I sit down with April Martinez, Living Heritage Officer at the National Institute of Culture and History (NICH) and Director at the Heritage Education Network Belize (HENB), for a conversation about culture, tourism, and who actually benefits when cultural experiences are turned into products.
We discuss why community ownership matters, how villages like San Antonio in Cayo successfully built tourism around Maya culture, and why monetizing culture is more complicated than most people think.
We also explore why packaging Belize’s Creole culture has been more difficult than packaging Garifuna or Maya experiences, despite how deeply Creole culture shapes everyday Belizean life.
Hope you enjoy this and please like and share to keep these episodes coming.
Presented by BELTRAIDE, Belize’s national economic development agency.
Belize Tourism Futures S3E4 Transcript
Below is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation for those who prefer to read.
Lorenzo Gonzalez: Hello everyone and welcome to Belize Tourism Futures. Today I’m joined by April Martinez, a Living Heritage Officer at the Belize National Institute of Culture and History, and director at the Heritage Education Network Belize. Welcome, April.
April Martinez: Hi Lorenzo. Thanks for having me.
Lorenzo Gonzalez: So let’s jump right into it. I was wondering, is it okay to monetize culture through tourism experiences?
April Martinez: I think it’s not so much if it’s okay or not okay, but who benefits. I find that while the country does a very good job at promoting what Belize has to offer, the promotion of cultural communities doesn’t always benefit those communities.
A good example is the way certain large corporations utilize cultural communities to promote their products. Most of the time, the communities don’t see a cent after that product is sold at mass scale. Maybe they get paid $500 or $1,000 to participate in a production, but they don’t see the benefits after the product enters the market.
Once that tourism product is out there, they don’t necessarily get to enjoy the fruits of that labor.
At the same time, some communities have recognized that culture itself is a product and started monetizing it themselves.
A good example is the entire village of San Antonio in Cayo (Oxmul Kah). That is an entire tourist destination on its own. It is by the community and for the community. The products there are sold by the San Antonio Women’s Cooperative, Oxmul Coffee, U Janal Masewal, Upe Nai, and other community-run operations.
That is a good example of cultural tourism done well because the culture is presented by the people themselves, and the benefits go back into the community.
Lorenzo Gonzalez: Do you have any international examples of culture being monetized in a good way?
April Martinez: Central America and the Americas still haven’t fully figured it out. Some communities in Southeast Asia and Asia have done a better job, but I don’t think anyone in the world has fully cracked the code on how to ensure cultural communities truly benefit long term.
This isn’t only a Belize problem. It’s global.
Making it work requires partnerships and collaboration from multiple sides. It requires community leadership, political will, local tourism support, and long-term coordination. I don’t think any place has perfected that model yet.
Lorenzo Gonzalez: Do you know of any really poor examples internationally?
April Martinez: I think several pockets in Africa have struggled for various reasons. Globalization, urbanization, and neocolonialism still shape who owns land and who controls spaces.
You can safeguard culture very well, but if there is no road leading to your community, people won’t come. If communities don’t have financial literacy or business training, they won’t know how to properly price or market what they’re trying to sell.
Things like manufacturing, packaging, and transportation for export are often missing from the model.
I can’t speak too much about international spaces because I haven’t worked in them extensively, but I can speak about certain rural communities in Belize.
We also see cases where people outside a culture monetize elements of that culture. There’s nothing inherently wrong with someone becoming a cultural creative and building a business. But if a community member teaches you how to weave or create products from natural resources, and you later monetize those techniques without giving back, then you’re benefiting from that living heritage without reinvesting into the people who taught you.
We often see people leave communities, become successful, and never return support to those communities.
This goes back to collaboration and understanding that if you want to build capacity, you also have to invest in the people and spaces you’re benefiting from.
It also applies to policymaking. If environmental policy is designed only from a scientific perspective and ignores the people who have relationships with that land, then entire communities get excluded from the process.
People often underestimate how much historical understanding, trust-building, and collaboration are required when working with cultural communities.
Lorenzo Gonzalez: Going back to San Antonio, why were they able to successfully monetize cultural experiences?
April Martinez: I really like that question.
The San Antonio Women’s Cooperative started in 2001. Their original goal wasn’t tourism. They wanted to teach young girls in the community how to cook, sew, embroider, and preserve their traditions because they realized they were already losing parts of their culture.
Eventually they recognized that these skills could also generate income.
At first they struggled with marketing and accessibility because the roads were poor. Visitors would come, but maybe they would only sell one pottery item per day.
Later they opened spaces where foreigners could learn directly from them. They realized their culture was unique and authentic, and people genuinely wanted to experience it.
Then COVID hit, which created major challenges.
