Myths of tourism institutionalization and Cancún

•Provides a rare glimpse of the launch of a large-scale industry carved from Cancún’s genesis.•Combines institutional theory with banking alliances to reveal power struggles.•Examines how the autonomous Mexico Central Bank built Cancún, not the government.•Explains how and why project director Antonio Enriquez-Savignac violated the original mandate.•Demonstrates the use of unmandated land-for-share swaps to launch hotel investment.

This interdisciplinary investigation revisits Cancún’s origins and tourism institutionalization. Original accounting documents separate myth and marketing from events to debunk widely disseminated misconceptions of the Mexican state’s role. This rare view of mass tourism emergence at a (trans)formative period demonstrates the historical processes, personalities and ploys. Against a backdrop of conflicts, a banking alliance sparked integrally planned tourism centers. Cancún was the brainchild of economics-trained central bankers inexperienced in tourism with a mandate to increase foreign revenue. Amid looming failure, the bankers swapped land-for-shares to portray the project as a financial success to its stakeholders. Combined with fiscal sociology, organizational theory institutionalization through a six-stage process serves to incrementally reveal the introduction of central planning, the linchpin of Mexico’s tourism predominance.