Retail Capital and Urban Tourism Consumption in Mexico

Urban commerce and consumption are subject to innovations in markets, organizational structures, and the coordination of agents aimed at creating new consumer spaces within the context of evolving capitalism. Retailers in Mexico have recently been attracted by booming tourist activity associated with high consumption levels linked to hotels, real estate, and financial enterprises, and the public sectors. This analysis is grounded in political economy, considering the capital reproduction interlinked to cultural perspectives on consumption. On the coast of Quintana Roo in the Yucatan Peninsula, profuse spaces have been developed for tourist uses, elevating the consumption of goods and services. Land use zoning is geared towards high-end tourism regarding supply resorts, hotels, and exclusive urban developments. This paper explores the role of resorts in allowing for diverse physical and symbolic consumption of goods and services, mainly through the growing availability of restaurants, bars, spectacles, aestheticized, and luxury places offering a ‘connection to nature’. Additional formats have emerged to increase consumption within the dispersed resorts and in the newly developed tourist cities of Playa del Carmen and Tulum. This enclave model produced sociospatial segregation in the so-called ‘support villages’ settled in front of all resorts along the coast; a popular form of commerce and consumption emerged there. The paper examines the role of the state in approving policies for all initiatives from hotel chains and real estate developments, notwithstanding that they are built on protected natural areas. The association among productive, real estate, and retail sectors also aims to diversify the portfolio to cover the entire tourism value chain. We find that in the last two decades, international tourism companies controlled the consumption spaces of tourists 24 hours a day during their stay, spread over more than 130 km, mainly in all-inclusive resorts, intermittently occupying the beaches with businesses and resorts, and in nearby coastal districts of the new cities of the tourism boomtowns of Playa del Carmen and Tulum, mainly for foreign tourists and expats.