Precarious place: The founding of a tourism workers' town in the Riviera Maya, Quintana Roo, Mexico

Using ethnographic observation, extensive interviews, questionnaires, documentation of resident interactions, and local newspaper accounts, Precarious Place examines the efforts made by worker residents of Akumal Pueblo to create a town that belongs to them. Fifteen months of field research begun in 1997, only one year after the founding of their new town, highlights the process by which tourism workers originally from Yucatán state became private land owners in the Riviera Maya of Quintana Roo.; The battle to own land began the process of identification of place and home but it also poised residents in a struggle with extant power structures as they fought for a reliable infrastructure in the town, including a water supply and electrical power. Investigating this process also exposes the precariousness of their position as workers in a globalizing service industry, particularly in a state that prioritizes the needs of tourists above those of its citizens.; The chapters each reveal a different layer of Akumal workers' struggle which together, from the micro to the macro, and from the past to the present, tell the story of place-making in Akumal. Chapter 2 explores the historical pathways which led to the separation of the worker's town from the resort. Chapter 3 looks at the social dynamics of place in the ways that residents interact with each other on a daily basis. Chapter 4 examines how a new set of place relations developed when workers arrived from other parts of Mexico. Chapter 5 investigates how residents have had to renegotiate their status as a new town with local and state government agencies. Chapter 6 examines how residents' retellings of their struggle for land titles, or lucha , have formed part of a current place-making discourse.; This exposition portrays the unique perspectives and experiences of the residents of Akumal Pueblo as they seek a place of their own. Their struggle to have their voices heard and their needs met is also an endeavor to claim their position within local, state, and global structures of power.