City, patrimony and performance. The mirror of San Juan de Puerto Rico and Cartagena de Indias

Abstract

The article presents a research result that seeks to revise the concepts of city, heritage and performance from an ethnographic perspective that served to analyze the ways of inhabit Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) and San Juan de Puerto Rico. The work is develops in two moments. The first, is an approach to two cities that, in the plan to museify, play the performance of the military Spanish bastions as an apology that walks between tourism and colonial history. The second one, is an analysis of the concept of heritage and performance as interconnected symbolic dynamics. It is a revision of the symbolic universes from an ontological approximation that demands the researcher to explore the alterities that compose cultural elements and also the reality in both cities. The research achieves a critical rapprochement to the extraction economy (rather than conservation or recovery) to understand how a tourist city and its changes not only determines its urban morphology, but also its political, economic and cultural composition. Throughout this paper different cities are observed, which is visited under the role of tourist traveler and another hidden in conditions of vulnerability and only perceived in a qualitative analysis of ethnography.