THE SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF SPACE IN TOURISM ENCLAVES: MAYAN CHILDREN’S PERCEPTIONS OF TOURISM BOUNDARIES

•Engages geographies of childhood to understand lived socio-spatial experiences.•Focuses on children residing in service towns created by tourism in Mexico.•Interrogates the intersection between children’s geographies and tourism geographies.•The trialectics of space is the conceptual foundation.•Space was interpreted based on recreational use and dominant constructions.

This paper adopts an interpretive approach to investigate children’s perceptions of their socio-spatial surroundings. It focuses on two tourism service towns, Akumal Pueblo and Chemuyil, and two major tourism centers, Akumal Playa and Bahia Principe, all located in the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula. Drawing on scholarship related to tourism’s role in demarcating and segregating space and Lefebvre’s trialectics of space production, this inquiry focuses on ways in which Mayan children residing in Akumal Pueblo and Chemuyil render their surrounding spaces intelligible, while reproducing or challenging the boundaries, symmetries and inclusions/exclusions created by the tourism industry. Tourism scholarship has tended to ignore children. By contrast this study engages the geographies of childhood to understand the lived socio-spatial experiences of this demographic group.