Week 8 -- Kristina Nguyen

This week's reading was about the national re-branding of Costa Rica as a country of ecotourism, not just with government help, but with entrepreneurs from overseas. The high rise of ecotourism "reflected consumer demand to visit cultural and natural attractions but also responded to the changing ideas and interests of tourists and policymakers" (Jones and Spadafora, 3). Ecotourism in Costa Rica "involves nature tourism conducted by small businesses" which is a different aspect of national re-branding presented in this reading compared to previous readings in the quarter (4). It is different because this national re-branding of ecotourism had something to do with overseas entrepreneurs coming in to Costa Rica from other countries to help Costa Rica with their image of a vacation in paradise. The paper claims that the growth of Costa Rica's ecotourism industry "is better seen as a case of co-creation, involving small entrepreneurial start-ups operating private reserves, tours, and accommodations, as well as environmental and scientific NGOs" (5). This success that Costa Rica is faced with is due to a "co-creation of the public, private, and tertiary sectors," and the country's "openness to foreigners allowed these entrepreneurs as well as Costa Rican nationals to start the businesses that created [ecotourism]" (40, 41).

In my group's project, the most valuable aspect of our chosen city is the huge amounts of cultural diversity there is in San Jose, which aids in the city's brand of cultural tourism. Cultural tourism is defined as tourism specifically concerned with the lifestyle, history, art, architecture, religion, and other things that helped shape peoples' way of living. While San Jose is mostly known as being a part of the Silicon Valley, and the Downtown area is definitely booming with many businesses and start-ups very well living up to the Silicon Valley standards, what is also important is the amount of diversity there is in the city. Having grown up in San Jose, I can safely declare that there is an abundance of ethnic cultures seen in various parts of the city as well. However, with this abundant diversity, there are also assimilated generations of all ethnic groups that face a problem: what is their culture, and do they know the importance of their roots? With culture that is lost, San Jose would not be a culturally diverse city anymore as masses of generational assimilation in the United States would slowly strip away their cultural identity. This is a big problem for many ethnic groups; however, our group will be focusing on Southeast Asian Americans. Some precautions we can take to not overuse/exploit/destroy this value is just to not take over and claim that we know what Southeast Asian history is and how each of their art looks like. We can have a group of 5 people that represent each part of Southeast Asians that have immigrated to San Jose from their home country because they are the ones who have fresh knowledge of their country's culture.

Source: http://qcostarica.com/2665000-tourists-visited-costa-rica-in-2015/

Question: I wonder if Vietnam were to bring in entrepreneurs from other countries, or maybe if the country's officials and nationals saw that if they were to focus on the environments and sciences, that their rates of tourism would also rise and be significantly high?


Sources:

“Translations for Cultural Tourism.” What Does Cultural Tourism Mean?, www.definitions.net/definition/cultural tourism.

Jones, Geoffrey Gareth, and Andrew Spadafora. "Entrepreneurs and the Co-Creation of Ecotourism in Costa Rica." (2016).