Tourism and the Commodification of Blackness in the Colombian Caribbean during the Twentieth Century

Speaker: Orlando Deavila Pertuz, Assistant Professor, International Institute of Caribbean Studies, Universidad de Cartagena, Colombia

Following the mid-twentieth century, Cartagena sought to become an international tourist destination. At first, national and local authorities rebranded Cartagena as a Spanish city frozen in time. Yet, as the city came to compete with other destinations across the Caribbean, they began representing Cartagena as a tropical and culturally and racially diverse site. As the city embraced this tropical picturesque through travel literature, tourist guides, and brochures, blackness became a commodity. The Palenqueros, rural migrants who descended from maroons that settled in a nearby community and worked within the colonial quarter, were included within the city’s touristic representations. Despite this apparent inclusion, they met with a double-standard reality. While being progressively incorporated into the city’s image, they still faced racial discrimination and police harassment while working in the touristic areas. This presentation analyzes how their racialization played out as a double-edged sword that made their bodies commodifiable while still a target to everyday forms of exclusion. This reality opened up possibilities as much as challenges for a community of migrants trying to carve out their place in a changing city. In a broad sense, I will discuss the politics of racial identity, racial segregation in urban contexts, and tourism representations in modern Colombia.