Christian Rinaudo

Consuming the city in passing: Guided visits and the marketing of difference in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia

This article considers the performance of difference in the tourist presentation of Cartagena de Indias, on the Colombian Caribbean coast. The authors centre their analysis on the paseo en chiva, a guided tour in a folkloristic bus, which travels from one tourist site to another, to show how the city becomes an object of consumption through which the local history and culture emerge as easily appropriable global products and signs. Principal site of the slave trade in the territory of New Grenada and contemporary incarnation of a Spanish colonial past, Cartagena is particularly congruous for consideration of the identities of the city and those within it, identities that allude to the marketing of black culture and bodies, and to the evocation of the mestizaje associated with Latin America. At the crossroads between urban and ethnic studies, this article proposes an analysis of the production of a place in which differences are (faceted as) tourist resources which can be consumed itinerantly, thus producing a history and identities which, standardized and stereotyped, in turn act upon the relation of the inhabitants to their city.