Spring break travels abroad must stop
This year’s spring recess was the first real spring break for USC students since the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, for the majority, this was their first nondistanced and maskless spring break experience.
Spring break has a reputation of being an extravagant weeklong bender where students travel to a tropical destination surrounded by the beach, good weather and plenty of parties. During this week, midterms and lectures are the last thing on students’ minds — rather, they’re focused on indulging in tequila and fish tacos.
Whether it be Cabo or Maui, postpandemic college students are itching to leave their dorms behind and have fun. Since it was the first spring break for many, there was a looming pressure to have a memorable experience that is worth sharing on social media because if you’re not living it up in Cabo, what are you doing?
While it’s not inherently wrong for college students to want to drink and party for a week in Mexico, it can be problematic when they’re partaking in extreme consumerism and neocolonialism.
According to Sarah N.R. Wijesinghe, Paolo Mura and Frederic Bouchon’s research on tourism, “tourism knowledge production and dissemination” comes from the commodification of culture via the exploitation of people, allowing colonialism and imperialism to continue.
When foreigners visit tourist destinations, they’re contributing their wealth to the producers of tourist enterprises thus reinforcing unequal relationships of power. In turn, locals who aren’t generating profits are marginalized from mainstream economic structures, and lose control over their spaces and landscapes.
This is evident in places, such as Hawaii, where tourism, produced primarily by non-Hawaiians, drives a large part of their economy. Most Native Hawaiian people work lower-paying service jobs, and some have to work more than one job to get by. Tourism is an incredibly damaging industry to Hawaii that leads to an increase of the cost of living and the price of goods and services.
Similarly, foreigners flock to Mexico capitalizing off its affordability, as Americans get nearly 20 Mexican pesos to the United States dollar. An environment like this might encourage people to consume in amounts that might exceed the rate of everyday consumer behavior, which further stimulates the tourist industry while marginalizing smaller local businesses.
When college students visit these places, they overconsume and reinforce colonial power structures. While it might seem harmless, there are residual effects of vacationing abroad that students should be more aware of on their next trip.
Along with neocolonialism, traveling out of the state and country for spring break poses a health risk for the inhabitants of the vacation destination, and for at-risk USC students in Los Angeles, as many seem to forget that we are not quite out of the pandemic just yet.
While the University did take spring break-related coronavirus precautions by requiring students to test after returning to campus, they should have implemented stricter quarantine measures post-break, such as a three to five-day quarantine for students who traveled out of state and Zoom accommodations for all students returning.
The CDC recommends that returning travelers, particularly those that partook in large-scale gatherings, exercise caution and avoid those at higher risk of the coronavirus for two weeks, but how many students were truly cautious about the virus as they were partying it up in Palm Springs or Las Vegas?
So, does this mean students should stop traveling abroad for spring break entirely?
There is no type of tourism that doesn’t, in some way, contribute to neocolonialism and capitalist industries. So, honestly, yes.
It’s nearly impossible to avoid contributing to the tourism industry when traveling. If students must visit these places, they must be conscious of the lands and considerate to the people indigenous to these spaces. Students should at least learn the history of the places they travel to and be aware of how they affect local communities. Rather than giving white capitalists money, they should pay reparations directly to indigenous organizations.
Spring break in places such as Mexico and Hawaii are almost like a rite of passage for college students. But, despite the large presence of spring break culture among students at USC, this rite of passage isn’t worth the harm it causes.