Brokers and tours: the commodification of urban poverty and violence in Latin America and the Caribbean

This article explores how so-called “slum” tourism commodifies poverty and violence, transforming urban deprivation in to a tourism product. In particular, we pay ethnographic attention to the role of brokers who mediate encounters between residents and tourists. The paper explores how brokers – tour guides, art curators and civil society organisations - do work to mediate power structures and enact a specific representational-performative politics. In so doing, brokers play a key role in aestheticising and performing poverty and violence, and converting disadvantaged spaces in to a tourist product. We argue that brokers are vital to the reproduction of existing inequalities and to the formation of new social relationships and subjectivities.