Tensiones entre el postcolonialismo y la lucha por el control cultural : el caso de proyectos de turismo alternativo indígena en México y Perú

The importance of Indigenous peoples for tourism is well recognised but their participation and value are restricted, with limited access to economic benefits and their culture expropriated. Opposing this tendency, an increasing number of indigenous organisations are becoming tourist agents offering alternative forms of eco-cultural rural tourism. The tourist attracted are regarded as having social, cultural and ecological consciousness, but still expect ‘authentic’ cultural representations based on deeply internalised ideologies from old colonialist views. Therefore for alternative forms of tourism to be successful, indigenous organisations need to manage the tensions between their own culture and identity and the culture the market demands. The focus in this chapter is how alternative tourist projects in Mexico and Peru deal with the challenge of managing the commoditisation of their culture and natural resources without losing control of their own cultural values. Based on a semiotic discursive analysis of the indigenous organisations’ web pages, considered as hypertexts of meaning, I analyse in their Web-stories implicit and explicit models of cultural representation, organisational patterns and the contradictions and paradoxes they face as tourist agents. The findings point to the simultaneous appropriation of neo-colonial representations and indigenous struggles for cultural and political control.