Pura Vida: Affect, Puerto Viejo, and Emergent Tourism Erotics

Located approximately four hours southeast of San José on theCaribbean Coast of Costa Rica, Puerto Viejo de Talamanca is a burgeoning touristtown thoroughly characterized and “eroticized” in guidebook, anthropological,and ethnographic representations, as a place where “tourist women come to ‘hookup’ with local, Afro-Caribbean men.” Drawing on recent developments at theintersections of affect studies and the anthropologies of tourism, in thisexperimental paper, I seek to augment and accomplish a disruption of suchrepresentational and critical assessments, specifically, through a retooling ofsalient tourism studies concepts such as encountersand contact zones , toward a theoretical orientationthat explores “eroticization” as an affectively charged, durative, and ongoingprocess of becoming . In doing so, I further experimentwith ethnographic writing practices and conventions adequate to this task,thereby enacting a mimetic performance of affects toward an extension of theirdisruptive potentials. To that effect, I take up locally and touristicallyinflected notions of vortices , understood as seductiveand relational affectively charged pulls that draw tourists and locals alikeinto new and ongoing infrastructures of difference, for better or for worse.