Introduction: Tourism Development and the Policing of Urban Space in Latin American and the Caribbean

The relationships between police and Latin Americans and police and tourists are complex and in constant flux, not least in tourism zones. It would be tempting to analyze tourism police as enforcers of elite interests, but to do so would elide the crucial fact that tourism police and policing practices are situated within dense matrices of power relations. Our ethnographic data indicate that those who are marginalized, ignored, or maligned by the state can in fact exercise agency, use their cultural repertoire to ameliorate state domination, and even develop livelihoods in the tourism economy. Collectively, the essays of this special issue illustrate the multiple and contradictory ways in which policing operates in Latin American tourism sites, often with complicated and unintended social consequences. Placing an ethnographic lens on policing, as a mechanism that alternately protects and disciplines locals and tourists alike, can provide insight into the complexities of both the state and tourism locales.