Tourism Mobilities, Indigenous Claims, and the Securitization of the Beach

Abstract

In this chapter, Gonzalez explores the ways in which the tropical beach operates as a symbol and space of modern tourist mobility and its accompanying necessity for securitization. In the Philippines, where a neoliberal economy is most evident in places like Boracay Islands tourist haven, tourism mobilities operate to smooth over the vast social and political asymmetries that both enable and threaten this particular iteration of paradise. On the beach, tourism citizenship, desire, and security are legitimated, while those of local and particularly indigenous residents are threatened and violated. Framing the gendered and racialized ways in which the international cultures of class, cosmopolitanism, and tourism operates, this essay looks to the beach as that site where a material and symbolic struggle is taking place over land and the differential mobilities attached to it.