Local Politics, Cultural Knowledge Production, and the Contested Futures of Community-Based Tourism

This paper explores how local political struggles over tourism development constitute critical sites where academic knowledge production of the past intersects with community-based epistemologies and practices of self-determination. Focusing on the Yucatec Maya response to the Maya Train mega-infrastructure project, I analyze how local cultural organizing produces knowledge that challenges both extractive tourism models and conventional academic frameworks for studying Indigenous communities. Through systematic analysis of Maya cultural production–including community murals, theater plays, radio programs, and literature responding to the $30 billion-plus Maya Train–I show how local actors articulate Indigenous epistemologies, particularly mu’uch kuxtal (living well together) and k’ambe’enech (welcoming with happiness), as foundational alternatives to corporate and extractive tourism development paradigms. Rather than treating these cultural practices as mere local political resistance, I argue they constitute long term primary knowledge-making sites with capability to redefine the relationship between tourism, sovereignty, and hospitality. The paper argues that local politics operates at the intersection of multiple knowledge regimes: state and corporate-driven development discourse, academic tourism scholarship, and Indigenous intellectual traditions. By centering Maya cultural production as political knowledge work, it shows how community-based tourism debates are simultaneously struggles over epistemological authority: over whose knowledge counts, who controls cultural representation, and what futures remain possible when local communities assert political and intellectual sovereignty over their history and territories..