By Bianca Corona—

There is a version of Huatulco that now exists mostly in memory. Before the paved streets. Before the hotels. Before boundaries were drawn across maps and land was divided by paperwork. Before anyone imagined what this coastline would look like forty years into the future.

There are few photographs from that time. Most fishing families did not have cameras to capture ordinary life by the sea. What remains lives in stories. In names. In the memory of where a river once deepened, where animals grazed freely, and where families gathered when the moon was full.

I asked Abdon Lavariega Arista and his sister Oliva what Huatulco looked like before FONATUR arrived. Not the official version. Not the hectares or the decrees, although those came too, unprompted, because Abdon carries dates the way some people carry scripture. I asked them what they remembered.

Santa Cruz is where their family’s memory runs deepest, so that is where much of this story lives. But the same transformation, with its own local details, unfolded across this entire stretch of coast. In Bajos de Coyula. In Bajos del Arenal. On ranches near Tangolunda and along the Copalita River. This is Huatulco’s story, told through one family’s corner of it.

Before the Order

“Antes de la expropiación había libertad,” Abdon told me. Before the expropriation, there was freedom.

The land was communal, and that freedom was not an abstract idea. It was physical. You could camp on any beach or open plain, and nobody stopped you. Cattle, goats, pigs, and pack animals moved freely across the hillsides. The hills themselves looked different then. They were sabanas. Open. Grassy. Almost without trees because the animals kept them that way. Today, Abdon points out, grazing is restricted, and those same hills have grown into something closer to forest. It is one of the unexpected contradictions of development.

Santa María Huatulco, the municipal seat, moved according to its own rhythm. Monday was market day. Residents from the surrounding rancherías arrived on donkeys and mules to buy produce and dry goods at what is still known as the mercado antiguo, across from the old Palacio Municipal. Abdon remembers the shopkeepers by name: Don Antonio Salinas Gutiérrez, Doña Hortencia Martínez, Don Polo Galán. The way you remember the people who fed your family.

There were no restaurants. There were fondas. Small, informal kitchens where people sat together after finishing their shopping. Fishing required no permits. There was no capitanía de puerto watching the water. What you caught, you sold to your neighbors.

Oliva’s childhood followed a slightly different rhythm. She grew up mostly on the family ranch, Piedra de Moros, and came to Santa Cruz with her parents during visits until she was around twelve. She remembers dirt streets. No pavement anywhere. And one great spectacle: a traveling fair that arrived in Santa Cruz on the first Friday of the month. Against a village that small, the rides must have looked enormous.

She also carries stories of teenagers playing on the beach beneath the full moon. Those memories originally belonged to her sister-in-law, who lived them directly, but Oliva tells them now. Because that is how memory moves through a family. Hand to hand. Voice to voice. Until it becomes difficult to know exactly where one person’s memory ends and another begins.

When the News Arrived

Abdon remembers hearing news of the development project over the radio near the end of José López Portillo’s presidency. The official expropriation came during the presidency of Miguel de la Madrid. The decree was signed on May 28, 1984, and published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación the following day.

But for Oliva, the beginning was not about documents. It was a feeling. “Era como una emoción,” she said. It felt like excitement.

Huatulco was going to grow. More people would arrive. There would be jobs and opportunities, and they were told the project would benefit the comuneros. Huatulco would become like Cancún. Nobody she knew was preparing for loss. They were preparing for a future that sounded, for a moment, as though it belonged to them.

What It Took

What that future required arrived slowly, and not evenly. The agency behind that decree was FONATUR, the Fondo Nacional de Fomento al Turismo. It was created in 1974, folding together two earlier federal tourism funds, with a specific job: acquire undeveloped coastline, draw a master plan across it, build the roads and the utilities, then sell the serviced lots to hotel investors and developers. Huatulco was one of five major Centros Integralmente Planeados, large-scale tourism destinations developed according to federal master plans, alongside Cancún, Ixtapa, Los Cabos, and Loreto. Cancún came first, in the early 1970s, and became the template everything after it was measured against. Huatulco followed roughly a decade later, when a 1984 federal expropriation transformed nearly 21,000 hectares of communal territory into the land base for a new planned tourism destination.

Oliva remembers the noise of the dársena being built near her family’s home. The house was part concrete block and part varitas, sticks and cane. She remembers watching the beaches change. “Se empezó a ver mucha gente extraña, muchos albañiles.” There were strangers. Construction workers. People arriving everywhere, all at once.

And she remembers what she misses most. “Las playas vírgenes, las playas solas.” The untouched beaches. The empty beaches.

For Abdon, the greatest loss was not a single beach or piece of land. It was movement itself. “Éramos libres de caminar, cruzar los ríos y pescar,” he said. They were free to walk. To cross the rivers. To fish. To let an animal wander without encountering a fence, a permit, or an invisible boundary drawn somewhere on a map. It was an entire way of moving through a landscape that had once seemed to answer to no one.