Through Heritage Education Network Belize, we helped provide digital literacy training so they could create Facebook and Instagram accounts and reach people outside the community.
That completely changed things. Former visitors shared their pages online, and suddenly they were reaching a much larger audience.
Now they regularly offer food tours, pottery classes, and language classes.
What’s important is that they were not only selling a product. They were transmitting culture to younger generations. Younger people learned how to manage websites and social media while also learning their traditions.
That created momentum inside the village. Other families saw the success and realized they also had products and experiences to offer.
Oxmul Coffee became another strong example. Visitors don’t just drink coffee there. They experience the entire process in a very hands-on way.
The success of San Antonio came from collaboration across many levels: community leadership, outside support organizations, nearby resorts, and tour companies that intentionally route visitors through the village.
That’s why it works.
Lorenzo Gonzalez: Compared to Garifuna or Maya culture, why do you think Creole culture is harder to package as a tourism experience in Belize?
April Martinez: The history of Creole culture in Belize is deeply tied to colonization, and that history is painful.
I also think Creole communities have been heavily affected socially, politically, and economically, especially within urban spaces.
Communities like Gales Point know exactly who they are culturally, but development hasn’t fully reached them. Migration, land sales, and limited investment have all affected these communities.
They absolutely have a tourism product. They simply need support, infrastructure, and stronger local coordination.
Building capacity in communities takes a very long time.
The Bram and Sambai inscription onto UNESCO’s Representative List took 13 years of work. Documentation started back in 2013. Building trust with the community took years.
Getting onto the UNESCO list was only one step. The harder work begins afterward because now the community has to figure out how to build sustainable opportunities around it while maintaining ownership and authenticity.
Lorenzo Gonzalez: Whenever I think about Creole culture and how it’s not easily packaged compared to Garifuna or Maya culture, I wonder if one challenge is that Creole culture is so intertwined with everyday Belizean life that people don’t see it as distinct. Everyone speaks Creole. Everyone eats rice and beans. So maybe it’s harder to frame as a specific tourism product.
April Martinez: I agree with that.
Creole culture has become nationalized in Belize, and because of that, people often stop recognizing it as a distinct culture.
There’s a food anthropologist, Dr. Lrya Spang, who interviewed people across different ethnic groups in Belize and asked them what the national dish was.
Most people answered rice and beans, stew chicken, potato salad, and plantain. What was interesting is that people from different ethnic groups identified a Creole dish as the national dish instead of their own cultural foods.
That says a lot about how Creole culture became socially normalized.
At the same time, many elements of Creole culture are still very specific: Bruk Down music, Bram, Sambai, language variations, dress styles, cooking methods, and traditions.
Even the way Creole stew chicken is prepared differs from Mestizo cooking traditions.
We often flatten Creole identity into something generic when it actually has a lot of depth and variation.
Lorenzo Gonzalez: What are some Belizean cultural experiences that should be promoted more heavily?
April Martinez: I did a beach trap fishing tour in Sarteneja and it was incredible. You get to see how the community uses natural resources for economic survival and cultural continuity.
The water in Sarteneja is some of the most beautiful water you’ll ever see, and I don’t think enough people talk about it.
There are also community museums throughout northern Belize that most visitors never stop to experience.
You have homestays in Maya villages like Laguna, where visitors can cook, sleep, and live alongside families.
There’s boat building in Sarteneja and Gales Point. There’s the bioluminescence tour in Hopkins.
Belize has so many experiences that even Belizeans haven’t fully explored yet.
The bigger concern shouldn’t be whether the experiences exist. The concern should be how we protect and sustain them.
Lorenzo Gonzalez: Final question. What makes a cultural tourism experience truly memorable?
April Martinez: People respond to authenticity and genuine happiness from the people leading the experience.
I once took a group of about 40 academics through Maya Center, Hopkins, and Dangriga.
At Maya Center, we visited Julio Saqui for chocolate making and Aurora and Ernesto Saqui for herbal medicine.
The visitors weren’t just given demonstrations. They were taught the history, meaning, and cultural context behind everything.
Some visitors were so moved that they later booked private consultations with Aurora.
In Hopkins, we visited drum maker Rudolph Coleman. One visitor discovered they were distantly related through Gales Point family connections, and Rudolph ended up gifting her a finished drum.
Those kinds of moments are hard to manufacture artificially.
What makes Belize special is the intimacy of cultural tourism here. Visitors feel like they are experiencing something personal and genuine.
When tourism becomes too mass-produced, authenticity disappears.
People stop feeling like the experience is unique.
Belize needs to be careful not to lose that advantage.
Lorenzo Gonzalez: My guest today is April Martinez. April, thanks for being on Belize Tourism Futures.
April Martinez: Thank you so much for having me.
