By Akash Belsare
“[W]hen the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.”
Jamaica Kincaid published A Small Place in 1988, a sardonic critique of how the tourism industry in Antigua perpetuates a colonialist mentality by objectifying and exoticizing the local population. In 2001, Stephanie Black’s documentary, Life and Debt, used Kincaid’s voiceover narration to apply these same words to the political and economic history of Jamaica. Now, 25 years into the 21st Century, a record number of visitors are traveling to the Caribbean—with many more likely to arrive during the winter months.
As an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, I want my students to reckon with the power dynamics of narrativization. This semester, my “Introduction to World Literature” course grappled with the relationship between tourism and narratives about unfamiliar places. Students interrogated their own positionality as vacationers in the process. They recognized not only that tourism is shaped by privilege, but that their comfort is often prioritized at the expense of the local population. Reflecting on a trip to a resort in Mexico, one student wrote, “It’s complicated because although my family was born there, we were still entering the space as tourists.”
New questions began to take shape: Why do I want to vacation there? How do I know if I am truly welcome? What do I know about the communities who live there? Why is it so easy to consume a place’s beauty while staying blind to its pain? Can I travel in a way that is respectful of the struggles and everyday lives of the people who call the place home? My students began to think critically about how their ideas about travel and place are shaped by prevailing narratives that are often curated or sanitized for tourists.
This is the context in which I visited San Juan in November as a literary scholar attending the annual American Studies Association meeting. Puerto Rico has grown more popular among U.S. travelers due to a renewed marketing campaign from the island’s tourism agency and in the aftermath of Bad Bunny’s summer residency. The unincorporated U.S. territory, which was confusingly designated by the Supreme Court during the Insular cases of the early 1900s as “foreign in a domestic sense,” remains embroiled in debates regarding democratic governance and privatization.
The conference theme—Late-Stage American Empire?—resonated with researchers whose work addresses the continued impacts of settler colonialism and U.S. expansionism. While anti-imperialism was the focus of the meeting, off-site I was still a tourist put up in the Caribe Hilton hotel (touted as the birthplace of the Piña Colada and described as a “beachfront paradise”), observing the Live Boricua ads in the airport (a campaign which has faced considerable backlash), and drinking Corona (which was labeled a “local beer” in a nearby restaurant). In Viejo San Juan especially, an imperialist gaze was inescapable. Every smoke shop, boutique, jewelry store, and pumpkin spice latte seemed to conceal the story of Puerto Rico behind a generic Caribbean getaway.
That is until I booked a walking (de)tour with Memoria (De)colonial, a nonprofit organization partnered with ASA that examines the legacies of colonialism in Puerto Rico through public and digital humanities initiatives. This (de)tour, titled “San Juan (Anti)colonial: Imperialism and Resistance in the World’s Oldest Colony,” led brilliantly by Sofía Martínez Rivera, encouraged participants to ethically and consciously inhabit spaces defined by ongoing histories of violence, erasure, and the struggle for self-determination.
This isn’t a mere reclamation project. Memoria (De)colonial is not interested in rescuing the island’s “hidden” history; rather, its goal is to interrogate the complex social and cultural dynamics of the region by analyzing how space and place are constructed across time. The statue of Christopher Colombus in Plaza Colón? Erected by the Spanish in 1893, replacing the original statue of Juan Ponce de Leon to better promote Spain’s vision of a global empire. U.S. intervention during the Spanish-American War? Contextualized within the larger scope of expansionism and the “civilizing” mission. Puerto Rico’s Incentive Code, better known as Act 60? Not just a tax exemption, but a major contributor to disaster capitalism investors like real estate tycoon Cherif Medawar to radically transform San Juan to better appease cruise-goers. The (de)tour was a lesson in reading practice, in seeing through the cracks and drawing connections between the narratives of Puerto Rico’s interconnected cultural heritages, political policies, and economic considerations.
This method is neither dismissive, painted-over, nor fetishistic. In “The Message,” a 2024 travel narrative evaluating the imperialist gaze, Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects on his trip to Dakar: “It occurs to me now that I had come to see a part of Africa but not Africans…Toward the end of my trip, the limits of this approach were becoming clear.” So, how can you be a better tourist this holiday season? Don’t ask me, ask Sofía Martínez Rivera.
By Sofía Martínez Rivera
Responsibility does not ruin the experience of travel; it deepens it. The question, then, is not whether you should come, but how—and what you are willing to carry with you when you leave. Here are some ways you can engage with a place (more) ethically and in solidarity:
- Choosing connection over extraction. As a guide, I am often rendered as part of the scenery—useful, friendly, conveniently local. But Puerto Rico is not a backdrop, and its people are not supporting characters in your tropical rendezvous. When you travel, base your interactions on mutual respect, and center local and critical storytelling to engage intentionally with spaces, land, and heritage.
- Steer away from “local hidden gems,” and “exotic” or “colonial” experiences.This language commodifies Puerto Rico and decontextualizes its colonial reality. Mutual respect requires recognizing when to accept that some places, stories, and local haunts are not seeking your presence at all.
- Taking images with care and consent: Photographs are colonial technologies without a neutral spectator. Before you let Puerto Rico become another square on your Instagram grid, pause and ask yourself: Who is this representation serving? Is this photograph feeding a preconceived notion of a place? Does it reproduce or reject colonial fantasies, and am I in any position to narrate the story of this space? While you attempt to capture “paradise” on your cell phone, remember that paradise is built on material, emotional, and political realities that do not disappear just because you are on vacation.
- Do your due diligence: Puerto Rico is facing a housing crisis, and major threats of settler colonialism and displacement. Seeking guest house accommodations and local hotels, traveling off-season and tipping generously, buying from artisans and local vendors, and being aware of your water and power consumption, are some ways in which you can support the local economy and lower the negative impact of the tourism industry.
- Post-trip: Integrate and reflect. Ask yourself, what assumptions or stereotypes did this trip challenge? What did I learn about myself—and what do I still need to learn? And finally, how will I revisit the lessons from the trip to honor them and the people who facilitated them? After your trip, continue to support local organizations and commit to learning about the region’s ongoing challenges and happenings.