Abstract
This study examines how Discover Puerto Rico’s Instagram archive produces and circulates artificial cultural memories that promote an official gastronomic authenticity, stability, and national pride narrative. Through analyzing visual representations of food and culinary experiences, this research shows how these images cater to global gastro-tourism demands while making invisible the harsh realities of food insecurity, structural inequality, and displacement that affect communities outside the metropolitan area and main tourist destinations. Drawing on Urry and Larsen’s concept of the “tourist gaze” and MacCannell’s theories of constructed authenticity, this paper analyzes how tourism sells experiences and implants cultural memories, shaping perceptions that both visitors and Puerto Ricans have of their gastronomy. The digital archive works like a machine for symbolic erasure, deliberately leaving out signs of crisis—food lines, empty supermarkets after natural disasters, dependence on imported food, and grassroots agricultural projects—from the official visual story. The analysis demonstrates how this curated gastro-aesthetic functions beyond tourism promotion, contributing to urban space reconfiguration by transforming neighborhoods and local practices into aesthetic resources ready for consumption by external audiences, particularly investors and crypto-colonizers. While Discover Puerto Rico’s social media projects images of full markets and stylized dishes celebrating local authenticity, nearly 40% of Puerto Rican households experience food insecurity. This dissonance between representation and reality reveals how the state apparatus not only sells the country but aestheticizes and simplifies it to meet global market demands, reinforcing an official discourse that deflects attention from structural inequalities while legitimizing a colonized food crisis.
Presenters
Mónica E. Lugo VélezAssistant Professor, World Languages and Cultures, North Carolina State University, North Carolina, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—Fed Up: Learning From the Past, Imagining New Futures
KEYWORDS
Digital Tourism Marketing, Food Insecurity, Cultural Memory, Visual Culture
