What happens when a hotel or hostel is located outside the most traditional touristic area of a city? Manuel Frias, who is working on a paper for the Communication and Travel seminary I teach at the Communication Science field of the University of Buenos Aires, begins his work with this question. The idea is to analyze the speeches of hostel owners located at neighborhoods apart from the “touristified” downtown of Buenos Aires, Palermo or Recoleta. These hostels owners don’t say “it’s a shame we’re out the enclave”. Rather, they use this marginal position as a capital to be strategically displayed. That means saying: “we’re located in an authentic city neighborhood, not the touristic downtown, where everything is fake. If you want to see the real Buenos Aires, you should come here”.

This kind of speeches, which position capital in a strategic way, can be studied from theories such as Bourdieu’s. Authenticity speeches are not enough; it’s also important to remark the facilities of transportation, to draw attention to the “rich history” of the neighborhood, etc. But by showing as capital what in principle could be considered a disadvantage -to be located outside the enclave- can tell how well the agents in tourism field have learned to play the game. They can enunciate this kind of speeches because they have accepted the rules of the tourism field and want to play in their terms. That is, far from denying them, placing the value of the hostel in the marginal location of the touristic enclave in Buenos Aires shows how, in order to generate an “alternative proposal”, first one has to know how to place and differentiate them from the dominant strategies. Since we can’t play the game just like them, because we lack the economic or social capital they have, we reposition ourselvees and propose to see the field from another view. We do so because we’re interested in accomplishing a strategic position in the field that favors us. That is, for economic interest; nothing new about that.

Even when, from these perspectives, we’re aware of the “continuity” of alternatives proposals in the tourism field, one can’t help to be surprised on the variety of speeches when trying to position these capitals in an strategic way. And the ability of the different actors to “play the best game” is found in this variety. But we’ll talk about this later, when Manuel works more into his research and the analysis of the speeches of the owners of some Buenos Aires hostels.