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This chapter discusses tourism and biodiversity as the development alternatives for the indigenous peoples in Mexico. The Plural National Indigenous Assembly for Autonomy (ANIPA) is a national organization that includes fifty-four of the fifty-six officially recognized indigenous peoples in Mexico. It has worked for a series of reforms that are always aimed toward reclaiming autonomy and the right of self-determination for those peoples. The chapter stresses that the program of indigenous tourism should not be the only alternative of ANIPA; there are many other options that exist within their indigenous territories. However, it notes that the aim of ANIPA is to take advantage of this opportunity and to obtain that to which the indigenous peoples are entitled.

The chapter focuses on the tourism encounter at Parara Puru—an Emberá community at Chagres, Panama—the exotic images that publicise it, and the contradictory expectations of the tourists. Naturalised images of the Emberá in tourism advertisements—dressed in exotic garb, with their bodies largely uncovered—provide the promise of experiencing wild, tropical South America. Tourist expectations are rooted in such naturalised imagery and reproduce, on their part, contradictory remarks that communicate an ambivalence about the degree to which indigeneity should remain ‘uncorrupted’ by Western values and commodities. This type of exoticisation, to which I refer as ‘unintentional primitivisation’, relates to the expectation that indigenous people may benefit from some Western civilisational provisions—such as education for children and hospital care—while at the same time remaining unaffected by other Western influences or technologies. In this respect, unintentional primitivisation shapes indigenous tourism, posing dilemmas that fuel the ambivalence of the Emberá.

Focusing on the community of Parara Puru (at Chagres National Park), the chapter examines the involvement of the Emberá with tourism, and their increasing representational self-awareness. Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, the Emberá avoided the world of the non-Emberá. It is only in the past twenty years that some Emberá communities have started reaching out to the world, taking advantage of new representational opportunities. The Emberá who work for indigenous tourism are now concerned with how best to represent their culture, what aspects of it to make available for viewing, and in what form. The renewed interest of the Emberá in the details of their culture signals an emerging representational self-awareness; they have started to look for new or forgotten information about one’s own cultural distinctiveness, and a more confident articulation of indigenous knowledge is developing. The Emberá of Parara Puru consider their role in tourism as more akin to that of a teacher than tourist entertainer.

The chapter tells one among many possible stories of social change in Emberá society—one account of Emberá social history in Panama. Here the uniting thread is the changing Emberá dress codes. Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, the Emberá lived in dispersed settlement; they dressed in (what they describe now) as ‘traditional’ clothes. Later, they founded nucleated communities and reorganised their political representation. As they formalised their relationship with the state they started to rely more heavily on Western mass-manufactured clothing. More recently, we can recognise a third emergent stage of increased national and international visibility, which has led to the re-valorisation of Emberá dress through indigenous tourism. In later chapters I challenge the linearity of this sequence of transformations—and the misplaced assumption that they move in a single direction from tradition to modernity.