Letters from Mexico to the World: The discourse of solidarity in the promotion of tourism online^*

Abstract

The institutional handling of the promotion of tourist destinations has been enhanced by the use of video on the Internet as an effective tool to reach the user and display solidarity values towards the places visited. Given the scant analysis of Mexico’s official tourism promotion strategies, based on these values, this article seeks to make a critical analysis of the content of the Ministry of Tourism’s promotional strategy, called Letters from Mexico to the World, operated with the software Atlas.ti. To carry out this critical analysis, the theoretical-methodological design combines reflections on the role of cultural industries and mass media, the analysis of the content of messages in audiovisual media, and even the resignification of the codes and categories susceptible to the analysis at hand, to demonstrate the meaning that online tourism promotional content has in Mexico's tourism strategy. The main conclusion demonstrates the reproduction of a conventional model, going beyond the assumed pretension of making tourism a tool for social cohesion.

Keywords
Tourism promotion; Critical analysis; Solidarity discourse