Mateo Salas
Positions
Graduate Teaching Assistant
University of Calgary
PhD Student
University of Calgary
Contact information
Web presence
Background
Educational Background
Bachelor of Arts Anthropology, Florida Atlantic University, 2018
Master of Arts Anthropology, Florida Atlantic University, 2021
Biography
Mateo is Third year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary.
About my Research
Ecotourism has emerged as a shimmering mirage, a promise of prosperity untouched by the harsh footprints of mass tourism. It promises the flourishing of rural economies under the gaze of visitors from the North, a delicate balance between cultural exchange and economic growth. Yet this compelling story is largely written in the ink of Western development. It is a tale told by tourists with passports laden with privilege, whose vision of development is structured by the very world they seek to escape. In their wake, once self-sufficient rural economies now turn their faces toward the global North. For many in the global South, the stories of tourism development and its associated practices are intimately riddled with the violence of dispossession that results from colonial-capitalist interests. My work aims to illustrate how violence manifests itself in “the spaces and silences of everyday life, in the loss of land, community, and language” (Devine and Ojeda 2017, p. 605). It aims to highlight how ecotourism is linked to violence, as it relates to global real estate development and Western migration, which commodifies the natural environment and rural communities for the benefit of an elite. It is necessary to problematize what we define as "sustainable" tourism, foregrounding local autonomy in order to advocate for forms of community-based tourism that consider the role of tourism in the broader context of climate change, the creation of destructive colonial imaginaries, and land grabbing.
Awards
- Transformative Talent Internship, University of Calgary FGS. 2022
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