Recently, I was at the doctor’s office (I’m fine, thanks) and I started sifting through all the magazines. You know, all the magazines that you don’t usually read that suddenly look slightly more appealing when there’s no other choice. Yes, those. And then I saw one of the covers. It was Sunset magazine’s August 2018 issue. I saw the picture and it just seemed familiar. I didn’t look too closely, but it reminded me of the Cape region of Baja California Sur, which is where I have been working since 2009.

Probably just a chance resemblance, right?

So then I opened it up and started reading the issue’s introduction by the editor-in-chief, Irene Edwards.  Her piece is titled “The Case for Wanderlust.” She opens with the acknowledgement that the kind of work she does is a privilege. She recounts her earlier days, when she worked for a travel magazine in New York, and the travel itineraries featured “cost considerably more than [her] annual salary.” In those days, she writes, “my work felt like a portal into another existence, one of lavish hotel suites and town cars that whisked you to and from the airport.”

Edwards makes a case for the value of travel, of seeing other places and people. “[A]t every budget,” she writes, “the benefit of travel is universal–its ability to bring you outside your comfort zone and teach you about landscapes and lives beyond your own.”

As Edwards winds toward her conclusion, she gets philosophical about travel as a form of personal growth. It is Sunset magazine, after all. She quotes the late Anthony Bourdain, who once said “The journey changes you; it should change you.” He’s probably right. But, she admits, the journey also “changes the destination itself.” On this point, Edwards is probably right too.

And then she mentions her visit to “Costa Palmas” and the “East Cape of Baja California,” and the familiarity of the cover image suddenly makes sense. It looks familiar, because I know that place. Edwards tells us why her visit to Costa Palmas was so bittersweet:

Years from now, if I’m lucky enough to return, I will gaze at the superyachts in the marina and remember the serene and empty shore I set foot on, the moon rising on a beach with not a single other person in sight. But this is the magazine editor in me–I can’t help myself. When I see something this special, I want to share it with you all.

So here’s the thing. “Costa Palmas,” which is currently being promoted and branded as a new, exclusive, elite destination on the East Cape, is located in the small coastal town of La Ribera, home to a few thousand people who have lived there for a long time. This is not some empty terra nullius. It is a coastal community full of homes, histories, and lives. It is not an unknown, untouched place without history…despite the images being portrayed in tourist media.

Costa Palmas is the latest iteration of a development project on the East Cape of Baja California Sur, Mexico. The project began about a decade ago, and involved a lot of talk about money, investment, and of course jobs. For various reasons, the project has lingered, stalled, and stumbled its way forward. The original project, once known as “Cabo Riviera,” has been rebranded as Costa Palmas. And tourism media does some of the work of this rebranding, helping to transform this place into a destination.

This very magazine is an artifact and agent of that change. This is the kind of “worlding” that Spivak points us to, in which already existing places are represented as if they are “uninscribed territory” (Spivak 1990:1).[1] Edwards makes it sound like not a soul has ever stepped foot in this place, except for the folks who created Costa Palmas out of the mystical ethers of paradise…and the few magazine editors who managed to locate this marvel of time and space. Luckily, all of us, as readers and travelers, get to share in this rare jewel of a place just by reading along. And, if the news gets out, floods of tourists will indeed go seek out this supposedly untouched place. The underlying message, of course, is that we should get down there while the getting is good. This is how “paradise” is produced, packaged, sold, and ultimately overrun.

I have been watching the reconstruction of this place for about a decade. As Paige West (2014:426) argues:

Tourism, with its constant production of new illusions of the ‘further beyond’–sites and frontiers that are not ruined by tourism–is a never-ending form of accumulation by dispossession. It is relentless in its search for new images and new destinations; however, these newly discovered places are not really very new at all.[2]

Tourism discourses help to bury not only the histories of places, but also the claims and land rights that come with them. In La Ribera, these erasures have been ongoing for several years. In 2013 I wrote a short piece about this development site for Anthropology of Work Review. Back then, the project was called “Cabo Riviera,” and it was slated to be yet another golf course-marina-hotel destination with about 5,000 or so rooms. The Cabo Riviera development resulted in extensive change along the coast, including the removal of wetlands during the construction of a marina. These changes were not without controversy, and the project had its share of local resistance and protest.[3] The long story short, though, is that the Cabo Riviera project faltered, leaving a semi-developed site to linger on the landscape for several years. Costa Palmas is the latest attempt to pull this project from the ashes and re-brand La Ribera as an exclusive destination, waiting to be discovered. Tourism media helps lay the groundwork for all of this. Check out this coverage over at Forbes, which reads more like a real estate investment ad than journalism:

Surrounded by organic orchards and farms and including a stunning 250 slip deep-water marina, the area will be home to an all-new Four Seasons Resort and Private Residences Los Cabos, a Robert Trent Jones II 18-hole golf course, and the Costa Palmas Beach & Yacht Club with space for superyachts up to 250 feet. This will ultimately become one of the more exclusive billionaire retreats, considering the current popularity of neighboring La Paz, which hosted a dozen of the wealthiest families and their superyachts over New Year’s Eve.

Through such narratives, “new” destinations are made. The material changes and transformations of place, such as using heavy equipment to literally reshape the land, are just one part of the process. Another key component is changing the discourse of place–the ideas, beliefs, and knowledge that shapes perceptions of destinations. And this is where (tourism and real estate) media comes into the picture. A place needs to be produced in more ways than one in order to wrest it away from its (already populated, historical) past and turn it into the next desirable, exclusive, and empty paradise. This is dispossession by media saturation.

What is most striking to me, reading through some of this media about Costa Palmas, is that the town of La Ribera often receives little mention. For many who come, the little town may end up being a curious, quaint, secondary footnote to Costa Palmas. And this is how erasure and accumulation by dispossession work. One image, one ad, one brief editor’s note at a time.

[1] Spivak, Gayatri. 1990. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Sarah Harasym, ed. New York and London: Routledge.

[2] West, Paige. 2014. “Such a Site for Play, This Edge”: Surfing, Tourism, and Modernist Fantasy in Papua New Guinea. The Contemporary Pacific, Volume 26(2):411-432.

[3] See this video from 2009 by filmmaker Carmina Valiente: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hd0AeTGuisA and this video from the Colectivo Pericú in 2011: https://colectivopericu.net/tag/la-ribera-baja-california-sur/

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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