Abdon also spoke about the unease of suddenly living among people whose histories nobody in Santa Cruz knew. “Gente extraña que no sabemos qué antecedentes traen.” Strangers whose backgrounds were unknown. It is not an easy observation, but it reveals something about what rapid growth can do to a small community. Development does not only bring new people. It changes the quiet structure a village may not realize it depends on until it is gone, the fact that everyone knows everyone.

What It Gave

Abdon is careful not to tell only one side of the story. The development brought employment closer to home. It brought money into the region and exposed many families to a world beyond the coast. Some families recognized the opportunity and built rooms to rent. Roads and infrastructure improved.

Education came closer too. His children, and the generations after them, could attend COBAO and universities without making the same journey he had made. Abdon had to leave home to study. Secondary school in Salina Cruz. High school in Oaxaca City. A childhood shaped by migration simply to receive an education.

“Así es como se sufrió antes,” he said. That was how people suffered before. He does not say this to erase what was lost. He says it because no story is only one thing. Growth took. Growth gave. And sometimes the same family carries gratitude and grief at once.

What Only Memory Keeps

Some of what disappeared cannot be measured in hectares. It is texture. Rhythm. The feeling of a place before anyone thought to document it.

Abdon remembers full-moon nights when he played a las escondidas and el encantado. Games that continued until the children made their way to the river to swim in the honduras, the deep pools carved into the riverbed by years of moving water.

He listed the fruit as though he could still taste it: chía, cachayumba, papaya, piñuela, nanche de sabana, coconut, watermelon, cucumber. “Todo era natural.” Everything was natural. Everything simply grew.

He remembers Día de Muertos too. Not as a celebration performed for visitors, but as something intimate. Tamales from November 1 through November 2. Neighbors inviting one another inside for bread and chocolate. A village briefly becoming one household to receive its dead.

“Huatulco antes se veía como una familia. Todos éramos conocidos.” Before, Huatulco felt like a family. Everyone knew everyone.

Oliva remembers a deep communal well where people went to wash clothing and collect water before pipes reached their homes. She only visited it a few times herself. By the time her life settled in Santa Cruz, that world had already begun to change. It sounds like a small detail, but a communal well is never only a source of water. It is where a village speaks to itself.

What I Keep Asking

On a personal note, and as someone who came after the fact, this story has its own thread running through my own family. My father arrived in Huatulco years before any of this had a name most people recognized, and bought land here early, a quiet bet that this coast was going somewhere. My mother arrived differently. She had been working in Cancún, selling tours from the hotels there, when a major hurricane tore through the city and her coworkers began talking about a new tourism boom farther south, in Huatulco. She followed the work. In 1994, she and my father met at the Sheraton, the hotel that is now the Barceló. I exist, in a literal sense, because tourism brought two strangers to the same stretch of beach.

I did not grow up here. I grew up returning here, and there is something full-circle about that. The same tourism industry this piece keeps circling back to—the one that transformed Huatulco—is also the reason my own family has a story here at all. But there is a difference between benefiting from what came afterward and having lived through what the Lavariegas experienced, and I try to remain aware of it.

I cannot pretend to know what it felt like for the Lavariega family or others like them to watch an open hillside become part of someone else’s map. Or to exchange a communal well for a metered municipal line. Or to learn that a place they had always crossed freely now required permission.

What I can do is listen and sit with the final thing Abdon told me, because it has continued to follow me. He spoke about the fees now connected to accessing and using protected coastal areas and the feeling that local people are asked to pay without seeing anything returned to them. “Sin tener nada a cambio,” he said. Without receiving anything in return.

Land becomes claimed through a map somewhere. A boundary drawn in an office. Sometimes, he says, without even a mojonera, a physical marker on the ground showing the people who live there where one territory ends and another begins. “Se adjudica ser propietario de territorios que ni siquiera dan la identidad del trazo.” Someone claims ownership of territory without clearly identifying the boundary itself.

I work in real estate on this coast. I sell the version of Huatulco that comes with a survey, a fideicomiso, a notary, and a clean paper trail. It is, in almost every way, the opposite of an open plain that once belonged to whoever needed it that season. I cannot pretend that does not place me somewhere inside this story. Not only reporting on it, but living inside its contradiction.

And the institution that began much of this transformation is changing too. Beginning in 2024, responsibility for much of the CIP’s infrastructure and public services—including water, sanitation, waste collection and routine urban maintenance —shifted from FONATUR to the State of Oaxaca and local authorities.

The question is not whether Huatulco should have grown. It did. It is. It will continue to. The question is who gets to hold the paper now, and whether growth, more than forty years later, still owes something to the people whose land it grew from.