This was the first webinar in a series offering space for dialogue, analysis and discussion of alternatives to the impacts of the aviation industry, organised by the Latin American and Caribbean regional network of Stay Grounded, “Permanecer en la Tierra”.
Quintana Roo, Mexico. ‘The Day of Reflection on Aviation and Airport Expansion’, coordinated by Permanecer en la Tierra, a regional network for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), which is part of the Stay Grounded global network, began on 29 February 2024.
During the webinar, reflections began on important issues for Latin America and the Caribbean, related to aviation and its profound ecological, social and cultural impacts.
The first reflection topic was aviation and tourism and scenarios for Latin America and the Caribbean, which was presented by Luis Rodolfo Olivares Franco, member of the Seminar of Critical Urban Studies (SEUC) of Geography at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Associate Professor at the University of San Diego, California, and Daniela Subtil, coordinator of the Stay Grounded Global Network.
The ‘Reflection Talks’ presented academic analysis on the situation in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, which has been affected by the tourism industry since 1974 with the creation of Cancun as a mass tourism development project.
One of Matilde Córdoba Azcárate’s reflections was the following: “Tourism development is a continuation of extractivist ways of operating, which are not new, but are new in their impacts on an ecological level and also on a socio-political level. This type of extractive tourism involves the dispossession of land, the enclosure of common spaces and resources, the commodification of ways of life, civilising and acculturation processes, of language, of vision, of ideology of kinship and gender, of ways of organising the home. It implies the silencing and alienation of other possible futures”.
You can watch the first Reflection Talks conversation on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyjrVGuhm1w
It is also available on Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/61555323617123/videos/1177458026576792
We invite you to participate in the upcoming sessions of the Reflection Talks which will cover themes that greatly impact the lives of Indigenous, urban, rural, and peasant people’s and for all those who inhabit the diverse and beautiful territory of Latin America and the Caribbean:
2. Territorial conflicts and airport expansion in Latin America and the Caribbean.
3. Militarisation and airport infrastructure: an analysis of geopolitics in Latin America and the Caribbean.
4. The Mayan Train and the Interoceanic Corridor: The territorial reordering of south-southeast Mexico and Central America.
5. Building alternatives to stay grounded from Latin America and the Caribbean
Register here to join: https://es.stay-grounded.org/permanecer-en-la-tierra-jornadas-reflexion/
