On Cancun
Living in a place that doesn't exist
As I suspect is the case with many other tourism destinations that were built from the top down by government or corporate initiatives and grants, Cancun is effective in what it was engineered to do. It is so effective that even the people who live there end up as guests, whether they realize it or not. Living about 8 of my formative years in Cancun played a large part in forming my worldview, for better or for worse.
The city of Cancun is only about 50 years old. Before the development of the area, it mainly consisted of mangroves and empty land, where maybe a hundred people lived compared to the 1 million inhabitants that live there today. The overwhelming majority of people in the city are transplants, and this manifests itself in strange ways, like a notoriously weak food culture. The people incentivized to move there were by and large either in the tourism industry or poor laborers looking for work, and a population optimized for these two extremes is missing a significant part of the cultural know-how required to flesh out a town into a healthy organism.
The whole city revolves around what is referred to as the "hotel zone", an island about 23 kilometres long with the best beaches and most of the resorts. It is separated from the city proper by a lagoon, and consists of a single road with a bridge on each far end connecting it to the mainland. This separates the hotel zone from the rest of the place both physically and psychologically for locals, as access to it is a commitment to a long drive, often with heavy traffic.
All of the best attractions are in the hotel zone, since tourists are always plentiful and willing to spend. What strikes me is the lack of amenities, attractions, or interesting things to do for a local. The young city has always catered to the every whim of the strangers coming in, but never cared about what makes a place liveable. This is papered over by generous discounts for those who visit from in-town, but the places worth visiting are all on average an hour's drive out of the city through the highway. In effect, Cancun is a commuter town, built out of necessity for placing the masses somewhere when they're not working in resorts.
Growing up upper-middle class, I had very little space to inhabit. This may sound strange to those who have never lived in a third world country, but the entire social fabric is stratified into tiers of amenities that correspond to those in your class. Transgression is not welcome, and is treated with hostility. Compounding this, I happen to have fair skin and lighter hair. Cancun, as an amalgamation of different flavors of people both local and international, is surprisingly lacking in fair-featured people in all but expat circles. Due to this, other locals would more often than not treat me as a tourist or otherwise a foreigner. I could never take a walk down the road anywhere remotely popular without being stopped by local salesmen offering tours, packages, and so on, in awkward English. This all came together into a strong sense of alienation.
There is an exception to the demographic challenges here, which is of course the high class circles. As in many places, the Cancun elite (elite only in the wealth sense) are proportionally much whiter than the other tiers. The natural impulse towards social striving would dictate a simple solution to my problem: join them. In my life I've had the privilege of travelling to many places and engaging with the social elite of a variety of cultures across continents, and I find the Cancun elite to be vapid in an interesting way.
The closest parallels I can draw are to the Bangkok hi-so or the children of the Gulf economic boom. In all of these groups there is an implicit understanding of consumption as the primary form of self-expression. Unlike those groups, however, the Cancun circle is uniquely rootless. The Thai and Gulf circles are heavily insular, as is common in third world elite circles, but can still draw from the well of national and cultural identity. Most expats I've met who were born and raised in Dubai, Cancun, or another manufactured city without a cohesive cultural identity cannot anchor themselves to their surroundings without lying to themselves. Usually the best they can do is go all-in on their parents' cultural background or supplant it with the accepted national identity. A third option, basing one's identity off of consumption of hegemonic (read American) media, fashion, and so forth, serves as a status signifier as well as an ontological anchor, and is the most popular of the three. To various degrees, this is culturally seen as improper or shallow, so when pressed they will often retreat to one of the other two.
I was raised in and out of hotels and away from family, so building an identity out of my family's cultural background was never really an option. Some of the people around me were in similar situations, and would adopt their place within the national identity. I tried to follow suit, but was unable to keep it up too long, as I could never square it with what I saw around me. By elimination I landed in the third camp, where I was happy until my inner critic's arguments about the shallowness and frivolity of living for mere consumption became loud enough I could no longer ignore them. So I decided to up sticks and leave. Cancun shaped me for better or for worse, and for all the worse, I owe my drive to improve and my ambition to see the world to it more than anything else.