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With tourism rapidly increasing in developing nations there is an emerging focus on integrating pro-poor tourism into both the international tourism and aid agendas. Following a brief review of the pro-poor tourism literature, this article argues for the explicit creation of tourism and agriculture linkages to achieve pro-poor tourism objectives. To understand both the potential and the problems associated with linking the two sectors, we present an in-depth case study of tourism and agriculture in Cancun, Mexico. The case study draws on the perspectives of Cancun hotel chefs, who control hotel food purchasing, and Quintana Roo farmers, who have attempted to supply the tourism industry, to provide a unique thorough examination of the challenges and potential for such linkages in a mass tourism resort.

With Cancun, the site of the 2003 World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations, being presented as a metaphor for the inequities purported to emerge from globalization, this is an opportune time to examine the resort and its surrounding region as a product of transnational forces. Locals refer to Cancun as “Gringolandia,” a term that reflects the circus‐like spectacle of the overbuilt resort, embedded in a region deeply divided by uneven development and the ensuing inequitable power relations. The principal objective of this article is to understand how transnational forces have reshaped local realities and power structures in the Yucatan to construct and reproduce Gringolandia as a new tourist space. We commence with an historical overview of the planning, inception, and subsequent evolution of the physical and socioeconomic spatial divisions manifest in the resort today. We then analyze the two forces that have played perhaps the greatest role in constructing Gringolandia: the transnational economic structure of the resort and the consumption‐ and production‐led migratory flows to Cancun. Detailed understanding of the construction of Gringolandia, and its regional influence, holds valuable lessons for future tourist resort planning and development in lesser‐developed countries.

Tourism scholars in recent years have posited a global paradigmatic shift from Fordist to more post-Fordist and neo-Fordist modes of tourism production and consumption. This article provides a brief literature review of transformations in global tourism production and consumption from a Fordist spectrum of analysis. Following a discussion of tourism development in Cancun and the surrounding state of Quintana Roo, this article draws on empirical data from a survey of 615 visitors to the Yucatan Peninsula and 60 Cancun hotels to provide a contextual application of the Fordist spectrum in understanding the nature of tourism production and consumption in the region. Cancun is situated as a predominately Fordist mass tourism resort, however, analysis reveals that the region’s tourism landscape, which is experiencing processes of diversification, is in reality a complex combination of both Fordist and post-Fordist elements manifest in different ‘shades’ of mass tourism, ‘neo-Fordism’ and ‘mass customization’. The article concludes that the Fordist spectrum of analysis provides a useful perspective from which to examine the changing nature of tourism production and consumption.