Brokers and Tours: Selling Urban Poverty and Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean

Dürr, Eveline; Jaffe, Rivke and Jones, Gareth A. (2020): Brokers and Tours: Selling Urban Poverty and Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean. In: Selling Urban Poverty and Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean. Special Issue: Space and Culture, Vol. 23, No. 1: pp. 4-14

Abstract

This article explores how so-called ``slum'' tourism commodifies poverty and violence, transforming urban deprivation into a tourism product. In particular, we pay ethnographic attention to the role of brokers who mediate encounters between residents and tourists. The article explores how brokers-tour guides, art curators and civil society organizations-work to mediate power structures and enact a specific representational-performative politics. In so doing, brokers play a key role in aestheticizing and performing poverty and violence and converting disadvantaged spaces into a tourist product. We argue that brokers are vital to the reproduction of existing inequalities and to the formation of new social relationships and subjectivities.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Keywords: brokers;guides;slum tours;urban poverty;violence
• Faculties: Cultural Studies > Department of Ancient and Modern Cultures > Ethnology
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology
• Language: English