city of Mazatlán, northern Mexico, as an alternative to mass tourism. The tour, conducted by an evangelical North American church, is conceptualized as a non-profit, eye-opening experience for affluent tourists. I frame the tour as a particular kind of slum tourism, which is embedded in Christian values and promises a meaningful tourist experience by helping the poor. Drawing on an ethnographic approach, I argue that the interplay of globalization processes and local conditions in Mazatlán produces a particular framework in which slum tours emerge and work. The analysis reveals that this tour is a consequence of revised forms of tourism, transnational lifestyles and global forces at work in the North American–Mexican relationships. I stress that research needs to draw further attention to slum tourism's positioning in wider structural and historical contexts in order to understand its idiosyncratic features.

Key Words:

• Slum tourism
• garbage
• lifestyle migration
• charity
• urban poverty
• Mazatlán
• Mexico
• globalization