Occupying the Centre: Handicraft Vendors, Cultural Vitality, Commodi fication, and Tourism in Cusco, Peru

This article analyzes the efforts of municipal and regional authorities to restructure Cusco's urban centre and surrounding areas so as to make it an attractive tourist mecca. One way sought to achieve this has been by displacing all vendors from the centre to the periphery of the city. This has been partly thwarted because of a convergence between the desires of tourists for a particular kind of experience and vendors' ability to draw on cultural aesthetics and economic calculations to fulfil those desires. At the same time, macroeconomic forces, the increasing stratification among dispersed handicraft vendors, producers, and wholesalers, and failure on the part of authorities to provide adequate mechanisms for vendors to organize into viable associations makes the livelihood of most handicraft vendors precarious. We suggest that government agencies should pay less attention to definitions of authenticity; they should officially encourage satellite markets; a empt to provide some measure of property rights to vendors, encouraging the resurrection of informal associations; and thereby create greater permanent integration among producers, vendors, and consumers of agricultural and handicraft wares that would contribute to the local economic vitality of the city and of Cusco's vendors who constitute an important urban sector.