Everyday Tourism Encounters in Bocas del Toro — Understanding Afro-Antillean Experiences with Global North Tourism in Panama Understanding Afro-Antillean Experiences with Global North Tourism in Panama

Tourism development in Bocas del Toro (short: Bocas), Panama, driven by Global North investment and rooted in colonial histories, imperial policies and racial inequalities, has been producing tourism frontiers over the past three decades. Foreign land ownership, large-scale land privatization, and dispossession have left Afro-Antillean and Indigenous Ngäbe communities dependent on tourism economies, restricted from ancestral lands, and embedded in unequal labor relations shaped by neoliberal and colonial logics. This master’s thesis centers the Afro-Antillean community of Old Bank on Bastimentos Island (Bocas) to examine their lived experiences with Global North tourism and the ongoing transformation of Bocas del Toro as a tourism frontier. Adopting a feminist political geography approach, I employ the framework of everyday tourism encounters to unpack how macro-structures of (de)coloniality in Global North tourism are embodied, negotiated, and contested at the micro-geographical scale of Afro-Antillean daily life and through Bocas’ spatial landscapes. I situate this thesis within the intersecting fields of feminist political geography—focusing on the concepts of (de)coloniality, embodiment and the personal as political—and critical tourism studies. Drawing on five weeks of fieldwork in Bocas and a qualitative research approach, including 12 in-depth interviews with Afro-Antilleans and participant observations, my analysis reveals that everyday tourism encounters are shaped by both identity and spatial politics. The findings provide three key insights: First, a decolonial perspective highlights how tourism frontiers persist not only through land privatization and exclusionary spaces but also across racialized and gendered bodies. Secondly, I understand Afro-Antilleans as active agents who navigate, negotiate, and challenge these colonial hierarchies, thereby countering a narrative that portrays local communities as passive victims. Third, Afro Antillean encounters with Global North tourism are deeply complex and cannot be reduced to binaries of exploitive versus meaningful; rather, they are embodied as ambiguous, contradictory, and continuously negotiated.