Visions of Sustainable Future Shaped Through a Dilemma: International Tourism Development and Lagoon Management in Bacalar

The international tourism development along the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, started as a state-driven project in the 1970s. Located farther south of the popular tourist resort in the Mexican Caribbean, Bacalar has increasingly become famous as international tourism destination because of its freshwater body named ‘Lagoon of Seven Colours’. As a drastic increase in tourist arrivals leads to the contamination of the lagoon, the question of sustainability of tourism development has become a highly debated issue in that small town. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in March 2019, this paper examines the visions of sustainability that the citizens of Bacalar developed in the attempt to find a balance between the growth of international tourism and the protection of local natural heritage. It analyses local narratives and interprets discourses of sustainability as being the outcome of translocal processes characterised by a productive friction between vernacular perceptions of the environment and the globalised concept of sustainability. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .