Global Tourism and Citizenship Claims: Citizen-Subjects and the State in Costa Rica Darcie Vandegrift Drake University, USA Abstract As developing nations expand international tourism development, the global promotion and expansion of tourism create contested, fluid citizenship categories. The article uses ethnographic data to explore various ways the state constructs citizen-subjects in the context of international tourism. In contrast, a multi-racial, multi-national group of residents from Costa Rica’s South Caribbean Coast contested state constructions of citizenship that cast citizen-subjects as white, from the Central Valley, and passive. Both community members and state apparatuses attempted to construct the boundaries of political membership in Costa Rica. Issues of contestation included Costa Rican whiteness, the nature of political stability, and the relationship between economic participation and citizenship. Introduction The tourism industry is a growing sector by which Third World governments generate foreign currency. As a development strategy, the tourism destination is more than just flora and fauna, but also people. Through the marketing of its residents to visitors and tourism businesses, states actively construct citizen-subjects, that is, who is (and who is not) a member of the potential ‘host’ nation. In this article, I examine how the Costa Rican government and residents of a growing Costa Rican tourism destination construct definitions of the Costa Rican citizen-subject in relation to international tourism. The 1 state extends historical exclusionary practices into questions regarding tourism, a quintessential growth industry of the epoch characterized as globalization (Azarya 2004). Costa Rican citizen-subjects are imagined popularly and in official histories as white (Gudmundson 1986; Wherry 2006), pacifist (Biesanz, Biesanz and Biesanz 1999; Edelman 1999), and residing in the Central Valley or Pacific region (Sharman 2001). Actual black, white, national and immigrant residents of Puerto Viejo, located on Costa Rica’s South Caribbean Coast, contest racial and regional exclusions through new contexts created by tourism development. This article examines how the category of citizen and the benefits of citizenship become highly contested as states and local communities pursue tourism development. Three important findings emerge. First, states draw on the imaginary of who is and is not a citizen (with resulting cultural and economic privileges) as state mechanisms promote and practice the tourism industry. In Costa Rica, the state projects an international image of its citizens as white and pacifist, with an implied connection between these characteristics. Second, globalized industries unevenly but undoubtedly shape the racialized and class-based power relations embedded in the category of citizenship. Third, excluded subjects participating in tourism draw on the centrality of tourism to development to make demands for inclusion, sometimes successfully challenging state exclusionary practices around citizenship. Global tourism operates as both a cultural project and economic development strategy in developing nations. Tourism promotion and service provision creates a new context in which debates occur over populations’ legitimate membership in the nation- state. For a country seeking to generate foreign currency through inclusion on global tourism circuits, citizens must be an attractive part of a commodity that appeals to an 2 affluent potential visitor. As First World tourists increasingly travel to Third World locations, unequal power relationships embedded in the tourism experience necessitate ‘a helpful, smiling and servile tourism class, serving the interests and economic preferences of business and local elites’ as well as travelers themselves (Mowforth and Munt 2001, p. 64). The destination nation-state must construct a desirable space to visit through a performance enacted on a global stage and in relation to other, competing destinations (Sheller and Urry 2004). States promote citizens as desirable workers, companions, and commodities for tourist consumption. Through its a claim of a civilized, low-wage labor force and a safe tourism destination, the state makes a subcontextual pledge to compliance to international economic structures and the hierarchies within these structures (Enloe 1990). Yet even as a state presents its citizens for global consumption, the category of citizen has multiple meanings in a given locale, reflecting the struggle over what constitutes full membership in society. This struggle includes contests over who is a member with recognized legitimate political agency and who decides the boundaries of inclusion (Taylor and Wilson 2004). Citizenship is more than a seamless, automatic association with the modern nation-state, in which the state confers rights and responsibilities on those born within its territories. Rather, struggles over political agency and belonging must be recognized as located, ‘in the social arena and in social relationships’ (Taylor and Wilson 2004, p. 157). Membership in a political community is determined not just by formal mechanisms such as resource allocation, voting and laws, but also through cultural practices and commodities (Rosaldo 1997). Cultural, like political, citizenship is not something that can just be asserted by disadvantaged subjects. The state as a cultural formation attempts ‘unitary and unifying expression to 3 what are in reality multi-faceted and differential experiences of groups within society’ through constructing citizens as taxpayers, consumers and workers (Ong 1999, pp. 263- 4). In the context of global tourism promotion, citizens are also imagined as commodities, usually docile, friendly, and part of a particular kind of ‘experience.’ As governments attempt to hail affluent tourists to sample experiences different from their own daily lives (Tucker 1997; Urry 1990), the citizen-subjects imagined as part of these experiences do not respond passively to the state’s cultural process of ‘subject-fication’ (Ong 1999). Subjects assert their right to belonging and inclusion, sometimes as they are excluded by state citizenship definitions (Rosaldo 1997; Canclini 2001). Through this argument, I diverge from the argument that economic globalization processes automatically result in the further marginalization of second-class citizens or non-citizens (Brysk and Shafir 2004). Potential citizen-subjects, even as they struggle from the effects of neoliberalism, may also successfully stake claims to resources based on their economic and cultural contributions, arguing that marginalized groups typically excluded from the national imaginary of the ‘citizen’ in effect earn inclusion through participation in tourism. In theorizing the relationship between tourism development and constructions of citizenship, I draw on ethnographic inquiry. As I lived Puerto Viejo and worked in its tourism sector as a manager of a small cabina, I completed a series of fieldwork stays between 1991 and 2006 totaling three years. During this time, most intensively during 1997 and 1998, I completed informal and semi-structured interviews with seventy-five residents, as well as ethnographic observation and a two-wave longitudinal survey of business owners in the region. Central to this article, I participated in informal conversations, formal ‘town-hall’ type meetings, and a protest by Puerto Viejo residents 4 in San José in 1998. I further draw on archival sources in Puerto Viejo and San José and a version of the promotional website created the Costa Rican Tourism Institute, a government agency. The Political Economy of Costa Rican Tourism Costa Rica has one of the strongest tourism sectors in Latin America, with between 900 thousand and 1.4 million visitors per year between 1998 and 2003, generating between 550 and 940 million US dollars in foreign currency annually during this time ICT 1997; 2004a; Loría and Vargas 2002). Tourism has been Costa Rica’s first or second highest generator of foreign currency since the late 1990s. Despite devastating effects of structural adjustment, Costa Rica’s economy grew during the 1990s largely due to tourism expansion (Campbell 2002). In the late 1990s and early 2000s, tourism accounted for over 20 per cent of total export earnings (ICT 1997; 2004a). It was the only nation in Latin America to not experience a decline in tourism in 2001, despite a general economic downturn in the country and region (Loría and Vargas 2002). Part of the success of Costa Rica’s tourism sector stems from its international reputation, which the state actively promotes through the Costa Rican Tourism Institute (Spanish acronym ICT). The ICT has an annual budget of over ten million dollars for international tourism promotion. Tourism serves as a central industry for foreign currency generation, while national and international conservationists view tourism as a way of selling the idea of national parks and environmental issues to the Costa Rican public (Evans 1999). The state promotes tourism in the context of longstanding international pressures to repay foreign debt (Kaye 1994 in Mowforth and Munt 2003, p. 287) and to environmentally protect specific areas (Campbell 2002). Additionally, 5 the private Tourism Chamber of Commerce wields tremendous political power and pushes an agenda of low taxation and mega-resorts (Evans-Prichard 1993). The reputation of Costa Rica among travelers and travel writers is that of, in the words of Lonely Planet