All about being a Tourist

Tourism is defined—with a simple google search—as: “the commercial organization and operation of vacations and visits to places of interest” and by the Marriam Webster dictionary as: “the practice of traveling for recreation” among other similar sounding definitions. Tourism can be extremely beneficial for the economy and can definitely aid in the betterment of a place due to economic instability or such other causes; but it can have a lot of disadvantages and damaging consequences: locally and socially. 

Locally, the effects not really things people really pay a lot of attention to, which they should; something that comes to mind really quickly and its so pronounced, would be the pollution of local tourist locations: beaches, San Juan, etc. I admit, we locals don’t really have the most amazing track record when it comes to keeping said places super clean, but we have to recognize something, tourist don’t really feel the need to take care of things that are not ‘theirs’. These “outsiders”, don’t really feel the need to be clean, because they are not home. Puerto Rico is not really a place they feel the need to take care of, because they are here to have fun not, be clean.

The worth of the natives, in this case puertorricans,  are boiled down to one thing: how much their hotel and plain ticket cost; how much the life of the native is worth. We discuss in our class a lot of the stereotypes that tourist have for us: how we party, and drink all day, how we can’t possibly be smart or accomplished professionals and my conclusion is one thing; they can’t seem to realize that this might be a tropical island but we still have a life outside of their vacation. I think below being “the help” we lose the right to be human, in their eyes we lose our humanity, our aspirations, our hopes, dreams, goals and  everything that define us as humans. We are nothing outside some exotic object that needs to be observed, some strange expectation to describe to their friends and family when they get back home as they hand them the keychain they bought near the beach. 

      Recently I took the adventure of pretending to be foreign in several activities with various degrees of understanding: to get some supplements (where I pretended to not be able to speak or understand english), to the capital city (Where I didn't speak english or spanish and relied on very bad french), and to a restaurant (purely english). I got treated like some sort of special costumer simply because I did not speak the language, but something I found very curious, while I was asking questions and getting supplements and wondering around the register a couple with a few kids came in asking about random stuff that I wasn't really paying attention to, the two sales clerks seem to make fun of them more openly then they would had I been be able to understand and once the couple left they were loudly making fun of them for their lack of knowledge and shapes while giving me sweet smiles and spaced out giggles. It was very rude. I promptly made a complaint.

Tourism can be extremely beneficial, or it can be dangerously demanding to the locals as humans. We create a dependency economically to these travelers and strangers buying things from us, and we create a vision of inferiority to them. The idea of tourist being somehow superior even alters how we act when we approach them. Go to San Juan during “high season” and look at how locals interact with them. Treated like royalty, not as equals; which is what we should be.

Works Cited

Randle, Dave. “The Tourism Crisis: Impacts and Solutions.” Huffington Posts, 6 Dec. 2017, 12:26 Pm, www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-dave-randle/the-tourism-crisis-impact_b_3900503.html.

____________ “Tourism.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tourism.