Racial Neoliberalism in Costa Rican Tourism: Blanqueamiento in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Purpose

This paper explores how racial neoliberalism is the latest evolution of race and global capitalism and is analyzed in the example of global tourism in Costa Rica. Racial neoliberalism represents two important features: colorblind ideology and new racial practices.

Methodology/approach

Two beach tourism localities in Costa Rica are investigated to identify the racial neoliberal practices that racialize tourism spaces and bodies and the ideological discourses deployed to justify racial hierarchical placement that perpetuates new forms of global and national inequality.

Findings

Three neoliberal racial practices in tourism globalization were found. First, “neoliberal networks” supported white transnational actors’ linkage to national and global tourism providers. Second, “neoliberal conservation” in beach land protection policies secured private tourism business development and impacted current and future racial community displacement. Third, “neoliberal activism” exposed how community fights to change local tourism development was demarcated along racial lines.

Practical implications

An inquiry into the mechanisms and logics of how racism contemporarily operates in the global economy exposes the importance of acknowledging that race has an impact on different actor’s global economic participation by organizing the distribution of material economic rewards unevenly.

Originality/value

As scholarship exposes how gender, ethnicity, and class are constituted through global economic arrangements it is imperative that research uncovers how race is a salient category also shaping current global inequality but experienced differently in diverse geographies and histories.

Citation

Christian, M. (2015), "Racial Neoliberalism in Costa Rican Tourism: Blanqueamiento in the Twenty-First Century", States and Citizens: Accommodation, Facilitation and Resistance to Globalization (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. 34), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 157-189. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0278-120420150000034007