By Jamilli Pacheco-Urquiza, M.F.A. Student in Social Documentation at UC-Santa Cruz
Puerto Escondido is a beach town located in the coastal region in the south of Oaxaca, Mexico, 194 km (120 miles) away from Oaxaca de Juarez, the capital of Oaxaca and just two hours away from Santiago Jamiltepec, my grandmother’s hometown. This summer, I traveled to this hot-spot destination for international tourists and Mexican nationals alike. Arriving at Puerto Escondido’s small but expanding airport, a fellow American traveler pointed to my bulky camera bag that was slung across my body and asked if I was going to film something in Puerto. When I responded yes, she inquired further about what I was going to film and I told her that I’m a filmmaking student at UCSC trying to make a documentary about tourist development in Puerto Escondido and its effects on the local population. She gives me a look of guilt, or maybe it was embarrassment, and then she says good luck and looks away. I say thanks and move to pick up my checked bag from the carousel. That was the last time I would speak English for a couple days.
My grandma is waiting for me outside and we take an airport shuttle van home. I’m seated in front of two Australian men who won’t stop talking about how drunk they’re going to get when they get to their hostel. I wondered if everyone I shared space with on that airplane was here to do the same thing. To party, to drink, to exist in a constructed paradise. I had been swept up in the wave of travelers arriving in Puerto Escondido.
My initial interest in exploring the development of tourism in Puerto Escondido began when I visited with my family during the summer of 2022. I remember going to eat at a restaurant in La Punta de Zicatela and my family and I were the only Mexican people there. I thought it was strange. Months later when my grandmother tried to install internet in her house, she was told by the county’s internet provider that she would have to endure a two year waiting period because the infrastructure they had could not withstand the influx of people needing internet access. These memories were my personal introduction to Puerto Escondido’s changing landscape; I was there for a week then, but the locals had been dealing with this change for a while now.
Before the tourism boom, Puerto Escondido was a fisherman’s village and additionally functioned as a port to transport coffee and coconuts. While Puerto Escondido’s airport has been in operation since 1985, an uptick of global tourism really started to take off during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Mexico did not have covid-related travel restrictions that were present in the United States and Europe so people arrived in droves to the paradise that is Puerto Escondido throughout 2020 and 2021.
The town’s infrastructure could not handle the influx of tourists and those who ended up staying long term. People who came for a week and fell in love with the town; People who moved to enjoy the luxury of living by the beach; People who wanted a piece of paradise for themselves. Prices rose on everything, the cost of food, gas, land. I witnessed this from the periphery, listening to what my grandmother and aunt would tell the rest of our family. For the most part, these people also hold economic superiority. I began to wonder if a wave of gentrification was washing over Puerto Escondido. Akin to the issue with land sales in other touristic places around the globe, real estate agents are able to sell plots of land at higher prices because newcomers can afford to pay more than what the land would sell for before the gentrification boom. There also comes an entitlement of space since they are buying the land and building on it. By doubling and tripling the price of land, the town changes for a new population, these new people create a community for themselves, separate from the existing one already found in Puerto Escondido.
Upon entering the Social Documentation M.F.A. program at UCSC, I decided I wanted to explore the topic of the touristic development of Puerto Escondido further. I spent my first year researching the reasons for tourism and gentrification happening in Puerto Escondido, practicing my camera and interviewing skills along the way. I planned to spend all of July and August 2024 shooting my thesis documentary in Puerto, and I had to be prepared.
Once I arrived in Puerto Escondido, I was a bit lost. I had so many ideas and a hunger to know more about the town but did not know where to start. I knew I wanted to concentrate the bulk of my filming on people who were local to the town and people who worked in the tourist industry. This led me to walking around the beach near my grandma’s house in La Punta Zicatela every morning. I would pass by beachfront hotels, clearly halted mid process. The big empty skeletons of tourism littered the beach and I wondered if they would ever be completed.
The main street area of my Grandma’s neighborhood was pretty gentrified with noticeable indicators of an economy catering to English-speaking visitors. Signs announced their menu in English, almost every cafe announced that they sold sourdough bread plastered on their store front, and I would get spoken to in English when I entered half of the stores. The most off putting locale on that street was a real estate agency, named Wahaka. They had cookies and ice cream waiting for those who came in, and their name offered English speakers a way to pronounce the name of the state they were in. These walks around the neighborhood helped me shape my past memories of the town into a reality. If I felt strange about this, how do the people local to Puerto Escondido feel? The town changed in my periphery, they experienced the change head on.
After exploring the neighborhood around my grandmother’s house, I began to visit La Bahia Principal, the beach on the other edge of the bay where I was focusing my documentary. My cousins had explained that La Bahia was a more local beach, where I would be able to see not only Puerto locals but also national tourists. There, I was able to connect with the people who I ended up interviewing for my film. Two of these participants are walking beach vendors and one is a fisherman. I let them know what my documentary was about and they seemed glad that I had done research on the town before arriving, that I knew some of the issues they were dealing with and most of all, that I was ready to listen to what they had to say. When interviewing them, I never attempted to try to mold their answers into something I wanted to hear. Instead, I asked them to describe what Puerto Escondido was like when they were growing up. I asked them about how they got into their jobs and how they thought the town would look like in the future. I hoped to have them paint their own picture of the town for me, one that could not be seen in the touristy travel vlogs I had seen online before coming. They all held the town to a high regard, obviously having enjoyed growing up there. They used the word paradise to describe the town, a term that tourist advertisements would use too. As I asked them about the town’s future, they all focused on the development of Puerto Escondido and how they saw it now, but zeroed into the effects that the current wave of tourism has imposed. Hotels leaking sewage into the ocean causing aguas negras (black waters), fish going further and further into the ocean, money that seemed to circulate everywhere but to the locals. Contradictions between the tourist industry and the town were becoming clearer to me.
The construction of hotels on the beachfront led to the continued destruction of the environment around them. The presence of the hotels messes with nature, the fisherman told me. The local construction companies use sand from the rivers around Puerto to make concrete for the hotels and this in turn damages the natural flow between the river and the ocean, causing waves to get smaller and the beach to get dirtier, all the attributes that attract tourists will take a turn for the worst. I came to the realization that if Puerto Escondido continues to develop itself only with the tourist in mind, then the tourism industry will swallow up the town with it. In ten years, when the beachfront is full of barren hotels and the waves are half of what they were before, when the tourist industry moves away from Puerto Escondido because it can no longer can be labeled as a PARADISE, what will the local people who depend on the tourism industry to survive do then?
My documentary explores this development, the influx of bodies into Puerto Escondido and what it means for the people who live and work there. Filming this summer was hard, I learned a lot about the town, about my craft, and about myself. I felt the power that holding a camera could have in learning through doing. I had explored a question I’ve had in my head for years through the act of filmmaking. The feeling of being neither from here nor there dimmed.
In creating a film, I felt a bit closer to a community I had always felt just outside of. Now, I wonder how the town will change from when I saw it last. I hope to screen my documentary in Puerto Escondido next summer when it’s completed. One film cannot change the world, but I hope my film will make someone think about how they travel and what goes into the construction of paradise they chase after.
