How Tulumization is transforming Mexico’s cultural spaces

Mexico — Mexicans have an infinite capacity to destroy the best of ourselves and our country. Every time a space with cultural, natural, or human potential appears, it seems our first reaction is to exploit it to exhaustion, turning it into an unbridled selfishness of egos, businesses, and opportunists, until what was valuable becomes unrecognizable.

Today the verb “to Tulumize” no longer needs explanation. It means ruining something that was inherently beautiful. It means converting a place with identity into a soulless decoration, a franchise of itself, a theme park for quick consumption. This has nothing to do with governments, parties, or ideologies. It happens with the right, with the left, with the PRI, with the PAN, with Morena, and with anyone in power. It is a deeper problem: cultural, social, and moral. It is perhaps the lack of rules and those who enforce them, of the Rule of Law; and it is certainly a lack of will.

Tulum is the most evident case, from the name itself. But before that was Playa del Carmen, created from scratch as a tourism project and then abandoned to its own excess. Today it’s the turn of Valle de Guadalupe, an agricultural and wine paradise that is becoming a succession of nightclubs, weddings, hotels where the DJ matters more than the land, the selfie more than the wine. The same occurs in Bacalar, and in every corner that someone detects as “new,” “authentic,” or “trendy.”

We want to transform everything into a nightclub without rules, without limits, without care for nature or the community. We want to grow fast, without order, without planning, and without responsibility. We want to get rich now, even if that means destroying what gave us the opportunity in the first place.

Polanco, once a beautiful and peaceful space, is now taken over by bodyguards, giant trucks, and restaurants built by money launderers that don’t serve good food, charge exorbitant prices, and live off empty ostentation. Avenida Masaryk ceased to be an urban promenade to become a parade of misunderstood power.

Now that logic is reaching Roma-Condesa. A zone that was built slowly from the community, from art, from walkability, from cafes, from cultural forums, and from real neighborhood life. Today hotels proliferate without control, endless parties, nightclubs disguised as “experiences,” constant noise, and the silent expulsion of those who made the place valuable.

As in Tulum, the measure is lost. Care for the neighbor, for public space, for history, and for culture is lost. What remains is a law of the jungle where the richest and most powerful impose their will in the absence of real law and a state that regulates seriously.

Tulumization doesn’t destroy suddenly; it erodes little by little. It kills identity, expels the community, and leaves a profitable but empty shell. And when there’s nothing authentic left to exploit, it simply moves to the next “discovered” place. The problem is that fewer and fewer remain.